How can we understand other cultures? Even more difficult, how can we understand other cultures from other times? How do we get into the minds of others?
There is a misconception about history and the social sciences that assumes that when you read a source, a document, or study a different culture, the truth will arise out of it – that the sources will talk to you.
But the difficulty arises when we acknowledge that research always begins with preconceptions, tools and language moulded through our own cultural and societal ideas.
Does this then confuse the results, skew the research towards our own agenda, however unintentionally?
How do we avoid this difference of perspective?
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), arguably the greatest anthropologist of the 20th century, had an influential answer: thick description.
Geertz had a prominent influence on what came be known as the ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities – a move away from looking at large social structures, economic systems or forms of politics and government towards immediate culture as a prime mover of history.
Through this lens, people can’t be understood just through economic ideas like a rational cost-benefit analysis (simple self-interest), or through studying how they were governed, or through an analysis of the means of production, or by assuming that philosophy meant the same for the philosophe of Enlightenment France as it did for someone in modern day Bali.
To understand people you had to look closely at their culture.
There are no ‘total definitions’ or ‘supreme theories’, or a ‘general theory of cultural interpretation’. Geertz said that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’.
To understand people you have to understand the webs.
Geertz says that, ‘Though ideational, [culture] does not exist in someone’s head; though unphysical, it is not an occult entity’.
It is an intersubjective map of meaning that helps guides actions.
Importantly for Geertz, culture is semiotic – a system of signs, codes and symbols – linguistic, pictorial, performative – gestures and norms – that create meaning between them.
Because the meaning is made between them, with no overarching universal idea of culture that determines meaning, to understand any given culture you have to get in amongst it.
To take a simplified example: an alien wouldn’t understand 90s America by watching Forest Gump and entering the lines into their alien supercomputer to get a translation. They’d have to understand politics, love, war, Hollywood – they’d have to come down and study the interconnecting themes.
Geertz uses the example of two boys winking rapidly.
One has a twitch. The other is winking at a friend.
Both look the same. But the second can only be understood to be different through knowing the social code of winking, the idea of a joke, the subject he is winking about. Or the biological and psychological pathology that causes the twitch. A single observation requires understanding a web of meaning – a thick description.
You don’t study a village. You study in a village.
For Geertz, interpreting cultures means looking at the minutiae of events and drawing up towards larger conclusions about the cohesiveness of the culture. The shared meaning.
His most famous example is the Balinese cockfight.
In 1958 Geertz and his wife travelled to a small Balinese village of around 500 people – remote and ‘its own world’, as he says.
The relatively new Indonesian republic had deemed cockfighting – a long-held tradition – as backward and primitive, and made it illegal.
As expected, the villagers continued anyway, and occasional raids, confiscations and fines were endured.
Geertz and his wife attended a cockfight in the village square that was raided, and in accordance with what he describes as the anthropological principle ‘when in Rome’, ran from the authorities with everyone else.
Because of this, the pair were immediately accepted by the locals, while before they had been treated with indifference, even distain. This intrigued Geertz.
Geertz writes that, ‘As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring’.
He first noticed that metaphors, jokes and turns of phrase about cocks permeated village culture. Desperate acts were likened to dying cocks. Acts of selfishness – men who promise much but give nothing – were compared to cocks who leap to fight but recede in cowardice.
Trials, wars, politics, arguments – all were communicated with reference to cockfights.
Fighters and supporters treated their cocks like royalty. Theories about the best cock diet were common topics of conversation.
But cocks are equally held with distain – they are dirty animals – the worst thing for a person to be in Bali. Animal instincts in humans are demotic, to be overcome. Even eating is animal like and should be done privately. The cock is a reminder of the repulsive, stupid, but ultimately unavoidable animal side of man. Like Ying and Yang. A reminder of order versus chaos.
Geertz says that, ‘In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death’.
And through studying the cockfight – the betting, the myths, the rules – Geertz discovers a complex set of cultural codes that regulate village society. Traditionally, princes, elders, bookmakers, tax collectors all had their roles to play around the cockfight.
But the culture also pointed to something larger – something social and political.
Each fight is accompanied by many small bets around the ring, but also one large bet between the fighters. This large bet though is never made by the owner himself, but by a coalition of kinsman, neighbours, friends – around four to eight people.
The larger the main bet, and the bigger the event, with the more side bets, the more excitement.
Geertz notes that while the money is obviously important, the moral stakes of the fight – ‘esteem, honor, dignity, respect,[…] status’ – are even more important.
If it was just about money, the larger, more evenly matched, harder to call games wouldn’t attract more side bets.
Geertz calls this, ‘the migration of the Balinese status hierarchy into the body of the cockfight’.
It’s ‘a simulation of the social matrix, the involved system of cross-cutting, overlapping, highly corporate groups- villages, kingroups, irrigation societies, temple congregations, “castes” – in which its devotees live’.
In the village he was in, large bets were made along the lines of the four factions in the village, organised around patriarchy, hierarchy, family, elders etc. Within which are sub-factions which operate in a similar way.
Geertz notes that a man almost never bets against his group, but always with his group or an allied group, and, of course, with his entire village if an outsider has come to fight.
If there is a dispute between factions or individuals of some kind – marital or political etc – then bets will almost always be higher – to reflect the importance of the dispute.
It is not that the result of the fight determines a change in the dispute, or in the hierarchies or social relations, but that the fight puts it all on display – makes it ‘visible, tangible, graspable, “real”’.
While Balinese culture, for Geertz in 1958 at least, was relatively slow, subdued and peaceful, the cockfight exploded this and reminded people of the cultural code that regulated society.
It’s what Geertz calls a ‘metasocial commentary’.
The cockfight is a case of that ‘web of meaning’.
Geertz says, ‘culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described’.
Understanding this would be impossible if you came with presuppositions about gambling, taking time of work for entertainment, or western politics.
Only by starting at the bottom and paying close attention can the larger meaning be inferred.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold has said that ‘anthropology is philosophy with the people in’. And while some search for the universal characteristics that are shared by all peoples, anthropology, for the most part, puts the differences front and centre. It makes no universal assumptions.
We can see from the cockfight why Geertz has been influential in other disciplines. How the same microanalysis in history for example might allow us to ‘travel’ to other times and cultures in surprising and enlightening ways.
It might also help us look at the seemingly banal everydayness of our own culture and to come to some broader conclusions about the meaning and politics that it engrains into all of us.
Sources
Edited by, J. Alexander, P. Smith, M. Norton, Interpreting Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences
C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
T.H. Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
