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Geertz as Challenge (was "Winks and Twitches> <debate> <long>John McCreery (JLM@TWICS.COM)Sat, 6 Apr 1996 13:23:09 +0900
In responding to Bob Graber's remarks about Clifford Geertz, winks and twitches, I noted that I had not read Geertz's call for thick description, "as leading to a focus on subjective interpretations of meaning and, thus, away from objective science." Here, in a spirit of provocation, I would like to advance the proposition that anthropologists have gone astray by reading Geertz as a model when he should be read as a challenge. Geertz, I have noted, is a great writer of prolegomena. In essay after essay, he has done a masterful job of explicating such concepts as "culture," "ideology," "art," etc., exposing the variety in their formulations and pointing in directions which he, himself, argues would be more fruitful. The business of twitches and winks is one example. In the famous essay on "Thick Description," he argues that culture is neither "subjective" nor "objective" in the usual naive way in which these alternatives are located on opposite sides of the classic Cartesian gap between mind and body."Culture, this acted document,... is public, like burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid. Though ideational, it does not exist in someone's head; though unphysical, it is not an occult entity." How, then, are we to theorize it? The famous "web of significance" is, like its prototype a trap. The unwary will focus on "significance" and be lured by talk of "interpretation" back into the subjectivism that Geertz explicitly rejects. Here the anthropologist is seen as expounding the native point of view ("I've been there, I've lived with this people, I know how they think"). And as Geertz himself argues repeatedly, in his essay on Malinowski's diaries for example, this is nonsensical. (It is also, of course, politically offensive, to those, myself included, who believe that people should be allowed to speak for themselves.) The best we can do is infer from what we see and hear and bring to our observations by way of background knowledge, what we imagine is going on. We are then left with a problem that Geertz is very clear about: "The besetting sin of interpretive approaches to anything--literature, dreams, symptoms, culture--is that they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to escape systematic modes of assessment." Here is the challenge that I, for one, would like us to spend more time discussing. My own position is this. (1) There is a small set of problems for which it is possible to use statistical methods. It is a precondition for using these methods that we (a) can distinguish things to count, (b) are, in fact, able to count them, and (c) able to count them in ways which produce statistically valid samples. (2) There is a much larger set of problems where it isn't at all clear what we are trying to count. (How different is different enough, for example, in a chain of family resemblances surrounding a conceptual prototype?) Or while we have a clear idea of hypothetical differences we don't command the resources to satisfy (b) and (c). (3) Computer simulations are a new and exciting way to examine the implications of complex ideas. They bring us closer to Geertz' ideal that "explanation often consists of substituting complex pictures for simple ones while striving somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with the simple ones." (From the opening paragraph of "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man.) (4) For much of the data we collect during fieldwork, however, neither ideas or evidence are clear enough to support simulation. Here we find ourselves groping toward clarity by telling stories and speaking in metaphors. And here is precisely the point at which we lack "systematic modes of assessment." I await your suggestions. John McCreery Yokohama April 6, 1996
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