Chapter From the Natives Point of View On the
Several years ago a minor scandal erupted in anthropology one of its ancestral figures told the truth in a public place. As befits an ancestor, he did it posthumously, and through his widow's decision rather than his own, with the result that a number of the sort of right-thinking types who are with us always immediately rose to cry that she, an in-marrier anyway, had betrayed clan secrets, profaned an idol, and let down the side. What will the children think, to say nothing of the layman But...
Introduction
When, a decade ago, I collected a number of my essays and rereleased them under the title, half genuflection, half talisman, The Interpretation of Cultures, I thought I was summing things up saying, as I said there, what it was I had been saying. But, as a matter of fact, I was imposing upon myself a charge. In anthropology, too, it so turns out, he who says A must say B, and I have spent much of my time since trying to say it. The essays below are the result but I am now altogether aware how...
Iv 1
Morocco, Middle Eastern and dry rather than East Asian and wet, extrovert, fluid, activist, masculine, informal to a fault, a Wild West sort of place without the barrooms and the cattle drives, is another kettle of selves altogether. My work there, which began in the mid-sixties, has been centered around a moderately large town or small city in the foothills of the Middle Atlas, about twenty miles south of Fez. It's an old place, probably founded in the tenth century, conceivably even earlier....
Nature
rendered established accounts of how anthropologists work fairly well implausible. The myth of the chameleon fieldworker, perfectly self-tuned to his exotic surroundings, a walking miracle of empathy, tact, patience, and cosmopolitanism, was demolished by the man who had perhaps done most to create it. The squabble that arose around the publication of the Diary concentrated, naturally, on inessentials and missed, as was only to be expected, the point. Most of the shock seems to have arisen from...
Conclusion
Now, the easy reaction to all this talk of monarchs, their trappings, and their peregrinations is that it has to do with a closed past, a time, in Hui-zinga's famous phrase, when the world was half-a-thousand years younger and everything was clearer. All the golden grasshoppers and bees are gone monarchy, in the true sense of the word, was ritually destroyed on one scaffold in Whitehall in 1649 and on another in the Place de la R volution in 1793 the few fragments left in the Third World are...
Ill Mpc
But there is more to it than this. What man has made is an authoritative story. Like Lear, the New Testament, or quantum mechanics, common sense consists in an account of things which claims to strike at their heart. Indeed, it is something of a natural rival to such more sophisticated stories when they are present, and when they are not to the phantasmagoric narratives of dream and myth. As a frame for thought, and a species of it, common sense is as totalizing as any other no religion is more...
Hayam Wuruks Java Splendor and Hierarchy
There are other ways of connecting the character of a sovereign to that of his realm, however, than enveloping him in pictured homilies as moral Yates, The Valois Tapestries, p. 92. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, p. 21. imaginations differ, so do political, and not every progress is that of a Pilgrim. In the Indie cultures of classical Indonesia the world was a less improvable place, and royal pageantry was hierarchical and mystical in spirit, not pious and didactic.17 Gods, kings, lords,...
Hasans Morocco Movement and Energy
It is not necessary, of course, that power be dressed up in virtue or set round with cosmology to be perceived as more than force in the service of interest its numinousness can be symbolized directly. In traditional Morocco, the Morocco that was, as Walter Harris called it, personal power, the ability 'Canto 17, stanza 3. Again I have altered the translation in particular I have rendered negara as capital rather than town. For the multiple meanings of this word, see my Negara. to make things...
Chapter I Blurred Genres
A number of things, I think, are true. One is that there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in intellectual life in recent years, and it is, such blurring of kinds, continuing apace. Another is that many social scientists have turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords. Yet another is that analogies...
Interpretive Anthropology
The drama analogy for social life has of course been around in a casual sort of way all the world's a stage and we but poor players who strut and so on for a very long time. And terms from the stage, most notably role, have been staples of sociological discourse since at least the 1930s. What is relatively new new, not unprecedented are two things. First, the full weight of the analogy is coming to be applied extensively and systematically, rather than being deployed piecemeal fashion a few...
Elizabeths England Virtue and Allegory
On 14 January 1559, the day before her coronation, Elizabeth Tudor a daughter, whose birth disappointed her father's hopes for succession, and thus, indirectly, caused her mother's early demise an illegitimized Princess whose claim to the throne was, nevertheless, almost as valid as those of her half-brother and half-sister a focus of disaffection during Mary's reign and a survivor of constant agitation by Imperial and Spanish emissaries to have her eliminated rode in a great progress there...
Game Analogy Anthropology
All this fiddling around with the proprieties of composition, inquiry, and explanation represents, of course, a radical alteration in the sociological imagination, propelling it in directions both difficult and unfamiliar. And like all such changes in fashions of the mind, it is about as likely to lead to obscurity and illusion as it is to precision and truth. If the result is not to be elaborate chatter or the higher nonsense, a critical consciousness will have to be developed and as so much...
Ill Iyg
There is hardly a better example of the fact that an artist works with signs that have a place in semiotic systems extending far beyond the craft he practices than the poet in Islam. A Muslim making verses faces a set of cultural realities as objective to his intentions as rocks or rainfall, no less substantial for being nonmaterial, and no less stubborn for being man-made. He operates, and alway has operated, in a context where the instrument of his art, language, has a peculiar, heightened...
Baxandall Periodic Sentence
A common response to this sort of argument, especially when it comes from the side of anthropologists, is to say, that may be all well and good for primitives, who confuse the realms of their experience into one large, unreflective whole, but it does not apply to more developed cultures where art emerges as a differentiated activity responsive mainly to its own necessities. And like most such easy contrasts between peoples on different sides of the literacy revolution, it is false, and in both...
II Hni
In Java, where I worked in the fifties, I studied a small, shabby inland county-seat sort of place two shadeless streets of whitewashed wooden shops and offices, and even less substantial bamboo shacks crammed in helter-skelter behind them, the whole surrounded by a great half-circle of densely packed rice-bowl villages. Land was short, jobs were scarce, politics was unstable, health was poor, prices were rising, and life was altogether far from promising, a kind of agitated stagnancy in which,...
Introduction 1
Like so many of the key ideas in Weber's sociology verstehen, legitimacy, inner-worldly asceticism, rationalization the concept of charisma suffers from an uncertainty of referent does it denote a cultural phenomenon or a psychological one At once a certain quality that marks an individual as standing in a privileged relationship to the sources of being and a hypnotic power certain personalities have to engage passions and dominate minds, it is not clear whether charisma is the status, the...
Interpretive Anthropology
'L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe New York, 1953 , p. 8 I have slightly altered the Anscombe translation. old city Did they grow out of it Has their creation changed it Will they finally swallow it up altogether , and what life in such symmetrical places could possibly be like. The difference between the sorts of societies anthropologists have traditionally studied, traditional ones, and the sorts they normally inhabit, modern ones, has commonly been put...
The Refiguration of Social Thought
philosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism think of Stanley Ca-vell on Beckett or Thoreau, Sartre on Flaubert , scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley , baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations Borges, Barthelme , histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony Fogel and Engerman, Le Roi Ladurie , documentaries that read like true confessions Mailer , parables posing as ethnographies...
Chapter Art as a Cultural System
Art is notoriously hard to talk about. It seems, even when made of words in the literary arts, all the more so when made of pigment, sound, stone, or whatever in the nonliterary ones, to exist in a world of its own, beyond the reach of discourse. It not only is hard to talk about it it seems unnecessary to do so. It speaks, as we say, for itself a poem must not mean but be if you have to ask what jazz is you are never going to get to know. Artists feel this especially. Most of them regard what...
Chapter Common Sense as a Cultural System
Very early on in that album of notional games and abrupt metaphors he called Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein compares language to a city Do not be troubled by the fact that some reduced languages he has just invented for didactic purposes consist only of imperatives. If you want to say that they are therefore incomplete, ask yourself whether our language is complete whether it was before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitestimal calculus were annexed to it,...