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Historically Speaking, Volume 8, Number 4, March/April 2007, p. 34
(Article)
DOI: 10.1353/hsp.2007.0056
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34 Historically Speaking March/April 2007
in different directions. He set off in many directionshimself, scattering his ideas across a vast landscape, just as he gathered them from many differentsources. He was a master without disciples —
one of a kind.
Robert Darnton is the Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Pro-fessor of European History at Princeton University.
He is the author of several books and articles on theEnlightenment, including The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (Norton,1995).
Geertz among the Historians
Peter Burke
At first sight, the influence that CliffordGeertz 's ideas have had on historians, in-
cluding such leading figures as Robert
Darnton and Rhys Isaac, is something of a puzzle.By contrast, the reasons for his influence on his fel-low anthropologists are reasonably clear. His reac-tion against positivist, evolutionary, functionalist,and scientific anthropologies came unusually earlyand was unusually powerful. He was, as far as Iknow, the first anthropologist toalign himself with the hermeneu-tic tradition, in particular withthe work of Hans-GeorgGadamer and Paul Ricoeur, at a
time when his colleagues were ei-ther structuralists, following themodel of Claude Lévi-Strauss, or
structural- functionalists, as in t he
case of the Anglo-American tra-dition. Geertz saw anthropologyas on e of th e humanities, and s o
an appropriate topic of essaysfor the general reader in a liter-ary tradition that runs fromMontaigne to Emerson and be-yond: the tradition of discussing what it means to be human.
I find it more difficult to explain — or should Isay interpret— the considerable influence thatGeertz has exercised over the last thirty years or soon academic historians, or at least on a substantial
and articulate minority of that large and heteroge-neous profession. Since traditional historical meth-
ods have been closer to hermeneutics than theyever were to structuralism or functionalism, Geertz
appears to have been telling us — with unusual elo-quence and wit, it is true — what we already knew.Perhaps the best way to be influential is preciselyto mix familiar with unfamiliar ideas in almost equaldoses, adding the spice of novelty to recommenda-tions already perceived to be sound.
To go any deeper in the search for explanationsrequires imitating Geertz himself and making useof a micro-example. Although many history stu-dents have been required to read "Thick Descrip-tion," and the idea of a "theater state" has
provoked considerable debate among historians of
Europe as well as of Asia, Geertz 's most-cited essayremains "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-fight." It is not difficult to understand why. The au-
thor gives a vivid description of a dramaticoccasion that he himself compares with a perform-ance of King Lear. In addition, he promises readersthat the cockfight will offer an "immediate, inside-view grasp" of Balinese mentality. It is a "dramati-zation of status concerns" in which cocks are a
Ifind it more difficult to explain — or shouldI say interpret — the considerable influencethat Geertz has exercised over the last thirty
years or so on academic historians, or at
leaston a substantial and articulate minority of that large and heterogeneous profession.
metaphor for men; "a Balinese reading of Balineseexperience, a story they tell themselves about them-selves." T he micro-example leads the author andthe reader on to a series of generalizations, culmi-nating in the suggestion that a culture is a kind of text that may be read not only by insiders but byoutsiders — anthropologists or historians — as well.
Thirty-five years later it has become quite easy
to criticize Geertz 's general statements. We tell our students to look for the differences between texts
and cultures as well as the similarities; to ask whether all Balinese, women and men, tell the same
story; and to consider the difficulty of moving fromvivid scenes like the cockfight to an account of cul-tural change. All the same, this essay helped manycultural historians, myself included, to understandrituals and the dramatic aspect of other events. Italso encouraged us to look for the relation betweenthese events and the culture surrounding them. If "Deep Play" did not lead to a series of studies of the English cockfight, the Spanish bullfight, and soon, this was probably the result of our awe of a
brilliant tour d e force.
By contrast, "Thick Description: Toward an Iterpretive Theory of Culture" is, I believe, read
historians primarily as an elegant statement of tmethod they were already following. As for the id
of the "theater state," its suggestion that powserved pomp rather than pomp serving power h
been usefully provocative, but it is not, I think, geerally accepted by historians of, say, early mode
France or Spain. In the case early modern Europe, the idea probably most relevant to the uation of the early mode popes, who combined a smarmy with a good deal of sptual power. Even some historiaof Southeast Asia have expresstheir doubts about the conce
Other ideas launched by Geersuch as "common sense as a c
tural system" or "local knowedge," have not yet been takenseriously by historians as they dserve to be. Whether or not
time will come for these particlar ideas, Geertz 's influence on at least one or t
generations of cultural historians seems secuAmong the leaders of the cultural or interpretatturn, he will probably be remembered as the owith whom historians had the closest affinity.
Peter Burke is emeritus professor of cultural historand a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Universi
of Cambridge. Polity Press published his What IsCultural History? in 2004.