ࡱ>    !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~Root Entry Fx/VSWordDocument VFCompObjnectual armory. But itno longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infiniteversatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle ofnatural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, orthe organization of the means of production does not explaineverything, not even everything human, but it still explainssomething; and our attention shifts to isolating just what thatsomething is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot ofpseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, ithas also given rise. Whether or not this is, in fact, the way all centrallyimportant scientific concepts develop, I don't know. Butcertainly this pattern fits the concept of culture, around whichthe whole discipline of anthropology arose, and whose dominationthat discipline has been increasingly concerned to limit,specify, focus, and contain. lt is to this cutting of theculture concept down to size, therefore actually insuring itscontinued importance rather than undermining it, that the essaysbelow are all, in their several ways and from their severaldirections, dedicated. They all argue, sometimes explicitly, moreoften merely through the particular analysis they develop, for anarrowed, specialized, and, so I imagine,theoretically morepowerful concept of culture to replace E. B. Tylor's famous "mostcomplex whole," which, its originative power not denied, seems tome to have reached the point where it obscures a good deal morethan it reveals. The conceptual morass into which the Tylorean kind ofpot-au-feu theorizing about culture can lead, is evident in whatis still one of the better general introductions to anthropology,Clyde Kluckhohn`s Mirror for Man. In some twenty-seven pages ofhis chapter on the concept, Kluckhohn managed to define culturein turn as: (I) "the total way of life of a people"; (2) "thesocial legacy the individual acquires from his group"; (3) "a wayof thinking, feeling, and believing"; (4) "an abse# *3VF,D|,D|DD D R(D@FDBF{a'R 0 0Times New Roman Symbol Arial Xref: murdoch uva.engl.amstdsma:98Newsgroups: uva.engl.amstdsmaPath: murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!ld9dFrom: ld9d@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (Laura C. Dove)Subject: READINGS: geertzMessage-ID: <CwACEB.Luq@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDUOrganization: uvaDate: Sat, 17 Sep 1994 17:54:11 GMT Chapter I/Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks thatcertain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with atremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve allfundamental problems,clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snapsthem up as the open sesame of some new positive science, theconceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system ofanalysis can be built. The sudden vogue ofsuch a grande idee,crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, shesays, "to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn atonce to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for everypurpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strictmeaning, with generalizetions and derivatives." After we have become familiar with the new idea,however, after it has become part of our general stock oftheoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more intobalance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity isended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe viewof it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to theproblems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it andextend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension;and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. Itbecomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place,a permanent and enduring part of our intelltraction frombehavior"; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist aboutthe way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a"storehouse of pooled learning"; (7) "a set of standardizedorientations to re-current problems"; (8) "learned behavior"; (9)a mechanism for thenormative regulation of behavior; (10) "a setof techniques for adjustingboth to the external environrnent andto other men"; (11) "a precipitate of history"; and turning,perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, as a sieve, and asa matrix. In the face of this sort of theoretical diffusion,even a somewhat constricted and not entirely standard concept ofculture, which is at least internally coherent and, moreimportant, which has a definable argument to make is (as, to befair, Kluckhohn himself keenly realized) an improvement.Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only onedirection in which it is useful to move, but because there are somany: it is necessary to choose. The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility theessays belowattempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semioticone. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspendedin webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to bethose webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not anexperimental science in search of law but an iterpretive one insearch of meaning. It is explication I am after, construingsocial expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pro-nouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself someexplication. II Operationalism as a methodological dogma never made muchsense so far as the social sciences are concerned, and except fora few rather toowell-swept corners--Skinnerian behaviorism,intelligence testing, and so on--it is largely dead now. But ithad, for all that, an important point to make, which, however wemay feel about trying to define charisma or alienation in termsof operations, retains a certain force: if you want to understandwhat a science is, you should look in the first instance not atits theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what thepractitioners of it do. In anthropology, or anyway socialanthropology, what the practioners do is ethnography. And it isin understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what~doingethnography is, that a start can be made to- ward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a formofknowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matterof methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doingethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants,transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping adiary, and so on. But it is not thesethings, techniques andreceived procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort itis: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from GilbertRyle, "thick description." Ryle's discussion of "thick description" appears intwo recent essays ofhis (now reprinted in the second volume ofhis Collected Papers addressed to the general question of what,as he puts it, "Le Penseur" is doing: "Thinking and Reflecting"and "The Thinking of Thoughts.' Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting theeyelids of their righteyes. In one, this is an involuntarytwitch; in the other, a conspiratorialsignal to a friend. The twomovements are, as movements, identical;from an l-am-a-camera,"phenomenalistic" observation of them alone,one could not tellwhich was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both oreither was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, howeverunphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyoneunfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the secondknows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in aquite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someonein particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) accordingto a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of therest of the company. As Rylepoints out, the winker has not donetwo things, contracted his eyelids and winked, while the twitcherhas done only one, contracted his eyelids. Contracting youreyelids on purpose when there exists a publiccode in which sodoing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That's all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleckof culture, and voila! a gesture.That, however, is just thebeginning. Suppose, he continues, there is a third boy, who, "togive malicious amusement to his cronies," parodiesthe firstboy`s wink, as amateurish, clumsy, obvious, and so on. He,ofcourse, does this in the same way the second boy winked and thefirsttwitched: by contracting his right eyelids. Only this boy isneither winking nor twitching, he is parodying someone else's, ashe takes it, laughable, attempt at winking. Here, too, a sociallyestablished code exists (hewill "wink" laboriously,overobviously, perhaps adding a grimace--theusual artifices ofthe clown); and so also does a message. Only now it is notconspiracy but ridicule that is in the air. If the others thinkhe is actually winking, his whole project misfires as completely,though with somewhat different results, as if they think he istwitching. One can go further: uncertain of his mimickingabilities, the would-be satirist may practice at home before themirror, in which case he is not twitching, winking, or parodying,but rehearsing; though so far as what a camera, a radicalbehaviorist, or a believer in protocol sentences would recordheis just rapidly contracting his right eyelids like all theothers. Complexities are possible, if not practically withoutend, at least logically so. The original winker might, for example, actually havebeen fake-winking, say, to mislead outsiders into imagining therewas a conspiracy afoot when there in fact was not, in which caseour descriptions of what the parodist is parodying and therehearser rehearsing of course shift accordingly. But the pointis that between what Ryle calls the "thin description" of whatthe rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher . . .) is doing(`'rapidly contracting his right eyelids") and the "thickdescription" of what he is doing ("practicing a burlesque of afriend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking aconspiracy is in motion") lies the object of ethnography: astratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of whichtwitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies areproduced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which theywould not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a culturalcategory, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches) infact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn't do with hiseyelids. Like so many of the little stories Oxford philosophers liketo makeup for themselves, all this winking, fake-winking,burlesque-fake-winking, rehearsed-burlesque-fake-winking, mayseem a bit artificial. In way of adding a more empirical note,let me give, deliberately unprecededby any prior explanatorycomment at all, a not untypical excerpt from my own field journalto demonstrate that, however evened off for didactic purposes,Ryle's exampl?presents an image only too exact of thesort ofpiled-up structures of inference and implication through which anethnographer is continually trying to pick his way: lhe French[the informant saidl had only just arrived. They set up twentyorso small forts between here, the town, and the Marmusha area upin the middle of the mountains, placing them on promontories sothey could survey the countryside. But for all this theycouldn't guarantee safety~ especially at night, so although themezrag, trade-pact, system was supposed to be legally abolishedit in fact continued as before. One night, when Cohen (who speaks fluent Berber)~ wasup there~ at Marmusha~ two other Jews who were traders to aneighboring tribe came by topurchase some goods from him. SomeBerbers~ from yet another neighboring tribe~ tried to break intoCohen`s place~ but he fired his rifle in the air.(Traditionally,Jews were not allowed to carry weapons; but at this periodthingswere so unsettled many did so anyway.) This attracted theattention of the French and the marauders fled. The next night~ however~ they came back~ one of themdisguised as awoman who knocked on the door with some sort of astory. Cohen was suspicious and didn't want to let '~her" in, butthe other Jews said~ "oh~ it's all right, it's only a woman.'` Sothey opened the door and the whole lot came pouring im Theykilled the two visiting Jews, but Cohen managed to barricadehimself in an adjoining room. He heard the robbers planning toburnhim alive in the shop after they removed his goods, and so heopened thedoor and~ laying about him wildly with a club~ managedto escape through awindow. He went up to the fort~ then~ to have his woundsdressed, and complained to the local commandant, one CaptainDumari, saying he wanted his 'ar-- i.e.~ four or five times thevalue of the merchandise stolen from him. The robbers were from atribe which had not yet submitted to French authority and were inopen rebellion against it~ and he wanted authorization to gowithhis mezrag -holder, the Marmusha tribal sheikh, to collect theindemnity that, under traditional rules~ he had coming to him.Captain Dumari couldn`t officially give him permission to dothis~ because of the French prohibition of the mezragrelationship~ but he gave him verbal authorization saying, "Ifyou get killed, it's your problem." So the .sheikh, the Jew, and a small company of armedMarmushans went off ten or fifteen kilometers up into therehellious area, where there were of course no French, and,sneaking up, captured the thief-tribe's shepherd and stole itsherds. The other tribe soon came riding outon horses after them armed with rifles and ready to attack. Butwhen they saw who the "sheep thieves'` were~ they thought betterof it and said, 'all right, we'll talk." They couldn`t reallydeny what had happened--that some of their men hadrobbed Cohen and killed the two visitors--and theyweren`t prepared to start the serious feud with the Marmusha ascuffle with the invading party would bring on. So the two groupstalked, and talked, and talked, there on the plain amid thethousands of sheep, and decided finally on five-hundred-sheepdamage~. Thc two armed Berber groups then lined upon their horse at opposite ends of the plain with the sheepherded between them, and Cohen, in his black gown, pillhox hat,and flapping slippers, went out alone among the sheep, pickingout, one hy one and at his own good speed, the best ones for hispayment. So Cohen got his sheep and drove them back toMarmusha. The French, up in their fort, heard them coming fromsome distance ("Ba, ba, ba" said Cohen, happily, recalling theimage) and said, ''What the hell is that?" Cohen said `'That ismy 'ar." The French couldn't believe he had actually done what he said he had done, and accused him of beinga spy for the rebellious Berbers~ put him in prison, and took hissheep. In the town, his family, not having heard from him in solong a time, thought he was dead. But after a while the French released him and he cameback home, but without his sheep. He then went to the Colonel inthe town, the Frenchman in charge of the whole region, tocomplain. But the Colonel said, "I can't do anything about thematter. It's not my problem." Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys,as any similar one similarly presented would do, a fair sense ofhow much goes into ethnographic description of even the mostelemental sort--how extraordinarily "thick" it is. In finishedanthropological writings, including those collected here, thisfact--that what we call our data are really our own constructionsof other people's constructions of what they and theircompatriots are up to--is obscured because most of what we needto comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, orwhatever is insinuated as background information before the thingitself is directly examined. (Even to reveal that this littledrama took place in the highlands of central Morocco in 1912--andwas recounted there in 1968--is to determine much of ourunderstanding of it. There is nothing particularly wrong withthis, and it is in any case inevitable. But it does lead to aview of anthropological research as rather more of anobservational and rather less of an interpretive activitythan it really is. Right down at the factual base, the hard rock, insofaras there is any, of the whole enterprise, we are alreadyexplicating: and worse, explicating explications. Winks uponwinks upon winks. Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures ofsignification--what Ryle called established codes, a somewhatmisleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too muchlike that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that ofthe literary critic--and determining their social ground andimport. Here, in our text, such sorting would begin withdistinguishing the three unlike frames ofinterpretationingredient in the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French, andwould then move on to show how (and why) at that time, in thatplace, their copresence produced a situation in which systematicmisunderstanding reduced traditional form to social farce. Whattripped Cohen up, and with him the whole, ancient pattern ofsocial and economic relationships within which he functioned, wasa confusion of tongues. I shall come back to this too-compacted aphorismlater, as well as to the details of the text itself. The pointfor now is only that ethnography is thick description. What theethnographer is in fact faced with--except when (as, of course,he must do) he is pursuingthe more automatized routines of data collection--is amultiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of themsuperimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at oncestrange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrivesomehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true atthe most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity:interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms,tracing property lines, censusing households . . .writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the senseof "construct a reading of') a manuscript--foreign, faded, t`ullof ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, andtendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalizedgraphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. Culture, this acted document, thus is public. like aburlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid. Though ideational it doesnot exist in someone's head; though unphysical is not an occultentity. The interminable, because unterminable, debate withinanthropology as to whether culture is "subjective" or"objective," together with the mutual exchange of intellectualinsults ("idealist!"--"materialist!";"mentalist!"--`'behaviorist!"; "impressionist!"--"positivist!")which accompanies it, is wholly misconceivcd. Once human behavioris seen as (most of the time; there are true twitches) symbolicaction which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, linein writing, or sonance in music, signifies--the question as towhether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or eventhe two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to askabout a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what theirontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the onehand and dreams on the other--they are things of thisworld. The thing to ask is~what their import is: what itis, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride,that in their occurrence and through their agency, is gettingsaid. This may seem like an obvious truth, but there are anumber of ways to obscure it. One is to imagine that culture is aself-contained "super-organic" reality with forces and purposesof its own; that is, to reify it. Another is to claim that it consists in the brutepattern of behavioral events we observe in fact to occur in someidentifiable community or other; that is, to reduce it. Butthough both these confusions still exist, and doubtless will bealways with us, the main source of theoretical muddlement incontemporary anthropology is a view which developed in reactionto them and is right now very widely held--namely, that, to quoteWard Goodenough, perhaps its leading proponent, "culture [islocated I in the minds and hearts of men." Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis,or cognitive anthropology (a terminological wavering whichreflects a deeper uncertainty), this school of thought holds thatculture is composed of psychological structures by means of whichindividuals or groups of individuals guide their behavior. '`Asociety's culture," to quote Goodenough again, this time in apassage which has become the locus classsicus of the wholemovement, "consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to itsmembers." And from this view of what culture is follows a view,equally assured, of what describing it is--the writing out ofsystematic rules, an ethnographic algorithm, which, if followed,would make it possible so to operate, to pass (physicalappearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extremesubjectivism is married to extreme formalism, with theexpected result: an explosion of debate as to whether particularanalyses (which come in the form of taxonomies, paradigms,tables, trees, and other ingenuities) reflect what the natives"really" think or are merely clever simulations, logicallyequivalent but substantively different, of whatthey think. As, on first glance, this approach may look closeenough to the one being developed here to be mistaken for it, itis useful to be explicit as to what divides them. If, leaving ourwinks and sheep behind for the moment, we take, say, a Beethovenquartet as an, admittedly rather special but, for these purposes,nicely illustrative, sample of culture, no one would, I think,identify it with its score, with the skills and knowledgeneeded to play it, with the understanding of it possessed by itsperformers or auditors, nor, to take care, ~n pC~ssC1~7t of thereductionists and reifiers, with a particular performance of itor with some mysterious entity transcending material existence.The "no one" is perhaps too strong here, for there are alwaysincorrigibles. But that a Beethoven quartet is a temporallydeveloped tonal structure, a coherent sequence of musicalsound--in a word, music--and not anybody's knowledge c-for belief about anything, including how to play it, is aproposition to which most people are, upon reflection, likely toassent. To play the violin it is necessary to possess certainhabits, skills, knowledge, and talents, to be in the mood toplay, and (as the old joke goes) to have a violin. But violinplaying is neither the habits, skills, knowledge, and so on, northe mood, nor (the notion believers in "material culture"apparently embrace) the violin. To make a trade pact inMorocco, you have to do certain things in certain ways(among others, cut, while chanting Quranic Arabic, the throat ofa lamb before the assembled, undeformed, adult male members ofyour tribe) and to be possessed of certain psychologicalcharacteristics (among others, a desire for distant things). Buta trade pact is neither the throat cutting nor the desire, thoughit is real enough, as seven kinsmen of our Marmusha sheikhdiscovered when, on an earlier occasion, they were executed byhim following the theft of one mangy, essentially valuelesssheepskin from Cohen. Culture is public because meaning is. You can't wink(or burlesque one) without knowing what counts as winking or how,physically, to contract your eyelids, and you can't conduct asheep raid (or mimic one) without knowing what it is to steal asheep and how practically to go about it. But to draw from suchtruths the conclusion that knowing how to wink is winking andknowing how to steal a sheep is sheep raiding is to betray asdeep a confusion as, taking thin descriptions for thick, toidentify winking with eyelid contractions or sheep raiding withchasing woolly animals out of pastures. The cognitivistfallacy--that culture consists (to quote another spokesman forthe movement, Stephen Tyler) of "mental phenomena which can [hemeans"should"l be analyzed by normal methods similar to those ofmathematics and logic"--is as destructive of an effectivc use ofthe concept as are the behaviorist and idealist fallacies towhich it is a misdrawn correction. Perhaps, as its errors aremore sophisticated and its distortions subtler, it is even moreso. The generalized attack on privacy theories of meaningis, since early Husserl and late Wittgenstein, so much a part ofmodern thought that it need not be developed once more here. Whatis necessary is to see to it that the news of it reachesanthropology; and in particular that it is made clear that to saythat culture consists of socially establishcd structures ofmeaning in terms of which people do sch things as signalconspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answerthem, is no moreto say that it is a psychological phenomenon, acharacteristic of someone's mind, personality, cognitivestructure, or whatever, than to say that Tantrism, genetics, theprogressive form of the verb, the classification of wines, theCommon Law, or the notion of "a conditional curse"(as Westermarck defined the concept of 'ar in terms ofwhich Cohen pressed his claim to damages) is. What, in a placelike Morocco, most prevents those of us who grew up winking otherwinks or attending other sheep from grasping what people are upto is not ignorance as to how cognition works (though, especiallyas, one assumes, it works the same among them as it does amongus, it would greatly help to have less of that too) as a lack offamiliarity with the imaginative universe within which their actsare signs. As Wittgenstein has been invoked, he may as well bequoted: We . . . say of some people that they are transparent tous. It is, however important as regards this observation that onehuman being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn thiswhen we come into a strange country with entirely strangetraditions; and. what is more, even given a mastery of thecountry's language. We do not understand the people.(And not because of not knowing what they are saying tothemselves.) We cannot find our feet with them. IV Finding our feet, an unnerving business which never morethan distantly succeeds, is what ethnographic research consistsof as a personal experience; trying to formulate the basis onwhich one imagines, always excessively, one has found them iswhat anthropological writing consists of as a scientificendeavor. We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either tobecome natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them.Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We areseeking, in the widened sense of the term in which itencompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, amatter a great deal more difflcult, and not only with strangers,than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seemsto be a mysterious process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, ''thatmay be because speaking to someone does not seem mysteriousenough" Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is theenlargement of the universe of human discourse. That is not, ofcourse, its only aim-- instruction, amusement, practical counsel,moral advance, and the discovery of natural order in humanbehavior are others; nor is anthropology the only disciplinewhich pursues it. But it is an aim to which a semiotic concept ofculture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked systems ofconstruable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would callsymbols), culture is not a power, something towhich social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can becausally attributed; it is a context, something within which theycan be intelligibly--that is, thickly--described. The famous anthropological absorption with the (tous) exotic Berber horsemen, Jewish peddlers, FrenchLegionnaires--is, thus, essentially a device for displacing thedulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of ourown ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealedfrom us. Looking at the ordinary in places where it takesunaccustomed forms brings out not, as has so often been claimed,the arbitrariness of human behavior (there is nothing especiallyarbitrary about taking sheep theft for insolence in Morocco), butthe degree to which its meaning varies according to thepattern of life by, which it is informed. Understanding apeople's culture exposes their normalness without reducing theirparticularity. (The more I manage to follow what the Moroccansare up to, the more logical, and the more singular, they seem.)It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of theirown banalities, it dissolves theiropacity. It is this maneuver, usually too casually referred toas "seeing things from the actor`s point of view," too bookishlyas "the verstehen approach," or too technically as "emicanalysis," that so often leads to the notion that anthropology isa variety of either long-distance mind reading or cannibal-islefantasizing, and which, for someone anxious to navigate past thewrecks of a dozen sunken philosophies, must therefore beexecuted with a great deal of care. Nothing is morenecessary to comprehending what anthropological interpretationis, and the degree to which it i.s interpretation, than an exactunderstanding of what it means--and what it does not mean--to saythat our formulations of other peoples' symbol systems must beactor-oriented. ' Not only other peoples': anthropology can be trainedon the culture of which it is itself a part, and it increasinglyis; a fact of profound importance, but which, as it raises a fewtricky and rather special second order problems, I shall put tothe side for the moment. What it means is that descriptions of Berber, Jewish,or French culture must be cast in terms of the constructions weimagine Berbers, Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they livethrough, the formulae they use to define what happens to them.What it does not mean is that such descriptions are themselvesBerber, Jewish, or French--that is, part of the reality they areostensibly describing; they are anthropological--that is, part ofa developing system of scientific analysis. They must be cast interms of the interpretations to which persons of a particulardenomination subject their experience, because that is what theyprofess to be descriptions of; they are anthropological becauseit is, in fact, anthropologists who profess them.Normally, it is not necessary to point out quite so laboriouslythat the object of study is one thing and the study of itanother. It is clear enough that the physical world is notphysics and A Skelton Key toFinnegan's Wake is not Finnegan's Wake. But, as, in the study ofculture, analysis penetrates into the very body of theobject--that is, we begin with our own interpretations of whatour informants are up to, or think they are up to, and thensystematize those--the line between (Moroccan) culture as anatural fact and (Moroccan) culture as a theoretical entity tendsto get blurred. All the more so, as the latter is presented inthe form of an actor's-eye description of (Moroccan) conceptionsof everything from violence, honor, divinity, and justice, totribe, property, patronage, and chiefship. In short, anthropological writings are themselvesinterpretations, and second and third order ones to boot. (Bydefinition, only a "native" makes first order ones: it's hi.~culture.) 2 They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense thatthey are "something made," "something fashioned"--the originalmeaning offctio--not that they are false, unfactual, or merely"as if" thought experiments. To construct actor-orienteddescriptions of the involvements of a Berber chieftain, a Jewishmerchant, and a French soldier with one another in 1912Morocco is clearly an imaginative act, not all that differentfrom constructing similar descriptions of, say, the involvementswith one another of a provincial French doctor, his silly,adulterous wife, and her feckless lover in nineteenth centuryFrance. In the latter case, the actors are represented as nothaving existed and the events as not having happened, while inthe former they are represented as actual, or as havingbeen so. This is a difference of no mean importance; indeed,precisely the one Madame Bovary had difficulty grasping. But theimportance does not lie in the fact that her story was createdwhile Cohen's was only noted. The conditions of their creation,alld the point of it (to say nothing of the manner and thequality) differ. But the one is as much a fiction making"--asthe other. Anthropologists have not always been as aware as theymight be of this fact: that although culture exists in thetrading post, the hill fort, or the sheep run, anthropologyexists in the book, the article, the lecture, the museum display,or, sometimes nowadays, the film. To become aware of it is torealize that the line between mode of representation andsubstantive content is as undrawable in cultural analysis as itis in painting; and that fact in turn seems to threaten theobjective status of anthropological knowledge by suggesting thatits source is not social reality but scholarly artifice. It does threaten it, but the threat is hollow. Theclaim to attention of an ethnographic account does not rest onits author's ability to capture primitive facts in faraway placesand carry them home like a mask or a carving, but on the degreeto which he is able to clarify what goes on in such places, toreduce the puzzlement--what manner of men are these?--to whichunfamiliar acts emerging out of unknown backgrounds naturallygive rise. This raises some serious problems of verification, allright--or, if "verification" is too strong a word for sosoft a science (I, myself, would prefer "appraisal"), of how youcan tell a better account from a worse one. But that is preciselythe virtue of it. If ethnography is thick description andethnographers those who are doing the describing, then thedetermining question for any given example of it, whethera field journal squib or a Malinowski-sized monograph,is whether it sorts winks from twitches and real winks frommimicked ones. It is not against a body of uninterpreted data,radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogencyof our explications, but against the power of the scientificimagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.It is not worth it, as Thoreau said, to go round the world tocount the cats in Zanzibar. Now, this proposition, that it is not in our interest tobleach human behavior of the very properties that interest usbefore we begin to examine it, has sometimes been escalated intoa larger claim: namely, that as it is only those properties thatinterest us, we need not attend, save cursorily, to behavior atall. Culture is most effectively treated, the argument goes,purely as a symbolic system (the catch phrase is, "in its ownterms"), by isolating its elements, specifying theinternal relationships among those elements, and thencharacterizing the whole system in some general way--according tothe core symbols aroundwhich it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is asurface expression, or the ideological principles upon which itis based. Though a distinct improvement over "learned behavior"and "mental phenomena" notions of what culture is, and the sourceof some of the most powerful theoretical ideas in contemporaryanthropology, this hermetical approach to things seems to me torun the danger (and increasingly to have been overtaken by it) oflocking cultural analysis away from its proper object, theinformal logic of actual life. There is little profit inextricating a concept from the defects of psychologism only toplunge it immediately into those of schematicism. Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness,because it is through the flow of behavior--or, more precisely,social action--that cultural forms find articulation. They findit as well of course, in various sorts of artifacts, and variousstates of consciousness; but these draw their meaning from therole they play (Wittgenstein would say their "use") in an ongoingpattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships they bearto one another. It is what Cohen, the sheikh, and "CaptainDumari" were doing when they tripped over one another'spurposes--pursuing trade, defending honor, establishingdominance-- that created our pastoral drama, and that is what thedrama is, there-fore, "about." Whatever, or wherever, symbolsystems "in their own terms" may be, we gain empirical access tothem by inspecting events, not by arranging abstracted entitiesinto unified patterns. A further implication of this is that coherence cannotbe the major test of validity for a cultural description.Cultural systems must have a minimal degree of coherence, else wewould not call them systems; and, by observation, they normallyhave a great deal more. But there is nothing so coherent as aparanoid's delusion or a swindler's story. The force of ourinterpretations cannot rest, as they are now so often made to do,on the tightness with which they hold together, or theassurance with which they are argued. Nothing has done more, Ithink, to discredit cultural analysis than the construction ofimpeccable depictions of formal order in whose actual existencenobody can quite believe. If anthropological interpretation is constructing areading of what happens, then to divorce it from whathappens--from what, in this time or that place, specific peoplesay, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole vastbusiness of the world--is to divorce it from its applications andrender it vacant. A good interpretation of anything--a poem, aperson, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society--takes usinto the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When itdoes not do that, but leads us instead somewhere else--into anadmiration of its own elegance, of its author's cleverness, or ofthe beauties of Euclidean order--it may have its intrinsiccharms; but it is something else than what the task athand--figuring out what all that rigamarole with the sheep isabout--calls for. The rigamarole with the sheep--the sham theft of them,the reparative transfer of them, the political confiscation ofthem---is (or was) essentially a social discourse, even if, as Isuggested earlier, one conducted in multiple tongues and as muchin action as in words. Claiming his 'ar~, Cohen invoked the trade pact;recognizing the claim, the sheikh challenged the offenders'tribe; accepting responsibility, the offenders' tribe paid theindemnity; anxious to make clear to sheikhs and peddlers alikewho was now in charge here, the French showed the imperial hand.As in any discourse, code does not determine conduct, and whatwas actually said need not have been. Cohen might not have, givenits illegitimacy in Protectorate eyes, chosen to press his claim.The sheikh might, for similar reasons, have rejected it. The offenders' tribe, still resisting French authority,might have decided to regard the raid as "real" and fight ratherthan negotiate. The French, were they more habile~ and less dur(as, under MareschalLyautey's seigniorial tutelage, they later in t:act became),might have permitted Cohen to keep his sheep, winking--as wesay--at the continuance of the trade pattern and its limitationto their authority. And there are other possibilities: theMarmushans might have regarded the French action as togreat an insult to bear and gone into dissidence themselves; theFrench might have attempted not just to clamp down on Cohen butto bring the sheikh himself more closely to heel; and Cohen mighthave concluded that between renegade Berbers and Beau Gestesoldiers, driving trade in the Atlas highlands was no longerworth the candle and retired to the better-governed confines ofthe town. This, indeed, is more or less what happened, somewhatfurther along, as the Protectorate moved toward genuinesovereignty. But the point here is not to describe what did ordid not take place in Morocco. (From this simple incident one canwiden out into enormous complexities of social experience.) It isto demonstrate what a piece of anthropologicalinterpretation consists in tracing the curve of a socialdiscourse; fixing it into inspectable form. The ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse; he writes it down. ln so doing, he turns it trom a passing event,which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into anaccount, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.The sheikh is long dead, killed in the process of being, as theFrench called it, "pacified"; "Captain Dumari," his pacifier,lives, retired to his souvenirs, in the south of France; andCohen went last year, part refugee, part pilgrim, part dyingpatriarch, "home" to Israel. But what they, in my extended sense,"said" to one another on an Atlas plateau sixty years agois--very far from perfectly--preserved for study. "What," PaulRicoeur, from whom this whole idea of the inscription of actionis borrowed and somewhat twisted, asks, "what does writing fix?" Not the event of speaking, but the ''said" of speaking,where we understand by the '`said" of speaking that intentionalexteriorization constitutive of the aim of discourse thanks towhich the sagen--the saying--wants to become the enunciation. theenunciated. In short, what we write is the noma [`thought, ''content,'' 'gist''l of the speaking.It is the meaning of the speech event, not the event as event. This is not itsef so very "said"--if Oxfordphilosophers run to little stories, phenomenological ones run tolarge sentences; but it brings us anyway to a more precise answerto our generative question, "What does the ethnographer do?"--hewrites.:~ This, too, may seem a less than startling discovery,and to someone familiar with the current "literature," animplausible one. But as the standard answer to our question hasbeen, "He observes, he records, he analyzes"--a kind of veni vidivici conception of the matter--it may have moredeep-going consequences than are at first apparent,- not theleast of which is that distinguishing these three phases ofknowledge-seeking may not, as a matter of fact, normally bepossible; and, indeed, as autonomous "operations" they may not infact exist. The situation is even more delicate, because, asalready noted, what we inscribe (or try to) is not raw socialdiscourse, to which, because save very marginally or veryspecially, we are not actors, we do not have direct access, butonly that small part of it which our informants can lead us intounderstanding.4 This is not as fatal as it sounds, for, in fact,not all Cretans are liars, and it is not necessary to knoweverything in order to understand something. But it does make theview of anthropological analysis as the conceptual manipulationof discovered facts, a logical reconstruction of a mere reality,seem ratherlame. To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purifiedo f the material complexity in which they were located, and thenattribute their existence to autogenous principles of order,universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a prioriwetenshnauugan is to pretend a science that does notexist and imagine a reality that cannot be found.Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings,assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions fromthe better guesses, not discovering the Con- tinent of Meaning and mapping out its bodilesslandscape. VI So, there are three characteristics of ethnographicdescription: it is interpretive; what it is interpretive of isthe flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involvedconsists in trying to rescue the ~`said" of such discourse fromits perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms. Thekula is gone or altered; but, for better or worse, The Argonaut.sof the Western Pacific remains. ~ So far as it has reinforced the anthropologist`simpulse to engage himself with his informants as person~ ratherthan as objects, the notion of "participant observation`' hasbeen a valuable one. But, to the degree it has lead theanthropologist to block from his view the very special,culturally bracketed nature of his own role and to imaginehimself something more than an interested (in bothsenses of that word) sojourner, it has been our mostpowerful source of bad faith. Western Pacific remains. But there is, in addition, afourth characteristic of such description. at least as I practiceit: it is microscopic. This is not to say that there are no large-scaleanthropological interpretations of whole societies,civilizations, world events, and so on. Indeed, it is suchextension of our analyses to wider contexts that, alongwith their theoretical implications, recommends them togeneral attention and justifies our constructing them. No onereally cares anymore, not even Cohen (well . . . maybe, Cohen),about those sheep as such. History may have its unobtrusive turning points, "greatnoises in a little room"; but this little go-round was surely notone of them. It is merely to say that the anthropologistcharacteristically approaches such broader interpretations andmore abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extendedacquaintances with extremely small matters. He confronts the samegrand realities that others--historians, economists, politicalscientists, sociologists--confront in more fateful settings:Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Passion, Authority,Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige; but he confronts them incontexts obscure enough--places like Marmusha and lives likeCohen's--to take the capital letters off them. Theseall-too-human constancies, "those big words that make us allafraid," take a homely form in such homely contexts. But that isexactly the advantage. There are enough profundities in the worldalready. Yet, the problem of how to get from a collection ofethnographic miniatures on the order of our sheep story--anassortment of remarks and anecdotes--to wall-sized culturescapesof the nation, the epoch, the continent, or the civilization isnot so easily passed over with vague allusions to the virtues ofconcreteness and the down-to-earth mind. For a science born inIndian tribes, Pacific islands, and African lineages andsubsequently seized with grander ambitions, this has come to be amajor methodological problem, and tor the most part a badlyhandled one. The models that anthropologists have themselves workedout to justify their moving from local truths to general visionshave been, in fact, as responsible for undermining the effort asanything their critics--sociologists obsessed with sample sizes,psychologists with measures, or economists with aggregates--havebeen able to devise against them. Of these, the two main ones have been: theJonesville-is-the-USA "microcosmic" model; and the Easter-Island-is-a-testing-case "natural experiment" model. Eitherheaven in a grain of sand, or the farther shores of possibility. The Jonesville-is-Ameriea writ small (orAmerica-is-Jonesville writ large) fallacy is so obviously onethat the only thing that needs explanation is how people havemanaged to believe it and expected others to believe it. Thenotion that one can find the essence of national societies,civilizations, great religions, or whatever summed upand simplified in so-called "typical" small towns and villages ispalpable nonsense. What one finds in small towns and villages is(alas) small-town or village life. If localized, microscopic studies were really dependentfor their greater relevance upon such a premise--that they captured thegreat world in the little~they wouldn't have any relevance. But, of course, they are not. The locus of study isnot the object of study. Anthropologists don't study villages(tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . . ); they study in villages.You can study different things in different places, and somethings--for example, what colonial dommation does to establishedframes of moral expectation you can best study in confinedlocalities. But that doesn't make the place what it isyou are studying. ln the remoter provinces of Moroccoand Indonesia I have wrestled with the same questions othersocial scientists have wrestled with in more centrallocations--for example, how comes it that men's most importunateclaims to humanity are cast in the accents of group pride'? andwith about the same conclusiveness. One can add a dimension--onemuch needed in the present climate of size-up-and-solve socialscience; but that is all. There is a certain value, if you aregoing to run on about the exploitation of the masses in havingseen a Javanese sharecropper turning earth in a tropicaldownpour or a Morrocan tailor embroidering kaftans by the lightof a twenty-watt bulb. But the notion that this gives you the thing entire (andelevates you to some moral vantage ground from which you can lookdown upon the ethically less privileged) is an idea which onlysomeone too long in the bush could possibly entertain. The "natural laboratory" notion has been equallypernicious, not only because the analogy is false~what kind of alaboratory is it where none of the parameters aremanipulated?~but because it leads to a notion that the dataderived from ethnographic studies are purer, or morefundamental, or more solid, or less conditioned (themost favored word is "elementary") than those derived from othersorts of social inquiry. The great natural variation of cultural forms is, ofcourse, not only anthropology's great (and wasting) resource, butthe ground of its deepest theoretical dilemma: how is suchvariation to be squared with the biological unity of the humanspecies'? But it is not, even metaphorically, experimentalvariation, because the context in which it occurs variesalong with it, and it is not possible (though there arethose who try) to isolate the y's from x's to write a properfunction. The famous studies purporting to show that the Oedipuscomplex was backwards in the Trobriands, sex roles were upsidedown in Tchambuli, and the Pueblo Indians lacked aggression (itis characteristic that they were all negative--"but not in theSouth"), are, whatever their empirical validity may or may notbe, not "scientifically tested and approved" hypotheses. They areinterpretations, or misinterpretations, like any others, arrivedat in the same way as any others, and as inherently in-conclusive as any others, and the attempt to invest themwith the authority of physical experimentation is butmethodological sleight of hand. Ethnographic findings are notprivileged, just particular: another country heard from. Toregard them as anything more (oranything less) than that distorts both them and theirimplications, which are far profounder than mere primitivity, forsocial theory. Another country heard from: the reason that protracteddescriptions of distant sheep raids (and a really goodethnographer would have gone into what kind of sheep they were)have general relevance is that they present the sociological mindwith bodied stuff on which to feed. The important thing about theanthropologist's findings is their complex specificness, theircircumstantiality. It is with the kind of material producedby long-term, mainly (though not exclusively) qualitative, highlyparticipative, and almost obsessively fine-comb field study inconfined contexts that the mega-concepts with which contemporarysocial science is afflicted--legitimacy, modernization,integration, conflict, charisma, structure, . . . meaning--can begiven the sort of sensible actuality that makes it possible tothink not only realistically and concretely about them, but, whatis more important, creatively and imaginatively with them. The methodological problem which the microscopicnature of ethnography presents is both real and critical. But itis not to be resolved by regarding a remote locality as the worldin a teacup or as the sociological equivalent of a cloud chamber.It is to be resolved--or, anyway, decently kept at bay--byrealizing that social actions are comments on more thanthemselves; that where an interpretation comes from does notdetermine where it can be impelled to go. Small factsspeak to large issues, winks to epistemology, or sheep raids torevolution, because they are made to. Which brings us, finally, to theory. The besetting sinof interpretive approaches to anything--literature, dreams,symptoms, culture--is that they tend to resist, or to bepermitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to escapesystematic modes of assessment. You either grasp aninterpretation or you do not, see the point of it or youdo not, accept it or you do not. Imprisoned in the immediacy ofits own detail, it is presented as self-validating, or, worse, asvalidated by the supposedly developed sensitivities of the personwho presents it; any attempt to cast what it says in terms otherthan its own is regarded asa travesty--as, the anthropologist's severest term of moralabuse, ethnocentric. For a field of study which, however timidly (though 1,myself, am not timid about the matter at all), asserts itself tobe a science, this just will not do. There is no reason why theconceptual structure of a cultural interpretation should be anyless formulable, and thus less susceptible to explicit canons ofappraisal, than that of, say, a biological observationor a physical experiment--no reason except that theterms in which such formulations can be cast are, if not whollynonexistent, very nearly so. Wc are reduccd to insinuatingtheories becausc we lack the power to state them. At the same timc, it must be admitted that there are anumber of characteristics of cultural interpretation which makethe theoretical development of it more than usually difficult.The first is the need for theory to stay rather closer to theground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to givethemselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effectivein anthropology; longer ones tend to drift off into logicaldreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry. The wholepoint of a semiotic approach to culture is, as I havc said, toaid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which oursubjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term,converse with them. The tension between thepull of this need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolicaction and the requirements of technical advance in the theory ofculture, betwecn the need to grasp and the need to analyze, is,as a result, both necessarily great and esentially irrcmovable.Indecd, the further theoretical development goes, the deepcr thetension gets. This is the first condition for cultural theory: itis not its own master. As it is unseverable from the immediaciesthick description presents, its freedom to shape itself interms of its internal logic is rather limited. Whatgenerality it contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy ofits distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions. And from this follows a peculiarity in the way, as asimple matter of empirical fact, our knowledge of culture . . .cultures . . . a culture grows: in spurts. Rather than followinga rising curve of cumulative findings, cultural analysis breaksup into a disconnected yet coherent sequence of bolder and boldersorties. Studies do build on other studies, not in the sense thatthey take up where the others leave off, but in the sense that,better informed and better conceptualized, they plunge moredeeply into the same things. Every serious cultural analysisstarts from a sheer beginning and ends where it manages to getbefore exhausting its intellectual impulse. Previously discoveredfacts are mobilized, previously developed concepts used,previously formulated hypotheses tried out; but the movement isnot from already proven theorems to newly proven ones, it is froman awkward fumbling for the most elementary understanding to asupported claim that one has achieved that and surpassed it. Astudy is an advance if it is more incisive--whatever that may mean--than those that preceded it; but it lessstands on their shoulders than, challenged and challenging, runsby their side. It is for this reason, among others, that the essay,whether of thirty pages or three hundred, has seemed the naturalgenre in which to present cultural interpretations and thetheories sustaining them, and why, if one looks for systematictreatises in the field, one is so soon disappointed, the more soif one finds any. Even inventory articles are rare here, andanyway of hardly more than bibliographical interest. Themajor theoretical contributions not only lie in specificstudies--that is true in almost any field--but they are verydifficult to abstract from such studies and integrate intoanything one might call "culture theory" as such. Theorcticalformulations hover so low over the interpretations they governthat they don't make much sense or hold much interest apart fromthem. This is so, not because they are not general (if theyare not general, they are not theoretical), but because,stated independently of their applications, they seem eithercommonplace or vacant. One can, and this in fact is how the field progressesconceptually, take a line of theoretical attack developed inconnection with one exercise in ethnographic interpretation andemploy it in another, pushing it forward to greater precision andbroader relevance; but one cannot write a"General Theory ofCultural Interpretation." Or, rather, one can, but there appearsto be little profit in it, because the essential task of theorybuilding here is not to codify abstract regularities but to makethick description possible, not to generalize across cases butto generalize within them. To generalize within cases is usually called, at leastin medicine and depth psychology, clinical inference. Rather thanbeginning with a set of observations and attempting to subsumethem under a governing law, such inference begins with a set of(presumptive) signifiers and attempts to place them within anintelligible frame. Measures are matched to theoreticalpredictions, but symptoms (even when they are measured) arescanned for theoretical peculiarities--that is, they arediagnosed. In the study of culture the signifiers are notsymptoms or clusters of symptoms, but symbolic acts or clustersof symbolic acts, and the aim is not therapy but the analysis ofsocial discourse. But the way in which theory is used--to ferretout the unapparent import of things--is the same. Thus we are lead to the second condition of culturaltheory: it is not, at least in the strict meaning of the term,predictive. The diagnostician doesn't predict measles; he decidesthat someone has them*, or at the very most clincially decidesthat someone is rather likely shortly to get them. But this limitation, which is real enough, has commonlybeen both misunderstood and exaggerated, because it has beentaken to mean that cultural interpretation is merely post facto:that, like the peasant in the old story, we first shoot the holesin the fence and then paint the bull's-eyes around them. It ishardly to be denied that there is a good deal of thatsort of thing around, some of it in prominent places. Itis to be denied, however, that it is the inevitable outcome of aclinical approach to the use of theory. It is true that in the clinical style of theoreticalformulation, conceptualization is directed toward the task ofgenerating interpretations of matters already in hand, not towardprojecting outcomes of experimental manipulations or deducingfuture states of a determined system. But that does not mean thattheory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to generate cogentinterpretations of) realities past; it has also to survive---intellectually survive--realities to come. Althoughwe formulate our interpretation of an outburst of winking or aninstance of sheep-raiding after its occurrence, sometimes longafter, the theoretical framework in terms of which such aninterpretation is made must be capable of continuing to yielddefensiblc interpretations as new social phenomena swim intoview. Although one starts any effort at thick description, beyondthe obvious and superficial, from a state of general bewildermentas to what the devil is going on--trying to find one's feet--onedoes not start (or ought not) intellectually empty-handed.Theoretical ideas are not created wholly anew in each study; as Ihave said, they are adopted from other, related studies, and,refined in the process, applied to new interpretive problems. Ifthey cease being useful with respect to such problems, they tendto stop being used and are more or less abandoned. If theycontinue being useful, throwing up new understandings,they are further elaborated and go on being used.5 Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretivescience suggests that the distinction, relative in any case, thatappears in the experimental or observational sciences between"description" and "explanation" appears here as one, even morerelative, between "inscription7 ("thick description") and"specification" ("diagnosis")--between setting down the meaningparticular social actions have for the actors whose actions theyare, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what theknowledge thus attained demonstrates about the societyin which it is found and, beyond that, about social life as such.Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures thatinform our subjects' acts, the 'said" of social discourse, and toconstruct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic tothose structures, what belongs to them because they are what theyare, will stand out against the other determinants of humanbehavior. In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide avocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself     !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~--that is, about the role of culture in human life--can beexpressed. Aside from a couple of orienting pieces concerned withmore foundational matters, it is in such a manner that theoryoperates in the essays collected here. A repertoire of verygeneral, made-in-the-academy concepts and systems ofconcepts---"integration?" "rationalization," 'symbol,""ideology," "ethos," "revolution," ''identity," "metaphor,""structure," "ritual,' `'world view,' "actor,""function," "sacred," and, of course, "culture" itself--is woveninto the body of thick-description ethnography in the hope ofrendering mere occurrences scientifically eloquent.'i The aim isto draw large conclusions from small, but very densely texturedfacts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture inthe construction of collective life by engaging them exactly withcomplex specifics. Thus it is not only interpretational that goes all theway down to the most immediate observational level: the theoryupon which such interpretation conceptually depends does so also.My interest in Cohen's story, like Ryle's in winks, grew out ofsome very general notions indeed. The "confusion of tongues"model the view that social conflict is not something that happenswhen, out of weakness, indefiniteness, obsolescence, or neglect,cultural forms cease to operate, but rather something whichhappens when, like burlesqued winks, such forms are pressed byunusual situations or unusual intentions to operate in unusualways--is not an idea I got from Cohen's story. Itis one, instructed by colleagues, students, and predecessors, Ibrought to it. Our innocent-looking "note in a bottle" is more than aportrayal of` the frames of meaning of Jewish peddlers, Berberwarriors, and French proconsuls, or even of their mutualinterference. It is an argument that to rework the pattern ofsocial relationships is to rearrange the coordinates of theexperienced world. Society's forms are culture's substance. ~,'IlI There is an Indian story--at least I heard it as anIndian story--about an Englishman who, having been told that theworld rested on a platform which rested on the back of anelephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked(perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), whatdid the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle ? "Ah,Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down." Such, indeed, is the condition of things. I do not knowhow long it would be profitable to meditate on the encounter ofCohen, the sheikh, and "Dumari" (the period has perhaps alreadybeen exceeded); but I do know that however long I did so I wouldnot get anywhere near to the bottom of it. Nor have I ever gottenanywhere near to the bottom of anything I have ever writtenabout, either in the essays below or elsewhere. Cultural analysisis intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the moredeeply it goes the less complete it is.It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are itsmost tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matterat hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that ofothers, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, alongwith plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what beingan ethnographer is like. There are a number of ways to escape this--turningculture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traitsand counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it,turning it into structures and toying with it. But they areescapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semiotic conceptof culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it is tocommit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as, to borrowB. Gallie's by now famous phrase, "essentiallycontestable." Anthropology, or at least interpretiveanthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by aperfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What getsbetter is the precision with which we vex each other. This is very difficult to see when one's attention isbeing monopolized by a single party to the argument. Monologuesare of little value here, because there are no conclusions to bereported; there is merely a discussion to be sustained. Insofaras the essays here collected have any importance, it is less inwhat they say than what they are witness to: an enormous increasein interest, not only in anthropology, but in social studiesgenerally, in the role of symbolic forms in human life. Meaning,this elusive and ill-defined pseudoentity we were oncemore than content to leave philosophers and literary critics tofumble with, has now come back into the heart of our discipline.Even Marxists are quoting Cassirer; even positivists, KennethBurke. My~ own position in the midst of all this has been to tryto resist subjectivism on the one hand and cabbalism on theother, to try to keep theanalysis of symbolic forms as closelytied as I could to concrete social events and occasions, thepublic world of common life, and to organize it in such a waythat the connections between theoretical formulations anddescriptive interpretations were unobscured by appeals to darksciences. I have never been impressed by the argument that,as complete objectivity is impossible in these matters (as, ofcourse, it is), one might as well let one's sentiments run loose.As Robert Solow has remarked, that is like saying that as aperfectly aseptic environment is impossible, one might as wellconduct surgery in a sewer. Nor, onthe other hand, have I been impressed with claims that structurallinguistics, computer engineering, or some other advanced form ofthought is going to enable us to understand men without knowingthem. Nothing willdiscredit a semiotic approach to culture more quickly thanallowing it to drift into a combination of intuitionism andalchemy, no matter how elegantly the intuitions are expressed orhow modern the alchemy is made to look. The danger that cultural analysis, in search ofall-too-deep-lying turtles, will lose touch with the hardsurfaces of life--with the political, economic, stratificatoryrealities within which men areeverywhere contained--and with the biological and physicalnecessities on which those surfaces rest, is an ever-present one.The only defense against it, and against, thus, turning culturalanalysis into a kind of sociological aestheticism, is to trainsuch analysis on such realities and such necessities in the firstplace. It is thus that I have written about nationalism,about violence, about identity, about human nature, aboutlegitimacy, about revolution, about ethnicity, abouturbanization, about status, about death, about time, and most ofall about particular attempts by particular peoples to placethese things in some sort of comprehensible, meaningful frame. To look at the symbolic dimensions of socialaction--art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, commonsense--is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of lifefor some empyrean realm of deemotionalized forms; it is to plungeinto the midst of them. The essential vocation of interpretiveanthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to makeavailable to us answers that others, guarding other sheep inother valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.@B|~<>pr$&HJ LNzsle^WPI opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opacN~xzz|t v n p f h Z \ zsle^WPI opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac\ 02  "&(*,zsle^WPI opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac  |~jl zsle^WPI opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opacvxtvprjlrtzsle^WPI opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac opac 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