Clifford Geertz

The interpretation of cultures : selected essays

Part I * Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture Part II * The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man * The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind Part III * Religion As a Cultural System * Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols * Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example * Internal Conversion in Contemporary Bali Part IV * Ideology As a Cultural System * After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States * The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States * The Politics of Meaning * Politics Past, Politics Present: Some Notes on the Uses of Anthropology in Understanding the New States PART V * The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lvi-Strauss * Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali * Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight.

This reading alerts us that Americans hold no monopoly on popular culture. Geertz relates both the various events surrounding and the deeper cultural meaning of an example of popular culture, cockfighting on a South Pacific island. He contrasts his interpretation of engaging in “deep play” (extremely high stakes activities) with Jeremy Bentham’s famous earlier characterization of irrational behavior. For Geertz, cockfighting in Bali engages central cultural values such as honor, dignity, and respect. Thus, rather than seeing Balinese men betting unreasonable amounts of money on a mere game, Geertz portrays what appears as play to be a deadly serious struggle over relative status.

Common Sense as a Cultural System

Do not be troubled by the fact that [some reduced languages he has just invented for didactic purposes] consist only of imperatives. If you want to say that they are therefore incomplete, ask yourself whether our language is completewhether it was before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were annexed to it, for these are, so to speak, the suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an old city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of modern sections with straight regular streets and uniform houses. [Note: L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (N.Y., 1953), p. 8. I have slightly altered the Anscombe translation.]

Deep play : notes on the Balinese cockfight

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men.

The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man

“It is in a systematic review and analysis of the varying styles of becoming human—of the Plains Indians bravura, the Hindus obsessiveness, the Frenchmans rationalism, the Berbers anarchism, th...

The Javanese Kijaji: the Changing Role of a Cultural Broker

One of the most serious problems facing the post-revolutionary Indonesian political elite has turned out to be the maintenance of mutual understanding between themselves and the mass of the peasant population. The attempt to build up a modern national state out of a plurality of distinct regional cultures has been hampered by the difficulty of communication between people still largely absorbed in those cultures and the metropolitan-based nationalist leadership more oriented to the international patterns of intelligentsia culture common to ruling groups in all the new Bandung countries. On the one hand, the activist white-collar nationalists of the large cities are attempting to construct an integrated Indonesian state along generally western parliamentary lines; on the other, the peasants of the Javanese, Sundanese, Achenese, Buginese, etc. culture areas cling to the patterns of local community organization and belief with which they are intimately familiar.

The wet and the dry: Traditional irrigation in Bali and Morocco

The comparative perspective is of central importance to effective analysis in human ecology. The present paper compares “traditional” irrigation systems in two quite disparate settings: east central Morocco and southeastern Bali. Bali, which has a tropical climate and a plentiful water supply, displays a highly collective approach to the organization of irrigation facilities. Morocco, which is essentially an arid country, displays, on the contrary, a much more individual, property-based approach to water regulation. The internal organization of these two regimes is described and their connection with more general cultural and ecological factors is traced, in an attempt to demonstrate that patterns of adaptation are susceptible to the same pattern of analysis as other aspects of social and cultural life. The contrast between the strongly group-oriented Balinese approach to water control and distribution and the highly individualistic Moroccan one is said to extend in an overall way to the two societies as a whole.

Negara, The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali.

Combining great learning, interpretative originality, analytical sensitivity, and a charismatic prose style, Clifford Geertz has produced a lasting body of work with influence throughout the humanities and social sciences, and remains the foremost anthropologist in America. His  book Negara analyzed the social organization of Bali before it was colonized by the Dutch in . Here Geertz applied his widely influential method of cultural interpretation to the myths, ceremonies, rituals, and symbols of a precolonial state. He found that the nineteenth-century Balinese state defied easy conceptualization by the familiar models of political theory and the standard Western approaches to understanding politics. Negara means “country” or “seat of political authority” in Indonesian. In Bali Geertz found negara to be a “theatre state,” governed by rituals and symbols rather than by force. The Balinese state did not specialize in tyranny, conquest, or effective administration. Instead, it emphasized spectacle. The elaborate ceremonies and productions the state created were “not means to political ends: they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for. . . . Power served pomp, not pomp power.” Geertz argued more forcefully in Negara than in any of his other books for the fundamental importance of the culture of politics to a society. Much of Geertz’s previous work—including his world-famous essay on the Balinese cockfight—can be seen as leading up to the full portrait of the “poetics of power” that Negara so vividly depicts.

Thinking as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of Anthropological Fieldwork in the New States

* When I try to sum up what, above all else, I have learned from grappling with the sprawling prolixities of John Deweys work, what I come up with is the succinct and chilling doctrine that thought is conduct and is to be morally judged as such. It is not the notion that thinking is a serious matter that seems to be distinctive of this last of the New England philosophers; all intellectuals regard mental productions with some esteem. It is the argument that the reason thinking is serious is that it is a social act, and that one is therefore responsible for it as for any other social act. Perhaps even more so, for, in the long run, it is the most consequential of social acts. In short, Dewey brings thinking out into the public world where ethical judgment can get at it. To some, this seems to debase it terribly, to turn it into a thing, a weapon, a possession or something equally ordinary. Revolutionary moralists-for that, finally, amid all his awkwardness of expression, is what Dewey was-are never much liked, particularly by those, in this case practitioners of

What Is a State If It Is Not a Sovereign

The emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa after the decolonization revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s has resulted in a renewed concern with the problems of government in multiethnic, multireligious, and multilinguistic countries. I discuss the issues thus produced, including the viability of states that are not underpinned by a compact and sovereign nation, and the role anthropology can play in clarifying such issues.