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A Strange Romance: Anthropology and LiteratureAuthor(s): Clifford GeertzSource: Profession, (2003), pp. 28-36Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595754 .Accessed: 14/04/2011 05:03
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A Strange Romance:
Anthropology and Literature
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
Puzzled, as I'm sure my fellow panelists were as well, when StephenGreenblatt conscripted them to this peculiar, somewhat whimsical enter
prise, about justwhat the topic of discussion was supposed to be, I thoughtto begin, in good Empsonian style, with a reflection on the ambiguities of
his title.Was this to be my own engagement with literature and the language arts as subjects of study?what a cultural anthropologist had to sayabout modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, the new historicism, hermeneutics, and the other veerings andinsurrections of recent theory, having lived through all of them? Or was itto be how my engagement with anthropology was itself literary?what role
my involvement with my literary tradition, rather intense for a social scien
tist, played inmy half-century effort to understand how Javanese, Balinese,and Moroccans went about earning a living, governing themselves, and
making sense of their existence? Should I be professional ethnographer asamateur critic or amateur critic as professional ethnographer?
The two are connected, of course, and both involve a certain presumption and some fairly serious trespassing, aswell aswhat the psychoanalystswould call exaggerated self-reference. But it is the second that seems tome
the more relevant inmy case.What I have to say about the ups and downs
of recent literary scholarship or criticism isnot, even tome, very interest
The author isProfessor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, New Jersey. A version of this paper was presented at the 2002 MLA con
vention inNew York.
Profession 2003 28
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CLIFFORDGEERTZ |||29
ing. I have the usual mixed feelings?fascinating, but where the hell is it all
going??and nothing very helpful to add, except surtoutpas de zele. Therole that
my formation (I reallydon't know what else to call
it, Bildung perhaps; English is rather skittish about claims to cultural refinement). .. therole that my formation, which has been rather more on the humanities sidethan on the sciences side (an undergraduate major in literature and philosophy, I originally intended to become a novelist), has played inmy size-upand-solve anthropologizing is, I think, worthy of some reflection.
What is a Flaubert manque or, as someone has less kindly suggested, afauxHenry James doing in such a cold-fact discipline? Except that it is not
a cold-fact discipline, and it should not aspire to become one. Gainingsome sort of entree into various peoples' various ways of being-in-theworld demands not only that you have a reasonably distinct sensibilityyourself but also that you have some idea of what that sensibility is.Thisnot a job for the disembodied observer, and the methodologically overprepared need not apply. It is the encounter?sometimes the collision, occa
sionally an embrace, often a confusion, a nonplus, or a near miss?between
your sense of how matters stand, how, as we say, things should go, and the
sense of those whom you are struggling to understand that provides thebasis for whatever account of their lives you are able to give. The most im
portant instruments of cultural anthropologists are not tape recorders orvideo cameras?as valuable as they and other technical aids (polls, experiments, formal models) may be?but in-wrought perceptions. It is on their
ability to entangle those perceptions somehow with the equally cultural,equally in-wrought perceptions of the people they are studying that their
analytic reach, their power of witness depends.This is, as all sorts of people with rather larger ambitions for the social
sciences will be quick to tell you, dangerous doctrine. It raises the threat of
subjectivism, of relativism, of particularism, of a general failure to producerobust and reliable real-world knowledge. It turns us away from that shibboleth of shibboleths, the scientific method, toward an unregulated intu
itionism; away from the promise of a true, systematic, view-from-nowhere,prediction-making, program-producing Science ofMan. It substitutes va
grant insightsand sheer
assertions, producesa
cacophonyof
opinions.Rather like literature, actually.It is no part of my argument to deny that these are real perils, though
both their immediacy and their prevalence are commonly exaggerated bythe attack battalions of aggressive scientism. Instead of attempting to overcome the perils or hold them at bay by appealing to inappropriate ideals,ideals drawn from differently directed enterprises, operating under differ
ently formed conditions, and with different sorts of resources, we should
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30 III STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGY ANDLITERATURE
confront them head-on as an ingredient in the work as such. If it is an entan
glement of forms of life?the rub of various sensibilities against one another?that we're
dealing with,then
somethingrather closer to
graspinga
point than abstracting a lawwould seem to be involved. I once put this, in
something Iwrote, in terms of the anthropologist's reading other people'stexts over their shoulders {Interpretation 452). Itmakes the whole enterprisesound a lotmore surreptitious than it is, and less intrusive, but that is aboutthe size of it. And to read over shoulders effectively, conceptual, procedural,even substantive borrowing from literary studies would seem essential. The
dependence on images and figurations, what Coleridge called "speculative
instruments," from the natural sciences that has marked, and continues tomark, the social sciences needs to be supplemented by the introduction ofones from humanistic research and analysis?symbol, meaning, metaphor,plot, story, motif, interpretation?if we are actually to engage our subjectrather than merely attack it. So I have for some time now been arguing. Butthis perceiving of other people's perceivings, this reading of other people'sreadings, this texting of other people's texts turns out, as one might expect, tohave complexities and uncertainties?dare I say aporia??of its own. ReplacingNatur- with Geistes- before wissenschaft doesn't in itself get you all that far.
To be less gnomic, I turn to some concrete examples of the troubles I'veseen. Some years ago Iwrote a small piece on the Balinese cockfight, whichImade bold to compare in a suggestive, allusory, en passant sort of way tosome classics ofWestern literature, most notably Macbeth and Lear ("DeepPlay"). Itwas my notion that some themes of these tragedies by Shakespearewere caught up, in their own way and with their own inflections?that is,Balinese inflections?in the cockfight. Iwon't rehearse the argument hereor try to defend its cogency. That, it turns out, is altogether unnecessary, because what set off a fair volley of criticism was not whether what I said aboutBali or Shakespeare had any merit (the Shakespeare stuff concerning Macbeth and Lear came from Northrop Frye, so how could it be wrong?) but thesheer effrontery I displayed in daring to speak about them in the same
breath. What on earth, as one recent enrage?the author of awork deli
cately called How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our
Past?put it, could possibly justify comparing "a cheap low-lifeblood
sporton which foolish young men wager far more money than they could sensi
bly afford" to such monumental expressions of the immense and universalWestern spirit? Only, he thought, a settled nihilistic intent to undermine
morality, spread relativism, and "use the bizarre and exotic to destabilizeWestern cultural assumptions" (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 7, 8).
This sort of moral panic, authority at bay, can be left to take care of it
self. But a similar reaction?that what I am trying to do by bringing West
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CLIFFORDGEERTZ |||31
ern imaginative creations into proximity with those of the South Seas orNorth Africa is to blur the line between barbarism and civilization to the
advantage of barbarism?was stimulated by a rather more developed pieceI did, also awhile back, on Balinese cremation ceremonies ("Found"). Herethe matter ismore complicated, and more telling, about exactly where it isthe procedure pinches, about justwhat it is that brings on all the wrath andaccusation. So it is worth perhaps a bit more discussion.
Shortly efore e died in 1973, ionelTrilling, whom I knew slightly ndmuch admired, wrote a typically winding, ruminating piece for the Times
Literary Supplement concerning the difficulties he had experienced in teach
ing JaneAusten to
today's collegestudents. The differences between their
sensibilities and hers, their times and hers, their language and hers were so
great as tomake the whole enterprise perilous at best?"problematic." Re
ferring to some work I had done on the Balinese sense of self aswell as to a
strange Icelandic saga he had been reading concerning amurderous jealousyamong chiefs brought on by amisdirected gift of bears, he wondered justhow far large cultural gaps could be bridged by reading, by writing, by thefree play of the moral imagination no matter how liberal.When a couple of
years further on Iwas invited to give amemorial lecture in his honor at Columbia University, I sought to address this issue by an example ofmy own, ofa gap even wider than that which yawns between sophomores and Austen?the gap between the treatment of widows in our society and their immolation on their husbands' funeral pyres in nineteenth-century Bali ("Found").
Borrowing a rhetorically inverted phrase, "found in translation," fromthe title of a James Merrill poem, a phrase expressing the remoteness tohim of his familial past, I quoted a long passage from aDanish sea trader
describing such an immolation (which as a further irony, Imight remarknow, took place just where that terrorist bomb went off a few months ago).The description was written around 1850. This man, alternately charmedand appalled, drawn in and disarranged by what he saw, recounted theevent at great length and in very fine detail, as though to convince himselfthat it was all really happening. The enormous, gaudy funeral tower "risingon crimson pillars to a finely carved coffin shaped like a lion." The swarm
ing crowd, friendly andlaughing?"They
looked littleenough
like sav
ages." The great mile-long procession, complete with music, dancing, andelaborate filigreed offerings to the gods. The entranced and immobile
Veda-chanting priest. The three women?mirror in one hand, comb in the
other?plunging "for affections' sake and in the name of religion"?intothe flames. "It was a sight never to be forgotten," he concludes, with a sudden turn from fascination to horror, from the bewitchment of the drama tothe reality of what it was enacting.
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CLIFFORDGEERTZ |||33
far from being vehicles of intercultural communication and harmony, are
instead demonstrations of the moral vanity and self-indulgence of their
Western authors. (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 12)
Well, you can see the problem. Merely in presenting untoward, out-of
category material, material not easily bent to proprietous shape, one risks
being branded an enemy of progress, or worse. But despite all the holler
ing, the fear here isnot really of "indigenous illiteracy and superstition" orthe glamorization of barbarism. The most vain and self-indulgent of multiculturalized Western authors (and I am not the worst), smitten by exoticcustoms and dubious of some of our own, isnot going to try to sellwidow
burning to anyone. And the Balinese are neither illiterate nor, as these
things go in the world, particularly profligate, misogynous, or superstitious. The fear here is that in entangling our own sense of life and its "classic representations" with ones more than a little at angles to it and to them,
we will soweaken our convictions as tomake us unable to sustain them and
impress them with sufficient force on the world at large. It is the verydestabilization, the confusion of impulses that my honest sea captain felt
that in quoting him Iwanted my readers to feel too.Why do we teach JaneAusten, or Icelandic sagas, or Hindu funerals? Just that: to wound our
complacency, tomake us a little less confident in and satisfied with the immediate deliverances of our here-and-now imperious world. Such teaching
is indeed a subversive business. But what it subverts is not morality. Whatit subverts is bluster, obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, onecould say, and prejudice.
But enough of the long ago and far away.We are right now, in this
country and at this time in the process of trying to get, aswe say, some sortof handle on a cultural formation heretofore removed, distant, strange, and
ominous?namely, Islam (on which I have also worked).1 We are con
structing, live and in real time?rather hurriedly, as though we had better
get on with it after years of neglect?our image of what Muslims think, believe, do, and desire. Until recently, we barely possessed such an image be
yond vague and vacant notions about stallions, harems, deserts, anddervishes and some schoolbook
legendsabout the Crusades?an
ignoranceimmortally summed up by the Peter Arno New Yorker cartoon of a half
century or so ago showing a Stetson-hatted tourist leaning out of his roadster to ask a turbaned man prostrate in prayer by the side of the road:
"Hey, Jack, which way toMecca?"The reason for all the rush and for the dimensions it is taking is, of
course, 9/11. When it suddenly became apparent that the familiar threat
ening other that we had lost with the unlooked-for collapse of the Soviet
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34 I A STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGYAND LITERATURE
Union was about to be replaced by something even lesswell defined in our
minds; by something even further removed from the political history ofnineteenth- and
twentieth-centuryAmerica?Communism had, after all, a
Western pedigree at least, with roots in the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution; by in fact a creed of Arabs, Turks, Persians, Africans, South
Asians, Mongols, andMalays, rather off our spiritual map, a suffusing anxi
ety settled in.What are we Americans to think about an ideological competitor of
which most of us know barely more than the name and some plots andatrocities alleged to flow from its teachings? The result has been an
avalanche of books and articles by historians, journalists, political scientists,sociologists, anthropologists, and variously inspired amateurs designed to
give us a crash course in, as the phrase goes, understanding Islam. Jihad, aterm Americans encountered, if they encountered it at all, only in dime
novels, has become a prime subject of popular discourse. There are works
designed for that elusive figure, the general reader, on something called,
confusingly, reformism or modernism or fundamentalism?now even
Wahhabism?in contemporary Islam; on the teachings of the Koran; on
Sufi brotherhoods; on Islamic law, Islamic education; on the Sunni-Shi'isplit; on the deep meaning of the veil. And so forth and so on, into some
extraordinary corners indeed.There is, of course, a long tradition?sometimes called orientalism,
sometimes Middle Eastern studies?of Western scholarship on Islam, most
of itEuropean, most of it arcane. But we are now at the start of somethingentirely new: the formation of public-square, society-wide discussions?half apology, half debate, and riddled with grand assertions?of how we are
to think and feel about this sudden apparition on our cultural and politicalhorizon. We're going to be able towatch up close and while it happens the
building up in our minds of an enduring image or set of images of whatIslam andMuslims are all about, just aswe were able to watch, at a certain
remove, the holding of such an image or set of images of Bali and the Balinese in the mind of our rapt and troubled sea captain. The difference is
that this time the exotic is coming to us, and we are lesswell placed to dis
ciplineits
expressions.The evidence is all around us: in heated discussions
of "the clash of civilizations," of "what went wrong" with Islamic culture
(after the Renaissance, why no Reformation, let alone an Enlightenment?);in cliche-ridden TV biographies ofMuhammed; and in news magazine
pieces on the pilgrimage, the fast, fatwas, or houris in paradise.Perhaps one of the most striking indications that this image building is
going on, that it is not only an extensive process but also an intensely con
tested and, again, thoroughly destabilizing one?that is, destabilizing to
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CLIFFORDGEERTZ |||35
us?is provided by a recent seriocomic affaire litteraire that involved justthe sort of entanglement of disparate sensibilities, cross-cutting ways of ap
proachinga text and
reachinginto its world, that I have been
talkingabout.
Imean the storm?or perhaps itwas only a cloudburst, and a seeded one atthat?over the teaching of the Koran at the University ofNorth Carolina,ChapelHill.
Well, itwasn't exactly teaching the Koran; itwas merely, once more, ex
posing it without warning labels and weather advisories to vulnerableminds?that is to say, to college freshmen. In the summer of 2002, driven
apparently by a rising concern to understand Islam, the university assigned
a translation of the early, so-called Meccan, verses of the Koran?thosethat supposedly initiated the prophecy?to its incoming class. Criticism,intense and unbridled, appeared almost immediately: from Franklin Gra
ham, the son of the Christian evangelist; from Bill O'Reilly, the residentMencken of the Fox network (he said itwas like teaching Mein Kampf);from, inevitably, William F. Buckley, Jr.; from, just about as inevitably, theWall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Daily News and various other news
papers, columnists, and soi-disant guardians of the public conscience. The
ACLU made nervous separationist noises. The university was sued by afundamentalist Christian group, normally concerned with anti-abortion
activities, on the grounds that itwas unconstitutional for a public univer
sity to require students to study a specific religion. And the state legislaturevoted, ex post facto, to bar funding for the project. The suit was eventuallythrown out by the courts; the university made the assignment optional; andthe enterprise proceeded, and apparently is proceeding, still ringed by debate and protest (see Falwell; Park; Robinson).
Our interest in all this is not that the controversy provides yet another
example of hard-shell provincialism and its exploitation by sophisticatedreactionaries but that it is, again, a complex and contentious literary en
gagement. The main complaint was that in selecting the early, lyrical"Meccan" verses, composed when the Prophet was just starting out, whenhe was powerless and isolated, rather than the later, fire-and-brimstone,jihad-breathing "Medinan" ones composed when, regrouping in exile, he
wasorganizing
an armedreturn,
the translator waspresenting
anoverly
at
tractive, even seductive image of Islam. John Walker Lindh was men
tioned; so was the British shoe bomber. The problem was not somuchwith Islam in itself aswith how it was represented, how it is to be broughtinto contact, like cockfights, immolations, or Jane Austen, with our own
understandings?"found in translation."I could continue this discussion with a consideration of the relations
among narration, narrative poetry, and revelation in the Koran; of the
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36 III STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE
nature of the Koran as a text among texts and as spoken word; of the lin
guistic resources of the Arabic language and their literary employment. Butthat's for the future, as our encounter, not somuch with "Islam" aswith
Muslims, develops, however it develops. It is clear that merely listening toother voices in other rooms saying other things in other accents can be a
perilous business, liable to confuse our emotions, derail our judgments, andleave us both rattled and engrossed. But that iswhat listening to the voicesof our own literary tradition, Macbeth orMerrill, Lear or Faulkner, bringson as well: the sense that there ismore to things than first appears and thatour reactions are where we start, not where we end.
We may indeed end almost anywhere.
NOTE =
lA number of sentences in the following paragraphs are more or less identical to ones
found inmy general review of recent works on Islam inTheNew YorkReview of ooks,"Which Way toMecca?" That review was written after this talk was given, at a time when
I did not expect that t, he talk, ould be published. I apologize for the self-plagiarism.
WORKS CITED -
Arno, Peter. Cartoon. New Yorker 9 Apr. 1938: 18.
Falwell, Jerry. "University of North Carolina Requires Islam Studies." Jesus and TodaysIssues: Church and State. 2002. 13Aug. 2003 .Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Geertz, Interpretation
412-53.-. "Found inTranslation." Local Knowledge. New York: Basic, 1983. 36-54.-. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.-. "WhichWay toMecca?" New YorkReview of ooks 13June 2003: 27-29.
Helms, L. V Pioneering in the Far East. London, 1882.
Park, Michael Y. "University's Quran Reading Stirs Controversy." 6 July 2002.Au
darya Fellowship. IndiaDivine Communications. 13 Aug. 2003 .
Robinson, B. A. University Dispute re Islamic Book. Ontario Consultants on Religious Tol
erance. 12Aug. 2002. 13Aug. 2003 .
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacri
fice."Wedge 7-8 (1985): 120-30.
Trilling, Lionel. "WhyWe Read Jane Austen." Times Literary Supplement ar. 1976:250-52.
Windschuttle, Keith. "The Ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz." New Criterion 21.2
(2002): 5-12.-. TheKilling of istory: How Literary ritics nd SocialTheorists reMurdering Our
Past. New York: Free, 1997.