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Clifford geertz: a strange romance: anthropology and literature. He says the panelists were puzzled about what the topic was supposed to be. Geertz says he's a literary anthropologist.
Clifford geertz: a strange romance: anthropology and literature. He says the panelists were puzzled about what the topic was supposed to be. Geertz says he's a literary anthropologist.
Clifford geertz: a strange romance: anthropology and literature. He says the panelists were puzzled about what the topic was supposed to be. Geertz says he's a literary anthropologist.
Source: Profession, (2003), pp. 28-36 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595754 . Accessed: 14/04/2011 05:03 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Profession. http://www.jstor.org A Strange Romance: Anthropology and Literature CLIFFORD GEERTZ Puzzled, as I'm sure my fellow panelists were as well, when Stephen Greenblatt conscripted them to this peculiar, somewhat whimsical enter prise, about just what the topic of discussion was supposed to be, I thought to begin, in good Empsonian style, with a reflection on the ambiguities of his title. Was this to be my own engagement with literature and the lan guage arts as subjects of study?what a cultural anthropologist had to say about modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, cul tural studies, the new historicism, hermeneutics, and the other veerings and insurrections of recent theory, having lived through all of them? Or was it to be how my engagement with anthropology was itself literary?what role my involvement with my literary tradition, rather intense for a social scien tist, played in my half-century effort to understand how Javanese, Balinese, and Moroccans went about earning a living, governing themselves, and making sense of their existence? Should I be professional ethnographer as amateur critic or amateur critic as professional ethnographer? The two are connected, of course, and both involve a certain presump tion and some fairly serious trespassing, as well as what the psychoanalysts would call exaggerated self-reference. But it is the second that seems to me the more relevant in my case. What I have to say about the ups and downs of recent literary scholarship or criticism is not, even to me, very interest The author is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. A version of this paper was presented at the 2002 MLA con vention in New York. Profession 2003 28 CLIFFORD GEERTZ ||| 29 ing. I have the usual mixed feelings?fascinating, but where the hell is it all going??and nothing very helpful to add, except surtoutpas de zele. The role that my formation (I really don't know what else to call it, Bildung per haps; English is rather skittish about claims to cultural refinement). .. the role that my formation, which has been rather more on the humanities side than on the sciences side (an undergraduate major in literature and philos ophy, I originally intended to become a novelist), has played in my size-up and-solve anthropologizing is, I think, worthy of some reflection. What is a Flaubert manque or, as someone has less kindly suggested, a faux Henry James doing in such a cold-fact discipline? Except that it is not a cold-fact discipline, and it should not aspire to become one. Gaining some sort of entree into various peoples' various ways of being-in-the world demands not only that you have a reasonably distinct sensibility yourself but also that you have some idea of what that sensibility is. This not a job for the disembodied observer, and the methodologically overpre pared need not apply. It is the encounter?sometimes the collision, occa sionally an embrace, often a confusion, a nonplus, or a near miss?between your sense of how matters stand, how, as we say, things should go, and the sense of those whom you are struggling to understand that provides the basis for whatever account of their lives you are able to give. The most im portant instruments of cultural anthropologists are not tape recorders or video cameras?as valuable as they and other technical aids (polls, experi ments, formal models) may be?but in-wrought perceptions. It is on their ability to entangle those perceptions somehow with the equally cultural, equally in-wrought perceptions of the people they are studying that their analytic reach, their power of witness depends. This is, as all sorts of people with rather larger ambitions for the social sciences will be quick to tell you, dangerous doctrine. It raises the threat of subjectivism, of relativism, of particularism, of a general failure to produce robust and reliable real-world knowledge. It turns us away from that shib boleth of shibboleths, the scientific method, toward an unregulated intu itionism; away from the promise of a true, systematic, view-from-nowhere, prediction-making, program-producing Science of Man. It substitutes va grant insights and sheer assertions, produces a cacophony of opinions. Rather like literature, actually. It is no part of my argument to deny that these are real perils, though both their immediacy and their prevalence are commonly exaggerated by the attack battalions of aggressive scientism. Instead of attempting to over come the perils or hold them at bay by appealing to inappropriate ideals, ideals drawn from differently directed enterprises, operating under differ ently formed conditions, and with different sorts of resources, we should 30 III A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE confront them head-on as an ingredient in the work as such. If it is an entan glement of forms of life?the rub of various sensibilities against one an other?that we're dealing with, then something rather closer to grasping a point than abstracting a law would seem to be involved. I once put this, in something I wrote, in terms of the anthropologist's reading other people's texts over their shoulders {Interpretation 452). It makes the whole enterprise sound a lot more surreptitious than it is, and less intrusive, but that is about the size of it. And to read over shoulders effectively, conceptual, procedural, even substantive borrowing from literary studies would seem essential. The dependence on images and figurations, what Coleridge called "speculative instruments," from the natural sciences that has marked, and continues to mark, the social sciences needs to be supplemented by the introduction of ones from humanistic research and analysis?symbol, meaning, metaphor, plot, story, motif, interpretation?if we are actually to engage our subject rather than merely attack it. So I have for some time now been arguing. But this perceiving of other people's perceivings, this reading of other people's readings, this texting of other people's texts turns out, as one might expect, to have complexities and uncertainties?dare I say aporia??of its own. Replac ing Natur- with Geistes- before wissenschaft doesn't in itself get you all that far. To be less gnomic, I turn to some concrete examples of the troubles I've seen. Some years ago I wrote a small piece on the Balinese cockfight, which I made bold to compare in a suggestive, allusory, en passant sort of way to some classics of Western literature, most notably Macbeth and Lear ("Deep Play"). It was my notion that some themes of these tragedies by Shakespeare were caught up, in their own way and with their own inflections?that is, Balinese inflections?in the cockfight. I won't rehearse the argument here or try to defend its cogency. That, it turns out, is altogether unnecessary, be cause what set off a fair volley of criticism was not whether what I said about Bali or Shakespeare had any merit (the Shakespeare stuff concerning Mac beth and Lear came from Northrop Frye, so how could it be wrong?) but the sheer effrontery I displayed in daring to speak about them in the same breath. What on earth, as one recent enrage?the author of a work deli cately called How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past?put it, could possibly justify comparing "a cheap low-life blood sport on which foolish young men wager far more money than they could sensi bly afford" to such monumental expressions of the immense and universal Western spirit? Only, he thought, a settled nihilistic intent to undermine morality, spread relativism, and "use the bizarre and exotic to destabilize Western cultural assumptions" (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 7, 8). This sort of moral panic, authority at bay, can be left to take care of it self. But a similar reaction?that what I am trying to do by bringing West CLIFFORD GEERTZ ||| 31 ern imaginative creations into proximity with those of the South Seas or North Africa is to blur the line between barbarism and civilization to the advantage of barbarism?was stimulated by a rather more developed piece I did, also awhile back, on Balinese cremation ceremonies ("Found"). Here the matter is more complicated, and more telling, about exactly where it is the procedure pinches, about just what it is that brings on all the wrath and accusation. So it is worth perhaps a bit more discussion. Shortly before he died in 1973, Lionel Trilling, whom I knew slightly and much admired, wrote a typically winding, ruminating piece for the Times Literary Supplement concerning the difficulties he had experienced in teach ing Jane Austen to today's college students. The differences between their sensibilities and hers, their times and hers, their language and hers were so great as to make the whole enterprise perilous at best?"problematic." Re ferring to some work I had done on the Balinese sense of self as well as to a strange Icelandic saga he had been reading concerning a murderous jealousy among chiefs brought on by a misdirected gift of bears, he wondered just how far large cultural gaps could be bridged by reading, by writing, by the free play of the moral imagination no matter how liberal. When a couple of years further on I was invited to give a memorial lecture in his honor at Co lumbia University, I sought to address this issue by an example of my own, of a gap even wider than that which yawns between sophomores and Austen? the gap between the treatment of widows in our society and their immola tion on their husbands' funeral pyres in nineteenth-century Bali ("Found"). Borrowing a rhetorically inverted phrase, "found in translation," from the title of a James Merrill poem, a phrase expressing the remoteness to him of his familial past, I quoted a long passage from a Danish sea trader describing such an immolation (which as a further irony, I might remark now, took place just where that terrorist bomb went off a few months ago). The description was written around 1850. This man, alternately charmed and appalled, drawn in and disarranged by what he saw, recounted the event at great length and in very fine detail, as though to convince himself that it was all really happening. The enormous, gaudy funeral tower "rising on crimson pillars to a finely carved coffin shaped like a lion." The swarm ing crowd, friendly and laughing?"They looked little enough like sav ages." The great mile-long procession, complete with music, dancing, and elaborate filigreed offerings to the gods. The entranced and immobile Veda-chanting priest. The three women?mirror in one hand, comb in the other?plunging "for affections' sake and in the name of religion"?into the flames. "It was a sight never to be forgotten," he concludes, with a sud den turn from fascination to horror, from the bewitchment of the drama to the reality of what it was enacting. 32 II A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE It brought to one's heart a strange feeling of thankfulness that one belonged to a civilization which, for all its faults, is merciful and tends more and more to emancipate women from deception and cruelty. To British rule is due the fact that this foul plague is extirpated in India, and doubdess the Dutch have, ere now, done as much for Bali. Works like these are the credentials by which the Western civilization makes good its right to conquer and hu manize barbarous races and to replace ancient civilizations. (Helms 66) It was for this, as I put it, moral instability, that wild and nervous swing ing between "morning-of-the-world," "island-of-the-gods" romanticism and self-congratulatory colonial paternalism (what Gayatri Spivak once de scribed, in another context, as white men's saving brown women from brown men), that I quoted this passage, as well as, I admit, for its force as what I called a moment ago "the power of witness." I enforced this point with other examples: Merrill's uneasy, counternostalgic poem, the play of discordant memory in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Paul Fussell's study of the Great War poets enclosing trenches and shell holes in pastoral tropes. I wanted to demonstrate the complexity, the loss of certitude, and the gain of dimension that connecting disparate sensibilities, striking them off against one another, brings into being. The difficult awareness that is found in translation, the ethnographer's craft. Now, it would not be fair to say that this argument failed to register. But there has again been resistance in some quarters, most especially from the imaginatively challenged, to seeing anything but savagery and primitivism in the cremation and anything but perversity and subversive purpose in taking it seriously as a disclosive expression?a cry, as Stevens once so ex actly said of poetry, of its own occasion. To quote again that moral scold whom the cockfight so upended, simply because he can be counted on to say what I want him to say: "It is hard to understand what they thought they were doing." (He means "he," that is, me; but he widens his charge to anthropologists generally.) How, for instance, could they have imagined they were assisting those they study by encouraging some of their most destructive myths and practices? How, for instance, could it have helped underdeveloped coun tries accumulate capital for social and industrial development by portray ing the reckless gambling of cockfighting as the symbolic equivalent of some of the great classics of Western culture? How could it have advanced that essential part of modernization, the emancipation of women, by glamorizing barbaric misogynist practices like suttee? What value could there have been in methodology more concerned to com pare itself to the interpretation of poetry than to make criticism of in digenous illiteracy and superstition? It is hard to escape the conclusion [he concludes] that cultural anthropology, relativism, multiculturalism, CLIFFORD GEERTZ ||| 33 far from being vehicles of intercultural communication and harmony, are instead demonstrations of the moral vanity and self-indulgence of their Western authors. (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 12) Well, you can see the problem. Merely in presenting untoward, out-of category material, material not easily bent to proprietous shape, one risks being branded an enemy of progress, or worse. But despite all the holler ing, the fear here is not really of "indigenous illiteracy and superstition" or the glamorization of barbarism. The most vain and self-indulgent of multi culturalized Western authors (and I am not the worst), smitten by exotic customs and dubious of some of our own, is not going to try to sell widow burning to anyone. And the Balinese are neither illiterate nor, as these things go in the world, particularly profligate, misogynous, or supersti tious. The fear here is that in entangling our own sense of life and its "clas sic representations" with ones more than a little at angles to it and to them, we will so weaken our convictions as to make us unable to sustain them and impress them with sufficient force on the world at large. It is the very destabilization, the confusion of impulses that my honest sea captain felt that in quoting him I wanted my readers to feel too. Why do we teach Jane Austen, or Icelandic sagas, or Hindu funerals? Just that: to wound our complacency, to make us a little less confident in and satisfied with the im mediate deliverances of our here-and-now imperious world. Such teaching is indeed a subversive business. But what it subverts is not morality. What it subverts is bluster, obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, one could say, and prejudice. But enough of the long ago and far away. We are right now, in this country and at this time in the process of trying to get, as we say, some sort of handle on a cultural formation heretofore removed, distant, strange, and ominous?namely, Islam (on which I have also worked).1 We are con structing, live and in real time?rather hurriedly, as though we had better get on with it after years of neglect?our image of what Muslims think, be lieve, do, and desire. Until recently, we barely possessed such an image be yond vague and vacant notions about stallions, harems, deserts, and dervishes and some schoolbook legends about the Crusades?an ignorance immortally summed up by the Peter Arno New Yorker cartoon of a half century or so ago showing a Stetson-hatted tourist leaning out of his road ster to ask a turbaned man prostrate in prayer by the side of the road: "Hey, Jack, which way to Mecca?" The reason for all the rush and for the dimensions it is taking is, of course, 9/11. When it suddenly became apparent that the familiar threat ening other that we had lost with the unlooked-for collapse of the Soviet 34 I A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE Union was about to be replaced by something even less well defined in our minds; by something even further removed from the political history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America?Communism had, after all, a Western pedigree at least, with roots in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; by in fact a creed of Arabs, Turks, Persians, Africans, South Asians, Mongols, and Malays, rather off our spiritual map, a suffusing anxi ety settled in. What are we Americans to think about an ideological competitor of which most of us know barely more than the name and some plots and atrocities alleged to flow from its teachings? The result has been an avalanche of books and articles by historians, journalists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and variously inspired amateurs designed to give us a crash course in, as the phrase goes, understanding Islam. Jihad, a term Americans encountered, if they encountered it at all, only in dime novels, has become a prime subject of popular discourse. There are works designed for that elusive figure, the general reader, on something called, confusingly, reformism or modernism or fundamentalism?now even Wahhabism?in contemporary Islam; on the teachings of the Koran; on Sufi brotherhoods; on Islamic law, Islamic education; on the Sunni-Shi'i split; on the deep meaning of the veil. And so forth and so on, into some extraordinary corners indeed. There is, of course, a long tradition?sometimes called orientalism, sometimes Middle Eastern studies?of Western scholarship on Islam, most of it European, most of it arcane. But we are now at the start of something entirely new: the formation of public-square, society-wide discussions? half apology, half debate, and riddled with grand assertions?of how we are to think and feel about this sudden apparition on our cultural and political horizon. We're going to be able to watch up close and while it happens the building up in our minds of an enduring image or set of images of what Islam and Muslims are all about, just as we were able to watch, at a certain remove, the holding of such an image or set of images of Bali and the Bali nese in the mind of our rapt and troubled sea captain. The difference is that this time the exotic is coming to us, and we are less well placed to dis cipline its expressions. The evidence is all around us: in heated discussions of "the clash of civilizations," of "what went wrong" with Islamic culture (after the Renaissance, why no Reformation, let alone an Enlightenment?); in cliche-ridden TV biographies of Muhammed; and in news magazine pieces on the pilgrimage, the fast, fatwas, or houris in paradise. Perhaps one of the most striking indications that this image building is going on, that it is not only an extensive process but also an intensely con tested and, again, thoroughly destabilizing one?that is, destabilizing to CLIFFORD GEERTZ ||| 35 us?is provided by a recent seriocomic affaire litteraire that involved just the sort of entanglement of disparate sensibilities, cross-cutting ways of ap proaching a text and reaching into its world, that I have been talking about. I mean the storm?or perhaps it was only a cloudburst, and a seeded one at that?over the teaching of the Koran at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Well, it wasn't exactly teaching the Koran; it was merely, once more, ex posing it without warning labels and weather advisories to vulnerable minds?that is to say, to college freshmen. In the summer of 2002, driven apparently by a rising concern to understand Islam, the university assigned a translation of the early, so-called Meccan, verses of the Koran?those that supposedly initiated the prophecy?to its incoming class. Criticism, intense and unbridled, appeared almost immediately: from Franklin Gra ham, the son of the Christian evangelist; from Bill O'Reilly, the resident Mencken of the Fox network (he said it was like teaching Mein Kampf); from, inevitably, William F. Buckley, Jr.; from, just about as inevitably, the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Daily News and various other news papers, columnists, and soi-disant guardians of the public conscience. The ACLU made nervous separationist noises. The university was sued by a fundamentalist Christian group, normally concerned with anti-abortion activities, on the grounds that it was unconstitutional for a public univer sity to require students to study a specific religion. And the state legislature voted, ex post facto, to bar funding for the project. The suit was eventually thrown out by the courts; the university made the assignment optional; and the enterprise proceeded, and apparently is proceeding, still ringed by de bate and protest (see Falwell; Park; Robinson). Our interest in all this is not that the controversy provides yet another example of hard-shell provincialism and its exploitation by sophisticated reactionaries but that it is, again, a complex and contentious literary en gagement. The main complaint was that in selecting the early, lyrical "Meccan" verses, composed when the Prophet was just starting out, when he was powerless and isolated, rather than the later, fire-and-brimstone, jihad-breathing "Medinan" ones composed when, regrouping in exile, he was organizing an armed return, the translator was presenting an overly at tractive, even seductive image of Islam. John Walker Lindh was men tioned; so was the British shoe bomber. The problem was not so much with Islam in itself as with how it was represented, how it is to be brought into contact, like cockfights, immolations, or Jane Austen, with our own understandings?"found in translation." I could continue this discussion with a consideration of the relations among narration, narrative poetry, and revelation in the Koran; of the 36 III A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE nature of the Koran as a text among texts and as spoken word; of the lin guistic resources of the Arabic language and their literary employment. But that's for the future, as our encounter, not so much with "Islam" as with Muslims, develops, however it develops. It is clear that merely listening to other voices in other rooms saying other things in other accents can be a perilous business, liable to confuse our emotions, derail our judgments, and leave us both rattled and engrossed. But that is what listening to the voices of our own literary tradition, Macbeth or Merrill, Lear or Faulkner, brings on as well: the sense that there is more to things than first appears and that our reactions are where we start, not where we end. We may indeed end almost anywhere. NOTE = lA number of sentences in the following paragraphs are more or less identical to ones found in my general review of recent works on Islam in The New York Review of Books, "Which Way to Mecca?" That review was written after this talk was given, at a time when I did not expect that it, the talk, would be published. I apologize for the self-plagiarism. WORKS CITED - Arno, Peter. Cartoon. New Yorker 9 Apr. 1938: 18. Falwell, Jerry. "University of North Carolina Requires Islam Studies." Jesus and Todays Issues: Church and State. 2002. 13 Aug. 2003 <http://www.jesusjournal.com/articles/ publish/article_259.html>. Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Geertz, Interpretation 412-53. -. "Found in Translation." Local Knowledge. New York: Basic, 1983. 36-54. -. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973. -. "Which Way to Mecca?" New York Review of Books 13 June 2003: 27-29. Helms, L. V Pioneering in the Far East. London, 1882. Park, Michael Y. "University's Quran Reading Stirs Controversy." 6 July 2002. Au darya Fellowship. IndiaDivine Communications. 13 Aug. 2003 <http://www .audarya-fellowship.eom/showflat/cat/WorldNews/25607/9/collapsed/5/o/l>. Robinson, B. A. University Dispute re Islamic Book. Ontario Consultants on Religious Tol erance. 12 Aug. 2002. 13 Aug. 2003 <http://www.religioustolerance.org/isl_unc.htm>. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacri fice." Wedge 7-8 (1985): 120-30. Trilling, Lionel. "Why We Read Jane Austen." Times Literary Supplement Mar. 1976: 250-52. Windschuttle, Keith. "The Ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz." New Criterion 21.2 (2002): 5-12. -. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. New York: Free, 1997.
Andreas Huyssen, Samuel Weber, Karen Beckan, Anthony Vidler, Keller Easterling, Reinhold Martin,David Salomon, Kaura Kurgan, Guy Nordenson, Judith Butler Grey Room 7, Spring 2002, Special Issue on 9 11-7-2002