Posted on 10/28/2002 8:37:43 AM PST by shrinkermd
From its origins in classical thought and Christianity, Western culture has always had a strong tendency towards universalism. This principle has long been expressed in the idea of the unity of human kind and the belief that all human beings had a common origin and were equal before God. During the European Enlightenment, these Christian concepts were secularized to produce the notions of a common human nature and universal human rights. At the same time, the West produced a scientific method that was so successful its practitioners assumed they had found the key that would open the way to knowledge of the universe. In other words, the universalizing principle has been one of the great strengths of Western culture and has been central to the self-assurance and development of Western civilization.
Nonetheless, there have periodically been major intellectual and social movements in the West that have rejected universalism in favor of relativism. These were often derived from political theories based on conflict models, such as Marxism, which saw the struggle between classes as the dynamic of history, or Nazism, which thought much the same about race. In both cases, the notion of a universal scientific method was adulterated by either class-based perspectives, such as the Russian plant geneticist Lysenko’s distinction between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” science, or notions like the racial conflict between “Aryan” and “Jewish physics” under Hitler’s regime.
The most recent relativist perspective to emerge in the West has been “multiculturalism,” an intellectual concept and political movement that has been far more successful than any of its predecessors. It has had a major impact on the culture of most of the leading Western nations. This is especially true of the United States where, as Allan Bloom observed in the mid-1980s, multicultural relativism had captured the minds of academics and their students throughout the institutions of higher education, where not only Western values had been relativized but so had the very notion of scientific truth itself. Since then, multiculturalism has been far more than an academic theory. It has had practical outcomes such as profound changes to immigration and education policy, employer recruitment and contracting practices, attitudes to diplomacy and foreign affairs, and artistic expressions in both high and popular culture.
While there are both hard and soft variants, most versions of multiculturalism hold that all cultures are authentic in their own terms and that neither the West at large nor the United States in particular has the right to impose its beliefs and values onto others. Under these principles, the traditional universalizing project of the West cannot be sustained. Enlightenment universalism becomes an arrogant presumption and Christianity no more than one among many equally valid religious perspectives.
While there has been no shortage of debate about its influence, there has so far been little discussion about multiculturalism’s origins. Externally, it was no doubt strongly influenced by the process of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s and the growth of the United Nations. Internally, it had much less to do with politics. Few of its advocates came from either of its relativist predecessors, and it has no obvious source in a clear-cut political ideology. Instead, its foundations lie more in academic theory and method. Perhaps its biggest single source and its major long-term sustenance has come from the academic discipline of anthropology, in particular the field of cultural anthropology that has been so influential in the United States.And within this field perhaps the most persuasive voice since the 1960s has been that of Clifford Geertz.
The cover notes on the latest collection of Geertz’s essays say that the book “treats the reader to an analysis of the American intellectual climate by someone who did much to shape it.”[1] This is all too true. During the past thirty years, Geertz and a number of like-minded colleagues and followers have been at the height of academic authority not only in anthropology but also in history, the social sciences, the study of literature, and the emergence of the field known as cultural studies.
Geertz has long been regarded as the doyen of cultural anthropology. He did his initial fieldwork in the 1950s in Indonesia and in the 1960s in Morocco. His major empirical work was Negara (1980), an analysis of the myths and ceremonies of the nineteenth-century pre-colonial Hindu and Buddhist-influenced state of Bali.
Although American cultural anthropologists have proclaimed that their interest in other cultures was for the cultures’ own sake, they have often believed that a study of the exotic could illuminate their own society. Hence, in the early twentieth century, the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis held that because the language of the Hopi Indians had no tenses and not even a word for time, this showed their mental processes were so different from Western thought that they inhabited a different world of meaning. This both undermined the notion of a common human nature and revealed the limitations and cultural conditioning of the Western mentality, thereby destabilizing its assumptions that its observations were natural and its concepts universal. Even more famously, Margaret Mead’s claim to have discovered unfettered sexual promiscuity in the Samoan islands revealed how unnecessarily inhibitive were American practices of courtship. Eventually, however, both these accounts were shown to be mistaken: the Hopi had words for the past, present and future just like everyone else, and the Samoans were far more protective of their daughters’ virtue than even the most bourgeois Western family. Nonetheless, cultural anthropology continued to pursue the remarkable and the bizarre in order to reveal their implications for the folks back home.
This has long been the milieu in which Geertz operated. His study of Negara was primarily designed to undermine conventional Western assumptions. He labelled Negara a “theater state” governed by rituals and symbols rather than force. Hence it defied all Western concepts of political theory. Geertz has also written detailed descriptions of practices regarded with distaste in the West, such as cockfighting and suttee in Bali. His major interest, however, has always been the theory and methodology of his field. This is where he has been both most radical and most influential.
Geertz’s best-known contribution to anthropology was his use of the term “thick description.” This was not original but a concept he borrowed in the 1970s from the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle who argued that human gestures often had multiple layers of meaning that could only be described through the symbols used by a culture. A blink of the eye could be either an involuntary action or a wink; a knowing wink could be an ironic comment on the concept of winking, and so on. Although Geertz proclaimed his pursuit of multiple layers of meaning was a breakthrough in anthropology, a very similar methodology had actually been a familiar if rather fruitless strand of American sociology since the 1920s in the work of George Herbert Mead and his approach called “symbolic interactionism.” But in the 1970s, coupled with the exotica provided by Geertz, this form of interpretation was quickly re-established in cultural anthropology as the latest thing.
Geertz contributed to this movement in a number of studies, some of which were based on his fieldwork, while others were derived from information he gleaned from history books, such as his analyses of the royal symbolism of Elizabeth I of England or the Negara court in Bali. He said that the objective of his type of interpretative anthropology was twofold: to make his readers aware there were other ways of thinking besides their own, and to make them more aware of the exact quality of their own mentalities. This was an approach, he argued, “that welds the processes of self-knowledge, self-perception, self-understanding to those of other-knowledge, other-perception, other-understanding; that identifies, or very nearly, sorting out who we are and sorting out whom we are among.” This interpretative process of other-knowledge also contributed, he went on, to an understanding of human culture as a whole.
The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad interpretations about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics.
Put like this, of course, there is nothing objectionable about the approach. But when one looks at the kind of “densely textured facts” that Geertz chose to illustrate his thesis, there seems to be more to it than this. One topic on which he later decided to write a long essay was a Balinese cockfight he witnessed in 1958. His aim was to persuade his readers that this activity was not just a cheap, low-life blood sport on which foolish young men wagered far more money than they could sensibly afford. He called cockfighting an “art form” of monumental proportions, a Balinese equivalent of King Lear or Crime and Punishment, which catches up these themes—death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance—and, ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature.
In another essay from the 1970s, Geertz reproduced a long, verbatim description written in the nineteenth century by a Danish observer who witnessed a suttee rite in Bali, in which the cremation of a dead Rajah was accompanied by the ritual immolation of his three young and beautiful surviving concubines. In this case, Geertz again claimed literary motives. He said his purpose in recounting what he called this “celebration of the quieter beauties of personal obliteration,” this “chaste hymn to annihilation,” was to emulate the literary critic Lionel Trilling when the latter tried to explain the similarly distant cultural mores of Georgian England in the novels of Jane Austen.
In justifying this approach, Geertz claimed to be demonstrating how closely the work of the anthropologist resembles that of the literary critic. In particular, he wanted to show how cultural interpretation resembled a critic’s reading of a poem. But it is also clear that his agenda was to persuade his readers to take a different attitude to behavior to which most Westerners would normally react with disgust. By portraying cockfighting as a noble art and the burning of widows as a spectacle of awesome beauty, he was engaged in the same exploit as his precursors Sapir, Whorf, and Mead: he was using the bizarre and the exotic to destabilize Western cultural assumptions.
This tactic has worked remarkably well. In the nineteenth century, the Western imperial powers used customs like suttee as a rationale for imposing their own rule of law over states where it was practiced. By the late twentieth century, the anthropological profession was urging its students to see ceremonies of this kind not as evidence of barbarism but as authentic expressions of particular cultures. The idea that Westerners might intervene in the name of their own universal principles had itself become the real cultural offence.
When Geertz came to academic prominence in the 1960s, American cultural anthropology had been dwarfed by the reputation of the French, especially the celebrated Marxists Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu. Geertz was never a Marxist and has long described himself as a social-democratic liberal. In 1967 he made a highly effective critique of Lévi-Strauss, accusing his Enlightenment rationalism and Rousseauvian Romanticism of failing to connect with the mind of the Other. Although this was published in the English neo-conservative journal Encounter, the intellectual trajectory Geertz was on at the time was anything but English or conservative. In 1983 he published a list of those he felt were in the academic vanguard in the social sciences. The list was an inventory of intellectual exotica, comprising the Continental philosophers Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, the literary critics Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, Fredric Jameson, and Stanley Fish, and what Geertz aptly called the “all-purpose subversives”: Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, and Thomas Kuhn—in short, the prophets of hermeneutics, postmodernism, and relativism who were then capturing the high ground of the humanities and social sciences and who have held much of it ever since.
Geertz has said the biggest single influence on his career was the later work of Wittgenstein, especially his arguments about the impossibility of a private language. Geertz applied this to cultural anthropology, arguing that it demonstrated that all people lived through the collective, public, symbolic culture they inherited and inhabited. “Culture is public because meaning is,” he wrote in an oft-cited aphorism. Hence the proper methodology for the social sciences was cultural interpretation. There were strong parallels, he argued, between the role of the anthropologist and that of the art historian, the literary critic and even the novelist. He rejected the rival notion that culture could be explained by material forces such as politics, economics, or the law. These were themselves largely cultural expressions. In short, rather than study the structural or material features of a society in the effort to understand how it works, one had to study its culture. The way to do this was through hermeneutics, an essentially literary form of interpretation.
Although the postmodernist movement made Geertz an academic celebrity and eventually propelled him onto the faculty of the famous Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, in recent years he appears to have some regrets about the creature he helped rear. Since it is virtually impossible today to find an indigenous culture immune from some kind of Western influence, anthropological fieldwork has become very difficult. Taking its cue from the essays of Geertz himself, a younger generation of theorists has argued that, since the study of culture is essentially a matter of literary interpretation, there is little need for the traditional empirical methods of anthropologists. Why go to all the trouble of fieldwork in remote locations where the researcher risks contaminated water, malaria, and local resentment, when one can do it all at home by simply reading printed texts and analyzing them? In his latest collection of essays, Geertz expresses some dismay at the usurpers now crowding the field.
Having carved out, from the mid-nineteenth century on, a special place for itself as the study of culture, “that complex whole, including beliefs, morals, laws, customs, acquired by man as a member of society,” it [anthropology] now finds various cooked-up and johnny-come-lately disciplines, semi-disciplines, and marching societies (gender studies, science studies, queer studies, media studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, loosely grouped, the final insult, as “cultural studies”), crowding into the space it has so painstakingly, and so bravely, cleared and weeded and begun to work.
Nonetheless, he still has no regrets about the major influence he has had on academic life through his justification of cultural relativism. One of the pieces reprinted in his latest collection of essays is a spirited defence of this concept and an assault on those who have dared disagree with him. This essay, originally written in 1983, is entitled “Anti Anti-Relativism.” Geertz uses this title because he claims he does not want to give the topic a positive endorsement. He says that the double negative is not the equivalent of a positive in this case. He illustrates this with the example of those liberals who were opposed to McCarthyism in the 1950s. They were “anti anti-Communists” but were not necessarily Communists themselves. While this is a plausible point in the politics of the Cold War, Geertz’s preference for the double negative is irrelevant since the conclusion of his essay endorses the central position to which relativism is committed: that principles of morality and knowledge are always tied to particular cultures, and that there can never be any morality or knowledge that is trans-cultural or beyond culture.
To give Geertz his due, he often presents his opponents’ strongest case and even reproduces some of their best lines. To illustrate how audacious the anti-relativists had become, he quotes the philosopher and novelist William Gass in a passage some readers would not find quite the caricature that Geertz does:
No more than we might expect a surgeon to say “Dead and good riddance” would an anthropologist exclaim, stepping from the culture just surveyed as one might shed a set of working clothes, “What a lousy way to live!” Because, even if the natives were impoverished, covered with dust and sores; … even if they were rapidly dying off; still the observer could remark how frequently they smiled, or how infrequently their children fought, or how serene they were. We can envy the Zuni their peaceful ways and the Navaho their “happy heart.” It was amazing how mollified we were to find that there was some functional point to food taboos, infibulation, or clitoridectomy; and if we still felt morally squeamish about human sacrifice or headhunting, it is clear we were still squeezed into a narrow modern European point of view, and had no sympathy, and didn’t—couldn’t—understand.
Geertz mocks the critique of relativism advanced by his fellow anthropologist I. C. Jarvie without apparently realizing that this is the very position that he defends himself later in the same essay. Jarvie describes relativism as “the position that all assessments are assessments relative to some standard or other, and standards derive from cultures.” This is a perfectly good definition of cultural relativism. Moreover, the main point that Jarvie goes on to make, that relativism entails nihilism, is also ridiculed by Geertz who does not recognize that Jarvie’s logic is perfectly valid. If assessments or values are always derived from some culture, and there are no universal moral principles, then no culture can itself be assessed, because there could be no trans-cultural values to stand in judgment over any particular culture. Cultural relativism, in short, cannot condemn any culture as a whole and hence no outsider can condemn any cultural practice, no matter how barbaric. Indeed, it disables any external form of moral criticism and endorses any practice that the culture itself regards as desirable.
Geertz also rejects the argument of another anthropologist, Robert Edgerton, that there must be a common human nature for without it we would lack the ability even to detect behavior that is unjust, unacceptable, or deviant. Edgerton had argued that without a context-independent conception of human nature we would be unable to assess the adequacy of any society. “Our relativistic tradition in anthropology,” Edgerton observes, “has been slow to yield to the idea that there could be such a thing as a deviant society, one that is contrary to human nature.” In his 1992 book, Sick Societies, Edgerton writes:
"For these relativists, not only is each culture unique unto itself, but people’s thoughts, feelings and motivations are radically different from one culture to another. It follows then that any attempt to generalize about either culture or human nature must be false or trivial unless it is confined to people who live in a specific cultural system. As these relativists have said, it necessarily follows that if peoples’ minds vary so much from one culture to another, Western science is only a culturally specific form of ethnoscience, not a universally valid way of verification or falsification. In this perspective, a person from another culture remains the “Other,” forever incomprehensible."
But, of course, if the Other really was unfathomable, then the very anthropology upon which Geertz based his career could not have been done. Without the existence of at least some common components to human nature, it would be impossible to understand the meanings of other cultures. Perhaps the best refutation of cultural relativism is the practice of anthropology itself, which depends upon anthropologists living with, interrogating, and comprehending the symbols of other human groups, activities that would be impossible if both sides did not share many assumptions from the outset.
Anyone who reads the several collections of essays that compose most of the corpus of Geertz’s work will be struck by his apparently self-deprecating modesty. He often spends considerable time explaining the position of those he opposes and canvassing a range of opinions both for and against them. He hedges many of his assertions with qualifications to show he is not an absolutist even about his most cherished opinions. Apart from an often cryptic parting shot, many of his essays contain very little forthright opinion of his own about the targets of his criticism. There is little doubt many readers would find his prose charming and his arguments disarming. All this nonetheless conceals an essentially ad hominem approach in which the author either adopts a supercilious attitude to his opponents, as if debating them openly would be beneath his dignity, or censures them in essentially moral terms. Partly through the success Geertz has had in his field, this technique is now widely emulated and defines the style of many of today’s postmodernist intellectuals. Let me illustrate this with two examples.
At a conference to mark the International Year to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in 1971, UNESCO invited Claude Lévi-Strauss to give the opening address. Lévi-Strauss recalled in his memoirs that those who asked him to give the lecture expected him to repeat the sentiments he had expressed in a pamphlet written twenty years earlier called Race and History. At the time, he said, he had written that work “in order to serve the international institutions,” but he had since become disillusioned with their progress, especially since their main beneficiaries appeared to be their own personnel who had “moved from modest jobs in developing countries to sanctified positions in an international institution.” So he decided, he said, to speak with complete frankness and to rebel against the concept of “racism” that had become so strongly in vogue.
He said that people were confusing this idea of racism with “attitudes that are normal, even legitimate, and in any case, unavoidable.” A certain degree of ethnic identification, as long as it did not get out of hand, could be a good thing. “It is not at all invidious to place one way of life or thought above all others or to feel little drawn to other values,” he said. This might even be the price to be paid for the preservation and renewal of cultural values. Cultural diversity was dependent on each culture trying to “resist” those that surrounded it, “to distinguish itself from them—in short to be itself.”
In recounting this story, Geertz argued that the concept Lévi-Strauss was discussing was not so much racism as “ethnocentrism.” The latter was a term that had not existed in 1971, but when Geertz was writing in 1985 it had assumed enormous intellectual and moral force. Ethnocentrism represented a failure to value the human other. It was a reflection, Geertz suggested, of a distant past when “so-called” primitive cultures referred to themselves as “The True Ones,” “The Good Ones,” or just “The Human Beings,” in contrast to other tribes who dismissed one another as “earth monkeys” or “louse eggs,” that is, as not fully human. Although those days were long past, Geertz said, ethnocentrism entailed the same logic and had the same appeal. Most people were comfortable in their “imprisonment” within their own cultural traditions, he claimed. Humanity, however, could no longer live under such conditions.
Whatever once was possible and whatever may now be longed for, the sovereignty of the familiar impoverishes everyone; to the degree it has a future, ours is dark. It is not that we must love one another or die (if that is the case—Blacks and Afrikaners, Arabs and Jews, Tamils and Singhalese—we are I think doomed). It is that we must know one another, and live with that knowledge, or end marooned in a Beckett-world of colliding soliloquy.
Now, the speech by Lévi-Strauss did not do anything especially audacious or offensive. It did not applaud the white race against the black, or Western civilization against the barbarians. It simply made some qualifications to what its author saw as the extremes to which contemporary anti-racist thought was being taken, especially its utopian view of the prospects of cultural harmony. In fact, lurking within his complaint appeared to be a now familiar French concern about the encroachments being made by English, German, and, in particular, American culture on Gallic life. Yet for this minor offence Lévi-Strauss was castigated by Geertz and rebuked as the progenitor of a dark future.
This kind of response is now routinely applied to anyone who does not accept the intellectual package offered by multiculturalism. It says that if you disagree with me, and support anything other than my position on ethnocentrism and cultural diversity, you are a morally bad person who will open the way to a bleak future for the human species.
Geertz has made a similar critique of those who question the virtues of the indigenous tribal societies of the world, especially those like Ernest Gellner and Karl Popper who have argued that they need to overcome the “big ditch” between them and the civilized world. In a recent article on the art historian Ernst Gombrich in The New York Review of Books, Geertz concluded:
"At a time when the grand opposition of civilization and barbarism is becoming again a common coin of both cultural and political discussion … it will be well to keep in mind the dubiousness of the whole Ariel and Caliban procedure. We need to find in “primitivism,” whatever it may or may not be, something other than the image of our fears. In other words, if you support the modernization of primitive societies and their introduction to Western standards of education, health care, and employment, you are suffering from xenophobia and paranoia. Once it would have gone without saying that ad hominem arguments of this kind were gravely deficient. They address neither the evidence nor the logic of their opponents’ case and rely upon what amounts to little more than personal insult. Yet today the resort to the ad hominem is par for the course in almost any field of the humanities and social sciences."
This is one more outcome of the intellectual tendencies discussed here. Indeed, it is a logical outcome of the postmodernist relativism that Geertz has done so much to institutionalize. If there are no universal standards, then there can be no common grounds for debate. People are reduced to talking past one another from the enclaves of their own position. Once you have identified the political position of your opponents, enough has been said. Debate is reduced to calling one another other names.
The multiculturalist outlook was originally developed to serve the interests of many of the subjects of anthropological investigation, especially the indigenous people, peasants, and the landless of the underdeveloped world. It was intended to change damaging attitudes towards them and their beliefs about themselves. It would generate respect, combat racism, and foster cultural understanding and harmony. It would also lessen Western arrogance by revealing to the West the ethnocentric nature of its own assumptions. It hoped that the accomplishment of these objectives would be fostered by the kind of interpretive anthropology that Geertz and his colleagues practiced, by drawing large conclusions from small, densely textured facts and supporting broad interpretations about the role of culture in the construction of everyday life.
Thirty years down the track it is hard to find many positive outcomes from these worthy sentiments. Those underdeveloped countries that have succeeded in turning their fortunes around have accomplished this not by rejecting the West but by emulating it, especially its principles of economic and political liberty. Those that have remained stagnant and impoverished or which, like Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, are now in a rapid downward spiral towards the same status, are those that have accepted multiculturalism’s anti-Westernism and pursued its relativist goals. Within the West itself, indigenous minority groups like the Australian Aborigines who have been subject to policies derived from multicultural premises have seen critical measures of well-being, such as literacy, health, and life expectancy, all reversed from levels they had attained in the 1960s.
While cultural anthropologists have by no means been the only figures responsible, they have given these policies the imprimatur of academic respectability. They have endorsed an ideological package that has flattered third-world rulers, indigenous elites, and the bureaucracies of international organizations, but at considerable cost to ordinary people in the countries they have influenced.
Yet it is still hard to understand what they actually thought they were doing. How could they have imagined they were assisting those they studied by encouraging some of their most destructive myths and practices? How, for instance, could it have helped underdeveloped countries accumulate capital for social and industrial development by portraying 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? How could it have assisted third-world countries to overcome their numerous problems by telling them that those problems originated in Western arrogance? What value could there have been in a methodology more concerned to compare itself to the interpretation of poetry than to make criticisms of indigenous illiteracy and superstition? It is hard to escape the conclusion that cultural anthropology, cultural relativism, and multiculturalism, far from being vehicles of intercultural communication and harmony, are instead demonstrations of the moral vanity and self-indulgence of their Western authors: in short, conspicuous examples of the very ethnocentrism they purport to reject.
(1)Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, by Clifford Geertz; Princeton University Press, 271 pages, $16.95 (paper). Go back to the text.
To make a diagnosis of a liberal or a "RAT", look for the personal attack. If found this to be a profound and well written essay on a very difficult subject.
At a conference to mark the International Year to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in 1971, UNESCO invited Claude Lévi-Strauss to give the opening address. Lévi-Strauss
However, as the author tip-toes respectfully through the morgue, he accidentally trips over a body-part left lying on the floor:
The multiculturalist outlook was originally developed to serve the interests of many of the subjects of anthropological investigation, especially the indigenous people, peasants, and the landless of the underdeveloped world. It was intended to change damaging attitudes towards them and their beliefs about themselves. It would generate respect, combat racism, and foster cultural understanding and harmony. It would also lessen Western arrogance by revealing to the West the ethnocentric nature of its own assumptions. It hoped that the accomplishment of these objectives would be fostered by the kind of interpretive anthropology that Geertz and his colleagues practiced, by drawing large conclusions from small, densely textured facts and supporting broad interpretations about the role of culture in the construction of everyday life.
Actually, no it wasn't. But that's in another archive in another building in what is becoming the Homeland Autopsy Center for Advanced Reactionary Studies in What the H**l Happened and Why.
Until we can finally admit to ourselves that it was not benevolence that drove them to do what they did, we'll just have to stay hunched over here in the autopsy room busily adding documents to the file....
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