Clifford
Geertz, “Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The
Interpretation of Culture, (NY: Basic Books, 1973), Chapter 1
Background:
Clifford
Geertz (1926-present) began his academic career at Antioch College in Ohio as
an English major and went on to study anthropology at Harvard. After being
given the opportunity to do research in Indonesia, Geertz wrote Agricultural
Involution which surveyed two types of Indonesian agriculture, their
geographic location, and their historical development. His most influential
work has been in the area of ethnographic studies, specifically research
conducted on Javanese culture (an Indonesian island). Geertz is best known for
his attention to systems of meaning—the symbolic—in anthropological analysis of
culture, how cultures change, and the study of culture at large. He contends
that he is not interested in perpetuating a specific methodology, but rather
“setting a tone or mood or agenda that people could react toward or against.”
Geertz is presently a professor at Princeton University’s Institute for
Advanced Study.
Summary:
Geertz
aims to provide social science with and understanding and appreciation of
“thick description.” While Geertz applies thick description in the direction of
anthropological study (specifically his own ‘interpretive anthropology’), his
theory that asserts the essentially semiotic nature of culture has implications
for the social sciences in general and, in our case, political science (and
comparative political science) in particular.
“Cultural
analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it
goes the less complete it is… There are a number of ways of escaping
this—turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits
and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it
into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact is
that to commit oneself to a semiotic concept of culture and an interpretive
approach to the study of it is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic
assertion as… ‘essentially contestable.’ Anthropology, or at least interpretive
anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of the
consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision
with which we vex each other.” (29)
I.
The idea of “culture”
From
Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror of Man, Geertz lists the following potential
meanings of “culture”:
1.
"the total way of life of a people"
2.
"the social legacy the individual acquires from his group"
3.
"a way of thinking, feeling, and believing"
4.
"an abstraction from behavior"
5.
“a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of
people in fact behave”
6.
"a storehouse of pooled learning"
7.
"a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems"
8.
"learned behavior"
9.
“a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior”
10.
“a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to
other men"
11.
"a precipitate of history"
12.
a behavioral map, sieve, or matrix
Essentially,
there is no standard and it will eventually be “necessary to choose.” (5)
Geertz himself argues for a “semiotic” concept of culture: “Believing, with Max
Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has
spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore
not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in
search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression
on their surface enigmatical.” (5)
We
must proceed interpreting a culture’s web of symbols by 1. isolating its
elements 2. specifying the internal relationships among those elements 3.
characterize the whole system in some general way—according to the core symbols
around which it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is a
surface expression, or the ideological principles upon which it is based. (17)
We must, however, be careful that such hermetical approaches might actually
distance us from cultural analysis’s proper object, “the informal logic of
actual life… Whatever, or wherever, symbol systems ‘in their own terms’ may be,
we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events, not by arranging
abstracted entities into unified patterns.” (17) Therefore, coherence cannot be
a test for a cultural interpretation’s validity. While cultural systems must
have a certain degree of coherence in order to be cultural systems, coherence
is a loaded measurement as well as a limited one. “Tightness” of a culture, or
at least its interpretation, makes for neither a valid or invalid
interpretation. Rather, the ethnographer ‘inscribes’ social discourse, turning
a passing event into an account. Guessing at meanings is a given in the
interpretations behind the inscriptions. “Tightness” is irrelevant for the most
part.
In
Geertz’s understanding, ethnography is by definition “thick description”—“an
elaborate venture in.” Using the action of “winking,” Geertz examines
how—in order to distinguish the winking from a social gesture, a twitch,
etc.)—we must move beyond the action to both the particular social
understanding of the “winking” as a gesture, the mens rea (or state of
mind) of the winker, his/her audience, and how they construe the meaning of the
winking action itself. “Thin description” is the winking. “Thick” is the
meaning behind it and its symbolic import in society or between communicators.
Ethnographic
description includes the following: 1. it’s interpretive 2. what it is interpretive of is the flow of social
discourse 3. the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the ‘said’
of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms.
(20) He compares the method of the
“interpretive anthropologist” (who accepts a semiotic view of culture) with the
method of the literary critique analyzing a text: “Analysis, then, is sorting
out the structures of signification—what Ryle called established codes—and
determining their social ground or import… Doing ethnography is like trying to
read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript.” Additionally we
should treat human behavior as “symbolic action—action, which, like phonation
in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music,
signifies—the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of
mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask is
what their import is.” (9-10) (my emphasis) Approaching culture as either subjective/objective,
modern/traditional or designated by and supposed social dichotomy is dangerous
and misleading. We should, rather, view human behavior as “symbolic action.”
Culture
is public because “meaning is,” and systems of meanings are what produce
culture, they are the collective property of a particular people. When “we,”
either as researchers or simply as human beings, do not understand the beliefs
or actions of persons from a foreign culture, we are acknowledging our “lack of
familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs.”
(12-13) We cannot discover the culture’s import or understand its systems of
meaning when, as Wittgenstein noted, “We cannot find our feet with them.” (13)
Therefore,
when faced with “a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed
upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and
inexplicit,” the ethnographer must attempt to grasp and interpret them,
striving to understand how and why behavior is shaped in such and such a way
(as opposed to another). Thick description is, thus, much more that mere data
collection although this is an inherent part of anthropological work as well.
Mistaken
views of “culture” as a concept:
As
a semiotic concept, “culture is not a power, something to which social events,
behaviors, institutions, or processes can causally be attributed; it is a
context, something within which [interworked systems of construable signs] can
be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described.” We must ever be attempting to uncover “the degree to which [an action’s]
meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed. Understanding
a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity.”
(14)
In
sum, Geertz wants us to appreciate that social actions are larger than
themselves, they speak to larger issues, and vice versa, because “they are made
to.” (23) “It is not against a body of
uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the
cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific
imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.” (16) We seek
to converse with subjects in foreign cultures, gain access to their conceptual
world; this is the goal of the semiotic approach to culture. Cultural theory is
not its own master. At the end of the day, we must appreciate that the
generality thick description “contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of
its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions… [T]he essential task of
theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick
description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within
them.” (25-6) Cultural theory is not predictive; at best, it anticipates.
Finally, “Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform
our subjects’ acts, the ‘said’ of social discourse, and to construct a system
of analysis in those terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to
them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other
determinates of human behavior. In ethnography, the office of theory is to
provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself—that
is, about the role of culture in human life—can be expressed.” (27)
What
is Geertz’s argument’s ‘import’ for political science?
How
can thick description inform comparative politics? Our aims are not merely
description or even explanation but include tracing causal variables across
events and trying to determine if they have predictive value. How might Geertz
respond?
Additionally, what units of analysis are we using? Since the number of variables even in one of Geertz’s case studies are infinite, how large a number of cases are we humanly able to examine? Can states and institutions gain from such “thick description” and, if so, how might it be applied? What “interpretation” might be necessary in political science that we do not find necessary in anthropology? For the comparativist, “thick description” must be, at some level, generalizable over multiple unit analysis—such analysis will essentially include not simply an individual level analysis, but institutional, state levels.
What
does “meaning” do for Geertz’s analysis that is helpful to comparative
politics? At which point does it become meaningless to interpret the meaning
behind an action? Personally, I feel that meanings behind an action are
essential even to RCT; what we must be willing to do, even though it does not
appear that Geertz is interested, is in selecting which “meanings” are
especially relevant to a given context, interaction or study. Even Geertz
appreciates that we have no choice but to sift through relevant meanings,
although he seems uncomfortable giving preference or modeling any sort of
hierarchy from them.
Do
we aim to understand culture, acts and beliefs as “normal?” “Normality” has
certainly been a loaded normative term, for instance, in Orientalism.
Do
we wish to treat thick and thin description as Michael Walzer treats “thick and
thin morality”?
Through
Geertz’s thick description, how might we examine the idea of the “apology”
across cultures? For instance, the demand for apology by China after the spy
plane went down and landed on Chinese soil. How did the notion of “apology”
differ culturally for the US and the Chinese?
Prediction
vs. anticipation? What is the difference? Is there one for political scientists?