[Discussion] The ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz

[Paksoy, Hb]

The ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz 
by Keith Windschuttle 
 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 
>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. 
Notes
Go to the top of the document. 
	Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical
Topics, by Clifford Geertz; Princeton University Press, 271 pages, $16.95
(paper). Go back to the text. 

>From The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 2, October 2002