Anthropology and Literature Geertz

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A Strange Romance: Anthropology and LiteratureAuthor(s): Clifford GeertzReviewed work(s):Source: Profession, (2003), pp. 28-36Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595754.

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A Strange Romance:Anthropology and LiteratureCLIFFORD GEERTZ

Puzzled, as I'm sure my fellow panelists were as well, when StephenGreenblatt conscripted them to this peculiar, somewhat whimsical enterprise, about justwhat the topic of discussion was supposed to be, I thoughtto begin, in good Empsonian style,with a reflection on the ambiguities ofhis title.Was this to be my own engagement with literature and the language arts as subjects of study?what a cultural anthropologist had to sayabout modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, the new historicism, hermeneutics, and the other veerings andinsurrections of recent theory, having lived through all of them? Or was itto be how my engagement with anthropology was itself literary?what rolemy involvement with my literary tradition, rather intense for a social scientist, played inmy half-century effort to understand how Javanese, Balinese,and Moroccans went about earning a living, governing themselves, andmaking sense of their existence? Should I be professional ethnographer asamateur critic or amateur critic as professional ethnographer?The two are connected, of course, and both involve a certain presumption and some fairly serious trespassing, aswell aswhat the psychoanalystswould call exaggerated self-reference. But it is the second that seems tomethemore relevant inmy case.What I have to say about the ups and downsof recent literary scholarship or criticism isnot, even tome, very interestThe author isProfessor Emeritus in the School ofSocial Science at the Institute for AdvancedStudy inPrinceton, New Jersey. A version of thispaper was presented at the 2002 MLA convention inNew York.

Profession 2003 28


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CLIFFORD GEERTZ |||29ing. I have the usual mixed feelings?fascinating, but where the hell is it allgoing??and nothing very helpful to add, except surtoutpas de zele. Therole thatmy formation (I really don't know what else to call it,Bildung perhaps; English is rather skittish about claims to cultural refinement). .. therole thatmy formation, which has been rathermore on the humanities sidethan on the sciences side (an undergraduate major in literature and philosophy, I originally intended to become a novelist), has played inmy size-upand-solve anthropologizing is, I think,worthy of some reflection.What is a Flaubert manque or, as someone has less kindly suggested, afauxHenry James doing in such a cold-fact discipline? Except that it isnota cold-fact discipline, and it should not aspire to become one. Gainingsome sort of entree into various peoples' various ways of being-in-theworld demands not only that you have a reasonably distinct sensibilityyourself but also that you have some idea ofwhat that sensibility is.Thisnot a job for the disembodied observer, and themethodologically overprepared need not apply. It is the encounter?sometimes the collision, occasionally an embrace, often a confusion, a nonplus, or a near miss?betweenyour sense of how matters stand, how, as we say, things should go, and thesense of those whom you are struggling to understand that provides thebasis forwhatever account of their lives you are able to give. The most important instruments of cultural anthropologists are not tape recorders orvideo cameras?as valuable as they and other technical aids (polls, experiments, formalmodels) may be?but in-wrought perceptions. It is on theirability to entangle those perceptions somehow with the equally cultural,equally in-wrought perceptions of the people they are studying that theiranalytic reach, their power ofwitness depends.This is, as all sorts of people with rather larger ambitions for the socialsciences will be quick to tellyou, dangerous doctrine. It raises the threat ofsubjectivism, of relativism, of particularism, of a general failure to producerobust and reliable real-world knowledge. It turns us away from that shibboleth of shibboleths, the scientificmethod, toward an unregulated intuitionism; away from the promise of a true, systematic, view-from-nowhere,prediction-making, program-producing Science ofMan. It substitutes vagrant insights and sheer assertions, produces a cacophony of opinions.Rather like literature, actually.It isno part ofmy argument to deny that these are real perils, thoughboth their immediacy and their prevalence are commonly exaggerated bythe attack battalions of aggressive scientism. Instead of attempting to overcome the perils or hold them at bay by appealing to inappropriate ideals,ideals drawn from differently directed enterprises, operating under differently formed conditions, and with different sorts of resources, we should


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30 III STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATUREconfront them head-on as an ingredient in thework as such. If it is an entanglement of forms of life?the rub of various sensibilities against one another?that we're dealing with, then something rather closer to grasping apoint than abstracting a lawwould seem to be involved. I once put this, insomething Iwrote, in terms of the anthropologist's reading other people'stexts over their shoulders {Interpretation452). Itmakes thewhole enterprisesound a lotmore surreptitious than it is, and less intrusive, but that is aboutthe size of it.And to read over shoulders effectively,conceptual, procedural,even substantive borrowing from literary studies would seem essential. Thedependence on images and figurations, what Coleridge called "speculativeinstruments," from the natural sciences that has marked, and continues tomark, the social sciences needs to be supplemented by the introduction ofones from humanistic research and analysis?symbol, meaning, metaphor,plot, story,motif, interpretation?if we are actually to engage our subjectrather thanmerely attack it. So I have for some time now been arguing. Butthis perceiving of other people's perceivings, this reading of other people'sreadings, this texting of other people's texts turns out, as one might expect, tohave complexities and uncertainties?dare I say aporia??of itsown. ReplacingNatur- with Geistes- before wissenschaftdoesn't in itselfget you all that far.To be less gnomic, I turn to some concrete examples of the troubles I'veseen. Some years ago Iwrote a small piece on the Balinese cockfight,whichImade bold to compare in a suggestive, allusory, en passant sort ofway tosome classics ofWestern literature,most notablyMacbeth and Lear ("DeepPlay"). Itwas my notion that some themes of these tragedies by Shakespearewere caught up, in their own way and with their own inflections?that is,Balinese inflections?in the cockfight. Iwon't rehearse the argument hereor tryto defend its cogency. That, itturns out, is altogether unnecessary, because what set off a fairvolley of criticismwas not whether what I said aboutBali or Shakespeare had anymerit (the Shakespeare stuffconcerning Macbeth and Lear came fromNorthrop Frye, so how could itbe wrong?) but thesheer effrontery I displayed in daring to speak about them in the samebreath.What on earth, as one recent enrage?the author of awork delicately called How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering OurPast?put it,could possibly justifycomparing "a cheap low-life blood sporton which foolish young men wager farmore money than they could sensibly afford" to suchmonumental expressions of the immense and universalWestern spirit? Only, he thought, a settled nihilistic intent to underminemorality, spread relativism, and "use the bizarre and exotic to destabilizeWestern cultural assumptions" (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 7, 8).This sort ofmoral panic, authority at bay, can be left to take care of itself.But a similar reaction?that what I am trying to do by bringingWest


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CLIFFORD GEERTZ |||31ern imaginative creations into proximity with those of the South Seas orNorth Africa is to blur the line between barbarism and civilization to theadvantage of barbarism?was stimulated by a rathermore developed pieceI did, also awhile back, on Balinese cremation ceremonies ("Found"). Herethematter ismore complicated, and more telling, about exactlywhere it isthe procedure pinches, about justwhat it is that brings on all the wrath andaccusation. So it isworth perhaps a bitmore discussion.Shortly efore e died in 1973, ionelTrilling,whom Iknewslightlyndmuch admired, wrote a typicallywinding, ruminating piece for the TimesLiterary Supplement concerning the difficulties he had experienced in teaching Jane Austen to today's college students. The differences between theirsensibilities and hers, their times and hers, their language and hers were sogreat as tomake thewhole enterprise perilous at best?"problematic." Referring to some work I had done on the Balinese sense of self aswell as to astrange Icelandic saga he had been reading concerning amurderous jealousyamong chiefs brought on by amisdirected gift of bears, he wondered justhow far large cultural gaps could be bridged by reading, bywriting, by thefree play of themoral imagination no matter how liberal.When a couple ofyears furtheron Iwas invited to give amemorial lecture inhis honor atColumbiaUniversity, I sought to address this issue by an example ofmy own, ofa gap even wider than thatwhich yawns between sophomores andAusten?the gap between the treatment ofwidows in our society and their immolation on theirhusbands' funeral pyres innineteenth-century Bali ("Found").

Borrowing a rhetorically inverted phrase, "found in translation," fromthe title of a JamesMerrill poem, a phrase expressing the remoteness tohim of his familial past, I quoted a long passage from aDanish sea traderdescribing such an immolation (which as a further irony, Imight remarknow, took place justwhere that terrorist bomb went off a fewmonths ago).The description was written around 1850. This man, alternately charmedand appalled, drawn in and disarranged by what he saw, recounted theevent at great length and invery fine detail, as though to convince himselfthat itwas all really happening. The enormous, gaudy funeral tower "risingon crimson pillars to a finely carved coffin shaped like a lion." The swarming crowd, friendly and laughing?"They

looked little enough likesav

ages." The great mile-long procession, complete with music, dancing, andelaborate filigreed offerings to the gods. The entranced and immobileVeda-chanting priest. The threewomen?mirror in one hand, comb in theother?plunging "for affections' sake and in the name of religion"?intothe flames. "Itwas a sight never to be forgotten," he concludes, with a sudden turnfrom fascination to horror, from the bewitchment of the drama tothe reality ofwhat itwas enacting.


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32 IIA STRANGEROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATUREItbrought toone's heart a strangefeelingof thankfulnessthatone belongedto a civilizationwhich, for all itsfaults, smerciful and tendsmore andmoreto emancipate women fromdeception and cruelty. o British rule isduethe factthatthis foulplague isextirpated in India, and doubdess theDutchhave, ere now, done as much for Bali. Works like these are the credentialsbywhich the estern civilizationmakes good itsrightto conquer and humanize barbarous races and to replace ancient civilizations. (Helms 66)

Itwas for this, as I put it,moral instability, thatwild and nervous swinging between "morning-of-the-world," "island-of-the-gods" romanticismand self-congratulatory colonial paternalism (whatGayatri Spivak once described, in another context, as white men's saving brown women frombrown men), that I quoted this passage, aswell as, I admit, for its force aswhat I called amoment ago "the power of witness." I enforced this pointwith other examples: Merrill's uneasy, counternostalgic poem, the play ofdiscordant memory inFaulkner's Absalom, Absalom , Paul Fussell's study oftheGreat War poets enclosing trenches and shell holes in pastoral tropes. Iwanted to demonstrate the complexity, the loss of certitude, and the gain ofdimension that connecting disparate sensibilities, striking them off againstone another, brings into being. The difficult awareness that is found intranslation, the ethnographer's craft.

Now, itwould not be fair to say that this argument failed to register. Butthere has again been resistance in some quarters, most especially from theimaginatively challenged, to seeing anything but savagery and primitivismin the cremation and anything but perversity and subversive purpose intaking it seriously as a disclosive expression?a cry, as Stevens once so exactly said of poetry, of its own occasion. To quote again that moral scoldwhom the cockfight so upended, simply because he can be counted on tosaywhat Iwant him to say: "It is hard to understand what they thoughttheywere doing." (He means "he," that is,me; but he widens his charge toanthropologists generally.)

How, for instance, could theyhave imagined theywere assisting thosethey study by encouraging some of theirmost destructive myths andpractices?How, for instance, could ithave helped underdeveloped countriesaccumulate capital forsocial and industrialdevelopment by portraying the reckless gambling of cockfighting as the symbolic equivalentof some of the great classics ofWestern culture? How could it haveadvanced that essential part of modernization, the emancipation ofwomen, by glamorizing barbaricmisogynist practices like suttee?Whatvalue could there have been inmethodology more concerned to compare itselfto the interpretation of poetry than tomake criticism of indigenous illiteracyand superstition? It ishard to escape the conclusion[he concludes] that cultural anthropology, relativism,multiculturalism,


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CLIFFORD GEERTZ |||33far from being vehicles of intercultural communication and harmony, areinstead demonstrations of the moral vanity and self-indulgence of theirWestern authors. (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 12)

Well, you can see the problem. Merely inpresenting untoward, out-ofcategory material, material not easily bent to proprietous shape, one risksbeing branded an enemy of progress, or worse. But despite all the hollering, the fear here isnot really of "indigenous illiteracy and superstition" orthe glamorization of barbarism. The most vain and self-indulgent ofmulticulturalized Western authors (and I am not theworst), smitten by exoticcustoms and dubious of some of our own, isnot going to try to sellwidowburning to anyone. And the Balinese are neither illiterate nor, as thesethings go in theworld, particularly profligate, misogynous, or superstitious. The fear here is that in entangling our own sense of life and its "classic representations" with ones more than a little at angles to it and to them,we will soweaken our convictions as tomake us unable to sustain them andimpress them with sufficient force on the world at large. It is the verydestabilization, the confusion of impulses thatmy honest sea captain feltthat in quoting him Iwanted my readers to feel too.Why do we teach JaneAusten, or Icelandic sagas, or Hindu funerals? Just that: towound ourcomplacency, tomake us a little less confident in and satisfied with the immediate deliverances of our here-and-now imperious world. Such teachingis indeed a subversive business. But what it subverts isnot morality. Whatit subverts is bluster, obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, onecould say, and prejudice.But enough of the long ago and far away.We are right now, in thiscountry and at thistime in the process of trying to get, aswe say, some sortof handle on a cultural formation heretofore removed, distant, strange, andominous?namely, Islam (on which I have also worked).1 We are constructing, live and in real time?rather hurriedly, as though we had betterget on with it afteryears of neglect?our image ofwhat Muslims think, believe, do, and desire. Until recently,we barely possessed such an image beyond vague and vacant notions about stallions, harems, deserts, anddervishes and some schoolbook

legendsabout theCrusades?an ignoranceimmortally 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 roadster to ask a turbaned man prostrate in prayer by the side of the road:"Hey, Jack,which way toMecca?"The reason for all the rush and for the dimensions it is taking is, ofcourse, 9/11.When it suddenly became apparent that the familiar threatening other thatwe had lostwith the unlooked-for collapse of the Soviet


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34 I A STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGYAND LITERATUREUnion was about to be replaced by something even lesswell defined in ourminds; by something even further removed from the political history ofnineteenth- and twentieth-century America?Communism had, after all,

aWestern pedigree at least,with roots in theEnlightenment and the FrenchRevolution; by in fact a creed ofArabs, Turks, Persians, Africans, SouthAsians, Mongols, andMalays, rather offour spiritualmap, a suffusing anxiety settled in.What are we Americans to think about an ideological competitor ofwhich most of us know barely more than the name and some plots andatrocities alleged to flow from its teachings? The result has been anavalanche of books and articles by historians, journalists, political scientists,sociologists, anthropologists, and variously inspired amateurs designed togive us a crash course in, as the phrase goes, understanding Islam. Jihad, atermAmericans encountered, if they encountered it at all, only in dimenovels, has become a prime subject of popular discourse. There areworksdesigned for that elusive figure, the general reader, on something called,confusingly, reformism or modernism or fundamentalism?now evenWahhabism?in contemporary Islam; on the teachings of theKoran; onSufi brotherhoods; on Islamic law, Islamic education; on the Sunni-Shi'isplit; on the deep meaning of the veil. And so forth and so on, into someextraordinary corners indeed.There is, of course, a long tradition?sometimes called orientalism,sometimes Middle Eastern studies?of Western scholarship on Islam, mostof itEuropean, most of it arcane. But we are now at the start of somethingentirely new: the formation of public-square, society-wide discussions?half apology, half debate, and riddled with grand assertions?of how we areto think and feel about this sudden apparition on our cultural and politicalhorizon. We're going to be able towatch up close and while ithappens thebuilding up in our minds of an enduring image or set of images ofwhatIslam andMuslims are all about, just aswe were able towatch, at a certainremove, the holding of such an image or set of images of Bali and the Balinese in themind of our rapt and troubled sea captain. The difference isthat this time the exotic is coming to us, and we are lesswell placed to discipline its expressions. The evidence is all around us: inheated discussionsof "the clash of civilizations," of "what went wrong" with Islamic culture(after theRenaissance, why no Reformation, let alone an Enlightenment?);in cliche-ridden TV biographies ofMuhammed; and in news magazinepieces on the pilgrimage, the fast, fatwas, or houris in paradise.

Perhaps one of themost striking indications that this image building isgoing on, that it isnot only an extensive process but also an intensely contested and, again, thoroughly destabilizing one?that is, destabilizing to


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CLIFFORD GEERTZ |||35us?is provided by a recent seriocomic affaire litteraire that involved justthe sort of entanglement of disparate sensibilities, cross-cutting ways of approaching

a text and reaching into itsworld, thatI have been talking about.Imean the storm?or perhaps itwas only a cloudburst, and a seeded one atthat?over the teaching of theKoran at theUniversity ofNorth Carolina,ChapelHill.

Well, itwasn't exactly teaching theKoran; itwas merely, once more, exposing itwithout warning labels and weather advisories to vulnerableminds?that is to say, to college freshmen. In the summer of 2002, drivenapparently by a rising concern to understand Islam, the university assigneda translation of the early, so-called Meccan, verses of the Koran?thosethat supposedly initiated the prophecy?to its incoming class. Criticism,intense and unbridled, appeared almost immediately: from Franklin Graham, the son of theChristian evangelist; from Bill O'Reilly, the residentMencken of the Fox network (he said itwas like teaching Mein Kampf);from, inevitably,William F. Buckley, Jr.; from, just about as inevitably, theWall StreetJournal and thePhiladelphia Daily News and various other newspapers, columnists, and soi-disant guardians of the public conscience. TheACLU made nervous separationist noises. The university was sued by afundamentalist Christian group, normally concerned with anti-abortionactivities, on the grounds that itwas unconstitutional for a public university to require students to study a specific religion. And the state legislaturevoted, ex post facto, to bar funding for the project. The suitwas eventuallythrown out by the courts; the university made the assignment optional; andthe enterprise proceeded, and apparently isproceeding, still ringed by debate and protest (see Falwell; Park; Robinson).Our interest in all this isnot that the controversy provides yet anotherexample of hard-shell provincialism and its exploitation by sophisticatedreactionaries but that it is, again, a complex and contentious literary engagement. The main complaint was that in selecting the early, lyrical"Meccan" verses, composed when the Prophet was just starting out, whenhe was powerless and isolated, rather than the later, fire-and-brimstone,jihad-breathing "Medinan" ones composed when, regrouping in exile, hewas organizing an armed return, the translatorwas presenting an overly attractive, even seductive image of Islam. JohnWalker Lindh was mentioned; so was the British shoe bomber. The problem was not somuchwith Islam in itself aswith how itwas represented, how it is to be broughtinto contact, like cockfights, immolations, or Jane Austen, with our ownunderstandings?"found in translation."I could continue this discussion with a consideration of the relationsamong narration, narrative poetry, and revelation in theKoran; of the


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36 III STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATUREnature of theKoran as a text among texts and as spoken word; of the linguistic resources of the Arabic language and their literary employment. Butthat's for the future, as our encounter, not somuch with "Islam" aswith

Muslims, develops, however itdevelops. It is clear thatmerely listening toother voices in other rooms saying other things in other accents can be aperilous business, liable to confuse our emotions, derail our judgments, andleave us both rattled and engrossed. But that iswhat listening to the voicesof our own literary tradition,Macbeth orMerrill, Lear or Faulkner, bringson aswell: the sense that there ismore to things than first appears and thatour 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 onesfound inmy general reviewof recentworks on Islam inTheNew YorkReview of ooks,"Which Way toMecca?" That review was written after this talkwas given, at a time whenI didnot expectthat t, hetalk, ould be published. I apologize fortheself-plagiarism.

WORKS CITED -Arno, Peter. Cartoon. New Yorker 9 Apr. 1938: 18.Falwell, Jerry. "University ofNorth Carolina Requires Islam Studies." Jesus and TodaysIssues: Church and State. 2002. 13Aug. 2003 .Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Geertz, Interpretation412-53.

-. "Found inTranslation." Local Knowledge. New York: Basic, 1983. 36-54.-. The Interpretation ofCultures. New York: Basic, 1973.-. "WhichWay toMecca?" New YorkReviewof ooks 13June2003: 27-29.Helms, L. V Pioneering in theFar East. London, 1882.Park,Michael Y. "University'sQuran Reading StirsControversy." 6July2002.Audarya Fellowship. IndiaDivine Communications. 13 Aug. 2003 .Robinson, B. A. University Dispute re Islamic Book. Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance. 12Aug. 2002. 13Aug. 2003 .Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations onWidow Sacrifice."Wedge 7-8 (1985): 120-30.Trilling, Lionel. "WhyWe Read JaneAusten." TimesLiterarySupplement ar. 1976:250-52.

Windschuttle, Keith. "The Ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz." New Criterion 21.2(2002): 5-12.-. TheKilling of istory:How Literary ritics ndSocialTheorists reMurdering OurPast. New York: Free, 1997.

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Anthropology and Literature Geertz