Geertz Lecture: "FROM THE NATIVE'S POINT OF VIEW: ON THE NATURE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING"

Not a matter of extraordinary empathy, but – as in Gilligan’s work – a matter of working from the readily observable expressions people ‘give’ and ‘give off’ in their everyday activities.

Geertz (1986): “Whatever sense we have of how things stand with someone else’s inner life, we gain it through their expressions, not through some magical intrusion into their consciousness. It’s all a matter of scratching surfaces...” (p.73, my emphasis - jds).

Geertz’s article is important to us, I think, for the following reasons:

1            The methodology he sets out - what we can do with people’s expressions, ‘scratching surfaces’

2            The ‘movement’ needed - oscillating between parts and wholes, not a single fixed perspective – comparisons with ‘experience-near’ and ‘experience distant’ concepts

3            The nature of the Western self

4            A sense of other, different selves

Geertz and other than western modes of selfhood - their implications for morality, and the maintenance of social orders, and individuals's experiences.

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He begins his methodological discussion with an outline of past, failed attempts to depict or portray things from the native's point of view:

-             none succeed in bridging the gap between inside and outside, between subjective and objective, between meaning and form, between actor's and observer's knowledge.

-             But... if we cannot feel through a special form of empathy what they feel, perceive what they perceive, what it is that the investigator can perceive?

-             Here, we are on familiar ground, for:

“The ethnographer does not, and, in my opinion, largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive. What he (sic) perceives, and that uncertainly enough, is what they [his informants] perceive 'with' - or 'by means of', or 'through'... whatever the word should be" (p.58).

Getting at the SELF of another culture: “I have tried to get at this most intimate of notions, not by imaging myself someone else, a rice peasant or a tribal sheikh, and then seeing what I thought, but by searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms – words, images, institutions, behaviors – in terms of which, in each place, people actually represented themselves to themselves and to one another” (p.58).

-             A people 'show' the uses of their own everyday concepts in their spontaneous, everyday, colloquial activities.

-             Distinguish between experience near and experience distant concepts.

e.g. Love vs Object cathexis; cast vs. social stratification; fear vs, phobia

-             If anthropological understanding does not involve empathy, i.e., feeling and experiencing a world as those native to it do, what does it involve? - perceiving what they perceive 'with', or 'through'(ref. Vygotsky, and the 'tool', or 'mental instrument' aspect of our actions).

But what is different, of course, is that we, as Geertzian investigators, view their ways of life 'through' our experience-distant concepts.

Where we "grasp concepts that, for another people, are experience-near... [by placing] them in illuminating connection with experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of social life" (p.58, my emphasis).

This is the crucial feature of Geertz's method to which I wish to draw attention: by the use of invented concepts (orderly forms of talk), we can draw our attention as investigators to significant differences between such forms and a people's way of making sense of their lives.

But we can go further, and make use of the illuminated provided by comparisons with such invented concepts:

-             For Geertz does not talk of experience-distant concepts as being used like theoretical representations at all, that is, as supposedly corresponding to a true but hidden state of affairs.

-             They are for a quite different use, for a quite different purpose.

-             They are meant to be deployed "to produce an interpretation of a way a people lives" (p.57).

But how can they be used to do that? Well, a part of the task is the familiar hermeneutical one, of:

"hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts that actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole that motivates them" (p.69).

And we can come to a sense of what the uses to which they put their experience-near concepts, by gaining a sense of the general form of their life as a whole, and by 'placing' the parts such uses play (in relation to each other) within that whole.

“The concept of the person is, in fact, an excellent vehicle by means of which to examine this whole question of how to go about poking into another people’s turn of mind. In the first place, some sort of concept of this kind, one feels reasonably safe in saying, exists in recognizable form among all social groups... And for Java, Bali, Morocco, at least, that idea [of what selfhood is] differs markedly not only from our own but, no less dramatically and no less instructively, from one another ” (p.59).

1. Western conception of the person: What does Geertz say it is?

"The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set constrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however, incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures” (p.59).

Notice how he makes use of it occasionally in the article to show how trying to understand others on analogy with ourselves would lead us into mistakes - what are we 'up to', our goals?

2. Javanese: Making the self ‘smooth’

Two sets of religious contrasts: 1. Between 'inside' and 'outside'; and 2, between 'refined' and 'vulgar'.

Two major terms :             1) ‘Batin’ (inside) - "the felt realm of human experience" - emotional life

2) ‘Lair’ - "the observed realm of human behavior" - the movements and posture of the person...

two independent realms.

Two other major terms:     1) ‘Alus’ (pure, refined, polished... ) the term for "the proper ordering" of these realms,

                                           2) to be contrasted with 'kasar' (coarse, insenstive, vulgar).

The goal is to be alus in both separate realms of the self.

‒            What is the relation here between a person's experience and its public expression?

“The result is a bifurcated conception of the self, half ungestured feeling and half unfelt gesture. An inner world of stilled emotion and an outer world of shaped behavior behavior confront one another as sharply distinguished realms in themselves...” (p.61).

Example of young man whose wife has suddenly and inexplicable died...

‒            Why are our beliefs in "the intrinsic honesty of deep feelings" and "the moral importance of personal sincerity" inappropriate? - what are the Javanese 'up to'?

3. Balinese: Balinese life a "theatre of status"

-             "There are birth-order markers, kinship terms, caste titles, sex indicators... and so on and so forth, each of which consists not of a mere collection of useful tags but a distinct and bounded, internally very complex, terminological system. When one applies one of these designations or titles.. to someone, one therefore defines him as a determinate point in a fixed pattern, as the temporary occupant of a particular, quite untemporary, cultural locus” (P.68).

‒            ‘Lek' - stage-fright at not being able to probably play out in public performance what his or her cultural location commits one to (Goffman)... one’s status depends on being able to reproduce the cyclical cosmic drama

-             Again: what are the Balinese 'up to'?

4. Moroccan: a public context for a private life

In Arabic, 'nisba' means, variously - ascription, attribution, imputation, relationship, affinity, correlation, connection, kinship

-             Moroccans as “mosaic,” “contextualized persons”

“Nothing if not diverse, Moroccan society does not cope with its diversity by sealing it into castes, isolating it into tribes, dividing it into ethnic groups, or covering it over with some common-denominator of nationality, though, fitfully, all have now been tried. It copes with it by distinguishing with elaborate precision, the contexts – marriage, worship, and to an extent diet, law, education – within which men are separated by their dissimilitudes, and those – work, friendship, politics, trade – where, however warily and however conditionally, they are connected by them” (p.67).

-             “Calling a man a Sefroui is like calling him a San Franciscan, it 'classifies' him, but does not 'type' him; it places him without portraying him” (p.68).

-             There is a"hyper individualism" in Moroccan public social life – a vacant, shifting sketch, left to be filled in the interaction.

‒            What is the Moroccan 'up to'? Being pragmatic, opportunistic, adaptive – generally ad hoc in one’s relations to others. This is what makes the ‘mosaic’ work.

5. Wholes and parts: In what sense can the whole be conceived 'through' the parts which actualize it? And in what sense can the parts be said to be motivated by the whole within which they appear?

-             What then is the relation between people's contexts, and their experience?

-             Could we say, as an aspect of our 'modernity': we need particular contexts, but cannot rest content with any context in particular?

-             But how would the Javanese, Balinese, and Moroccans characterize their dissatisfactions with life?