The Interpretation Of Cultures [Paperback]

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs..."

These cultural "webs of significance" Clifford Geertz speaks of are constructed of religious beliefs and practices, cultural customs, social interactions, attitudes and behavior -- everything around us that we have constructed as rational beings capable of thought and imagination. According to Geertz, the role of the anthropologist is, in a sense, to 'decode' the symbolic meanings of these certain events, practices, customs and interactions that take place within a specific culture, however insignificant they may seem to the observer. Detail is of utmost importance. An anthropologist must become part of the culture -- looking in from the outside he will understand nothing. Of course, in order to reduce the occurrence of the anthropologist's own cultural bias and to attempt to more accurately understand a culture, one could easily say that it is imperative that anthropologists emerge themselves in the customs and practices of that culture. But, even then, is it ever possible for one to grasp an understanding of a culture in which one was not born into? Are humans socialized from birth to perceive all cultural customs and practices through a shady lens, clouded by perceptions of the world they have acquired during childhood?

Geertz believes that, while to some extent it is possible to reach an understanding of a culture outside of our own, it is important to understand that anthropological writing is merely a "thick description," an interpretation of an interpretation. In other words, the anthropologist is interpreting the culture's interpretation of the event that is taking place. There is nothing precise, categorically logical or rational about anthropological writing: Cultural analysis is strictly the process of creating various hypotheses, examining those hypotheses, and then deriving explanations from the best hypotheses. As Geertz says, the analysis of it is not an "experimental science in search of law" but, rather, "an interpretive one in search of meaning." It is the job of an anthropologist to first attempt to understand how an event is interpreted by the culture in which it takes place, then to make an interpretation of that interpretation, and then it is left up to the reader of anthropological writing to interpret the final interpretations. It is difficult, if not impossible, to derive any absolute factual conclusion from data constructed of so many interpretive layers; thus, interpretation is not definitive.

The role of an anthropologist, according to Geertz, is to construct the finest interpretations possible, and most importantly, to be an active participant in the culture, rather than a passive observer.

This book is THE classical text for a modern cultural anthropologist. It's also an excellent book for anyone skeptical of social science in general, and serves as a great introduction for anyone just curious about anthropology.

This remains one of the seminal works in not just Anthropology, but also in the field of social science, written by a brilliant Social Scientist.

When it was first written in 1973, it was not just "leading-edge," but utterly revolutionary. Today however, in the era of full-fledged "cultural and ethnographic relativity," and in the interim, where symbols have earned a more prominent if not wholly respected cross-disciplinary cachet and place in social science scholarship, many of Professor Geertz's seminal ideas now seem strangely "quaint," but have in any case become as much a part of the mainstream as they have become controversial.

For my money, I prefer to judge this brilliant scholarship, on its own merits as well as against the standards of the times in which it emerged. I have yet to read a first chapter in an English book that is as well constructed and as informatively exciting as that in this book. Geertz, in drawing a bright line between what is universal and constant about man -- versus what is local, ever changing, and merely parochial about him -- attempts to answer the question: Just how important are human differences, and especially differences between cultures?

To answer it, the author moves with seamless facility across, between and well beyond the ossified boundaries of "normal" Anthropology, into myriad related and not so related, fields: such as sociology, philosophy, and the philosophy of science, linguistics, psychology and evolutionary biology, among several others. From their intellectual intersection, Geertz builds up a beautiful theory that culture is a system of shared symbols that allows its members to give shape and meaning to their respective experiences. In 1973, making the full connection between the significance of man's ability to weave meaning from webs of symbols and symbolisms, was not fully appreciated by most social scientists, and certainly (and curiously) even less appreciated by most Anthropologists, who arguably were "pulling up the rear" in developing interpretative theories upon which to base their mostly ethnographic practices.

More than anything else, Professor Greetz "changed the game" and arguably brought the field of Anthropology out of the "theoretical backwaters" and "dark ages" into a more updated and respected place in the academic sun. With his philosophy of science and general philosophy bent, he gave the field of Anthropology a new more exciting cachet and a deeper more meaningful theoretical resonance, mandate and motive: If one was to fully understand culture, he had to first be able to unravel, and then decipher the web of intertwined meanings of symbolic actions and interactions: that is to say he had to be able to understand the full meaning of the whole panoply of culturally determined symbols, totems, events, customs, rituals, rites, politics, etc. Even so, there was only a limited amount that an "outsider" could expect to learn, as culture remains mostly an enigmatic "interior" enterprise. At root, studying culture is about trying to formulate a basis upon which groups imagine.

To Geertz, (and this book is full of vivid and penetrating examples), cultural analysis thus reduces to that of sorting out the structures of significance discovered in ethnographic observations. And to him ethnography was about "thick description." (A term he borrowed from Gilbert Rile, but then went on to make famous). "Thick description" is about the nested relationships of interpretations: It is about "the interpretation of interpretation, ... of interpretation," ... ad infinitum.

Most of his critics argued that there was nothing inherently new about this approach. However, the way Geertz proposed to go about it was indeed new: The Anthropologist could no longer remain aloof and stand detached "at a distance" as an innocent observer in the ethnographic experiment. He had to, as it were, "be on the inside looking out," rather than "on the outside looking in." He had to not just "stick his head under the tent," but get inside the "bone marrow" of the culture and become an integral and interactive part of its practices. Doing this, of course raised it's own risks and a host of ancillary problems, which ever since have been the subject of much criticism. The least of these was not suffering the debilitating backlash of what is referred to as the "Heisenberg effect of social measurements." This effect arises whenever one attempts to judge or gauge the meanings of cultural symbolisms by interacting with them. In doing so, one runs the risk of contaminating the very experiment he is attempting to study.

But these concerns aside, Geertz's main contribution was not just in changing the way Anthropology was done, and the effect he had on shaping its theoretical outlook, but he also changed the way cultural habits were viewed, as well as the way theoretical language and concepts were formulated and used to describe them. For once human behavior is seen as symbolic action, questions of whether it is then just patterns of conduct or frames of mind or some mixture of the two, ceases to make sense. One is no longer able to reify culture as for instance, power, or a set of sociological mechanisms, or something from which behavior can be inferred and attributed, but as a context in which "thick description" takes place.

100 stars.

I purchased this one as it was a part of course requirements at my major. Geertz' effort in the field of anthropology is undeniable. His contributions in understanding symbols of culture and how important interpreting them in the study of culture is, these things were discussed in my class. So for that, all students of Anthropology, especially Cultural/Social should read this one somewhere along their studies. However, it has to be said that the book is a demanding read. His sentence structures are complex, long-winded and hard-to-tackle academic reading. Parts of the book deal with New Nations (born after WW2) which are not that interesting, and which don't seem all that relevant.

Still, Geertz' examples from the cultures of Bali, Trinidad and Indonesia make the book more understandable and all-in-all a good read.

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