THE

INTERPRETATIONOF

CULTURES

SELECTED ESSAYSBY

Clifford Geertz

I, I,

II .I

I

==:BasicBooks '.

A Division of HarperCollinsPubiishers

~aSiCBr::./.: oaks AD· ..

.........ibrary f ' IVISlon of Ho Congress Caralo C arperCo/ltns Publishers

ISBN: 0-465 g ard Number: 73-81196ISBN: 0-465 -03425-X (cloth)

Printed in the _-09719-7 (paper)United States of A .

94959 rnenca6 RRDH 302928

Contents

Prefacevii

PART I

Chapter t!f Thick Description: Toward an InterpretiveTheory of Culture 3

"I

PART II I

Chapter 0/ The Impact of the Concept of Culture onthe Concept of Man 33

Chapter 3/ The Growth of Culture and the Evolutionof Mind 55

PART IIIII,

Chapter0/ Religion As a Cultural System

Chapter 5/ Ethos, World View, and the Analysis ofSacred Symbols,..,

Chapter [§I Ritual and Social Change: A JavaneseExample

Chapter 7/ "Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali

87

126

142

170

Chapter I / Thick

Description: Toward an

Interpretive Theory of

Culture

I

In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that~rtain ideas burst up_QILthe_j.nt61kctuaLlandscape with a tremendousforce. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that theyseem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems,clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesameof some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around whicha comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue ofsuch a grande idee, crowding out almost everything else for a while, isdue, she says, "to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn atonce to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose,experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generaliza-tions and derivatives. "After we have become familiar withthe new idea, howexer" after 3

ha;J;come part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, quLexp.e; -\

THE INTERPRETATION OF C

tations are brought more into balance with it ULTURESsive popularity is ended. A few zealots e . S ~ctual u~e&.verse view of it; but Jess driven thinker: S:~:~l~n the old key.to.the_unj.problems the idea has really generated. Th e own after ~ whiletotheIt where It applies and where it is capabl of try to apply It and extendwhere It does eo extension' and thtr th . not apply or cannot be extended. It b ' . ey desistU ,a seminal Idea in the f I . ecomes, If It Was .f

. rst p ace a perm ' ma OUf intellectual arm B' ' anent and enduriisin s . ory. ut It no longer has the . nUlLl. g cope, the Infinite versat ilit f grandiose, all-prom_~he second law of thermod y.o apparent ~pplication. it Once haduon, or the notion of uncons~:au:I~,~r t~e principle of natural selec~means of production does not ex ~tlvallon. ~r the organization of the~u~an> but it still explains somet~lal~ everything, n01 even everything109 Just what that somethin is n~,and our anent ion shifts to isolat-p~eudoscience to which ing th' t~ disentangling ourselves from a lotofgiven rise. ' erst flush of its celebrit . hWh y, It as also

. ether or not this .tiflc concept d IS, 10 fact, the way IIs eve lop I don' k a centrally important seen~oncept of culture an t now But certainly this pattern fits thearose, and wh ' ~und which the whole d . c. --;=:.::.:::..::.:::...~eerlled t I" .ase dommation that d" . I. Isclphne of anthropology

o Ifilt" ISCIP me has .culture c ' speciry, focus, and c . ,een Increasmgly con-importa oncept down to size the f ontam. It IS to this cutting of the

nee rat he th ,re ore actuallv ! .their s r an underm'·" . y ,"sunng its continuedeveral way lI11ng It that thargue "s and from th " ' e essays below are all in, sometlm etr several di . '

analysis th es explicitly, more f recuons, dedicated, They all

hey develo 0 ten merely th ht eoreticall p, for a oar d . . roug the particular

fy more p rowe speCial" damous "m Owerful COne ' Ize , and, so I imagine,ost COm I ept of culturseems to p ex whole" h' " e to replace E. 8, Tylor'sme to ha ' W lch, Its "' .more than it Ve reached the . ongmatlve power not denied,

Treveals POint whe .he COllce . re It obscures a good deal

th '. ptual meOflZlIlg ab orass into h'bett Out cult W Ich the T Ier general" Ure can lead" , yorean kind of pot~auJeufo M Introdu ' ' IS eVlde t .-Klr a~ In som ctlons to anthr I n In what is still one of theuckh lin e twent opo ogy CI d KI'f 0 n mana d y-seven pa ,y e luckhohn's Mirrol'

I e of a - ,ge to d fi ges of his chgrou ". peOPle';;(2)'~ n,e CUlture i apter on the concept,tionPf ' (3) "a Way of tthheSocial legacy..!1th

turnas: (I) "the total way of

rom b Ink· e tndJ "d .about th ehavior"· (5 Ing, feeling d VI ual acquires from hIS

e w ,) a h ,an beli " ,ay in Who t eory eVlIlg '; (4) "an abstr3C-Ich a on thegrouP of part of the anthropologist

people in fact behave; (6) a "stoW

4 Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 5

house of pooled learning"; (7) "a set of standardized orientations to re-qcurrent problems",; (8) "learned behavior"; (9) a mechanism for the \normative regulation of ~ehavior; (10) "a set of techniques for adjusting

Jboth to the external environment and to other men"; (Ll} "a precipitateof history"; and turning, perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, asa sieve, and as a matrix. In the face of this sort of,theoretical El~sion,even a somewhat constricted and not entirely standard concept of cul-ture, which is at least internally coherent and, more important, whichhas a definable argument to make is (as, to be fair, Kluckhohn himselfkeenly realized) an improvement. ~lecticism is self-defeating not be-cause there is onl one direc~ in which. it is useful to move, l.?J!!.l!e-c~~_a..te..§o m~y': it is necessary to cho_qse.,~The conce t of c1.!!tur I espouse, and whose utility the essays below

attempt to demonstrate, IS e§sentially a semiotic O,!1e.Believing, withMax Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance hehimself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis qi itto be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an in-~etive one in sealf ol..!1lea~ng:It-lsexprfCa1ion I am after,construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pro-nouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.

II

Operationalism as a methodological dogma never made much sense' sofar as the social sciences are concerned, and except for a few rather toC?well-swept corners-Skinnerian behaviorism~ intelligence testing, andso on-it is largely dead now. But it had, for all that, an importantpoint to make, which, however we may feel about trying to define cha-risma or alienation in terms of operations, retains a certain forceJiY.ouwant to understand what a scienc...e.Js. you should look in the first in-~ ---.-:;;.=- Istance not at its theories or its findmgs, and certainly not at what itsapologists say about it; you should ItlOk at whaUhe.-p.J:il&ti.tjone£s-.oLitdo.--rn anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the ractionersdo is ethno ra hy. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, ormore exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made to-

THE INTERPRETATION OF C, ULTURE

ward grasping what anthropological analysis . Sknowledge. This, it must immediately be id a~ounts to as a form ofd F' sal , IS not ao s. rom one pomt of view that of th matter of meth, ' ' e textbook d ' 'estabhshmg rapport selecting I' f ' omg ethnography', n ormants tran ibi IS

nealogies, mapping fields keeping a di sen 109 texts, takinggehi ' ' lary, and so 0 B " 't mgs, techniques and received p d n. ut It IS not theseW roce UTes that d fihat defines it is the kind of intellectual eifort' e ne the enterprise,

ture In, to borrow a notion from Gilb __ ,~IS: an elaborate ven-

R I'~d' I ert Ryle thick "do' "

yes iscussion of "thi k d .. ,I~ tion."hi tc escription" a .IS (now reprinted in the second vol ppe~rs In two recent essaysofdressed to the general question of h

umeof hIS Collected Papers) ad,

doing: "Thi ki w at, as he puts it <OLe P" m mg and Reflectin "an" " enseus" is<;onslder, he says, two boys ra i:l d the Thinking of Thoughts,"eyes, In one, this is an invofu:i _t_co.ntractmg the eyelids of their rightsignal to a friend. The two mary twitch, In the other, a conspiratorialfrom a I ovements are an -am-a-camer-a "phe . ,s movements, identical'one could not tell which nornenalistic" observation of them I 'rc was t it h . a one,whether both or either was twit WI c and which was wink, or indeed

f

!.lnphotographable, between a t c~ °hr wink. Yet the difference howeverortunat wuc and . k . 'wi k e enough to have had the fi a wm IS vast; as anyone un-id er IS, c,:m~unicating and . d rst taken for the second knows. The

an special w - "'r"' _' In eed communi ". " <:':--impart a ay: (F) deliberately, (Q) t eating In a quite precisecode d ~_a~lcular message (""/1-..\ ° ~omeone In particular, (~Jto

, an (5)-' ith ' '31 accordmg t 'points out WIt out cognizance of th ° a socially established, the wi k e rest of thand ink n er has not d e company, As Ryle

Win ed wh"1 - one two thinlids. C " I e the twitcher h gs, contracted his eyelids_ontractm as done onlcode in h' g your e.yelids on y one, contracted his eye-

, y Ich so d ' pUl]Jose wh h ' 'That's all th - -. omg_ counts as " en t ere eXists a pubhc, ere IS t ." ~ ~ ~..o.ns.nlr<;lt 'I ' -votla.'_a 0 It: a speck f b . Y- ona signal is winking.

gesture 0 ehavlOr ftThat h . ' a eck of culture and-, oweve . . '

third b r, IS Just th .oy, who, "to' e beginning, Su 'trefirst boy's ' give malicious - QQ.Q§~e continues there is a

c - Wink amusem"Ourse, does th' " as amateurish I ent to hIS cronies," parodiestWitched: by CO~t In the same way 't~ umsy, obvious, and so on~ofIng n ractIng h" e second b 'Or twitch' IS right I' oy wmked and the firstable lng, he is eye Ids. Onl h', ' attempt at . , parodying y t IS boy is neither wink-will <. ' w1nkm H someone I 'USUI Wink" laboriousl g,,_ ere, too, a so' e se s, as he takes it, laug

h-

a artifices of th y, overobvious( _':'..~Il established code exists (hee clown)' y, perhaps dd' "", and So al a mg a grimace-the____ so does a "~ message:: Only now it IS

6Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 7

not conspiracy but ridicu!e that is in the air. If the others think he is ac-tually winking, his whole project misfires as completely, though withsomewhat different results, as if they think he is twitching, One can gofurther: uncert~in of his mimicking abilities, the would-be satirist maypractice at home before the mirror, in which case he is not twitching,winking, or parodying, but rehearsing; though so far as what a camera,a radical behaviorist, or a believer in protocol sentences would recordhe is just rapidly contracting his right eyelids like all the others, Com-plexities are possible, if not practically without end, at least logically so.The original winker might, for example, actually have been fake-wink-ing, say, to mislead outsiders into imagining there was a conspiracyafoot when there in fact was not, in which case our descriptions of what -II, I.the parodist is parodying and the rehearser rehearsing of course shift d: Caccordingly. But the point is that between what Ryle calls the "thin del ;;.'lscription" of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher, . .) is' ,,~doing ("rapidly contr~cting his right eyelids") and the "thick descrip- "':,lO-c,;;tion" of what he is doing ("practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a (' ')wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion") "'I;;vlies the object of ethno ra h : a stratified hier ~gfJ11 C>.t. 'structures in terms of which twitches, winks fake-winks ar' e- k"

\ ,c.'1

hearsals of parodies are produced, perceived a te e e nd 'J'.w-ithout~Y would...u.9t (not even the zero-form twitches, which, ias a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches)~, no matter what anyone did or didn't do with his eyelids,.!Like so many of the little stories oxford philosophers like to make

up for themselves, all this winking, fake-winking, burlesque-fake-wink-ing, rehearsed_burlesque-fake-winking, may seem a bit artificial. In wayof adding a more empirical note, let me give, deliberately un precededby any prior explanatory comment at all, a not untypical excerpt frommy own field journal to demonstrate that, however evened off for didac-tic purposes, Ryle's example presents an image only too exact of thesort of piled-up structures of i'riference and implication through which

an ethnographer is continually trying to pick his way:

The French [the informant said} had only just arrived. They set up twentyor so 'mall forts between here, the town, and the Marmusha area up in themiddle of the mountains, placing them on promontories so they could sur-vey the countryside. But for all this they couldn't guarantee safety, espe-cially at night, 'so although the mezrag, trade-pact. system was supposed tobe legally abolished it in fact continued as before.

THE f TERPR TATIO OF" CULTURES

One night. when Cohen (who speaks fluent Berber), was up there,atmusha, two other Jews who were traders to a neighbo . 'be Mar·

hnng In came b

pure ase some goods from him. Some Berber (rom yel h . Ylo. .b . d . anal er nelghbomg tr,l .e, trte to break into Cohen's place. but he fired his rifle in ,r-(Tradinonafly, Jews were not allowed to carry weapons' b I h' the enthi ' U at I IS perodmgs were so unsettled many did so anyway) Thi If h F . I auracled the aile .

o t e rench and the marauders fled. IIIIOn

The next night, however, [hey came back. one of them dis .w.o~an who ~nocked on the door with some sort of a 10 1 gUised asaPICIOUS and didn't want to let "her" b h ry .. ohen Wassus-right, it's only a woman" So th 1n':1 ~ e other Jews ald. "ot!, it's allpouring in, They killed th t e~ ?~enc I e door and the whole lOt camed e wo vrsumg Jews but ohen ed

ca e himself in an adjoining ro H h d manag 10 barriohim alive in the shop aft hom. e ear the robbers planning 10 burnd er t ey removed his goods d hoor and, laying about him wild! ' h ,an 0 e opened thewindow, I y Wit a club, managed 10 escape through a

He went up to the fort then t h 'to the local commandant' 'Co a.ve his wounds dressed, and complained. f ' one apt am Dumari . hr.e., our or five limes th I . I, saying e wanted his 'ar-robbers were from a tribee vhauhc of the merchandise stolen from him. Theand - W IC had nOI yet s b . -"were In open reb II' '. u muted 10 French authoritywith hi e Ion against It a d hIS mezrag-holder th M ' n e wanted autbor ization 10gothat, under traditional rei arhmusha tribal sheikh, 10 collect the indemnityCouldn't offi ' , u es, e had comin h'hibi , cia Iy give him perm's ' I g to tm. eprain DumariI itton of th I Sian to do this be r hsa in" e mezrag relationshi ' cause 0 t e French pro-Ys g, If you get killed it's y p. but he gave him verbal authorization.o the sheikh th J' Our problem." .

off ten or fif '. e ew, and a small com .COurse teen kilometers up inl h pany of armed Marmushans went

no French 0 l e rebellious h fstole its h d ' and, sneaking up area, were Ihere \I.'ere0armed w.,ehr ~' The other tribe So ,captur~d the Ihicf-tribe's shepherd and

I nfles d on came nd'thieves" We an ready to attack B 109 out on hor ~ after them,couldn't re:~1 they thought better of'; ut w~cn they saw who lhe "sheeprobbed C h Y deny what had h I and saId, "all righl. we'll talk" Theystart the s~r~n and killed the twoap~~ned-that some of their m~n had

10US feUd ' ViSitors dWould bring on S with the Marmu h -an they weren't prepared tothe plain amid ~h 0 ~he two groups tal~ ~ a scuffle with the invading partySheep damages, T~et oUsands of sheep :n' and. [alked. and lalked. there on

CatOPPOSite ends f two armed Berber' d decIded finally on five-hundred·ohen ' 0 the I' groups the r d, In his black pain, with th n Inc up on their horse5

among Ih gOWn", e sheep h d d db e Sheep , . ,pI Ibox hat d er e between them. anest Ones f ' Plckll1g , an ftappin ,.S Or his paYm out. one by g Sippers, Went QUI alonea Cohe ent. one and at h'

up in th ' n got his Sheep , IS Own good speed. theCOhen heIr fort, heard Ih and drove them b k, app" em· ac to MCOhen said ~,Y, recalling th ~omlng from So . arnmsha. The French,

, That is rny '1lI~"Image) and said~.\~lstance {"Sa, ba, ba" saidThe French hat the hell is that?" And

couldn't believe he had ;ctuallY

8 Thick Description: Toward fon Interpretive Theory of Culture 9

done what he said he had done, and accused him of being a spy for the re-bellious Berbers, put him in prison, and took his sheep. In the town, hisfamily, not having heard from him in so long a time, thought he was dead.But after a while the French released him and he came back home, butwithout his sheep. He then went to the Colonel in the town, the Frenchmanin charge of the-whole region, to complain, But the Colonel said, '" can't doanything about the matter. It's not my problem."

Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, t~is passage conveys, as any similarone similarly presented would_ do, a fair sense of how much goes intoethnographic description 'of even the most elementalW!bm:;;tr;Q(-d-rri'~y "thick" it is: In finished anthropological writings, includingthose collected here, this fact-that what we call our data are really ourown constructions' of other eo Ie's constructio sal ]I and theircompatriots are up to-is obscured because most of what we need tocomprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is in-sinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly ex-amined. (Even to reveal that this little drama took place in the high-lands of central Morocco in 1912-and was recounted there in1968-is to determine much of our understanding of it.) There is noth-ing particularly wrong with this, and it is in any case inevitable. But itdoes lead to a view of anthropological research as rather more of an ob-servational and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is.Right down at the factual base, the hard rock, insofar as there is any, ofthe whole enterprise, we are already explicating: and worse, explicating

explications. Winks upon winks upon winks.Anal sis. then is sorting out the structures of signification-what

Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for itmakes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher 'clerk whenit is much more like that of the literary critic-and determining theirsocial ground and import. Here, in our text, such sorting would b~ginwith distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredientin the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French, and would then move onto show how (and why) at that time, in that place, their copresence pro-duced a situation in which systematic misunderstanding reduced tradi-tional form to social farce. What tripped Cohen up, and with him thewhole, ancient pattern of social and economic relationships within

which he functioned, was a confusion of tongues.I shall come back to this too-compacted aphorism later, as well as to

the deta'ils of the text itself. The point for now is only that frnnogr~p.h.

I,

THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

is thick description, What the ethnographer is in fact f d 'iwhen t ace withexcept w en as, of course, he must do) he is pursui h -

matized routines of data collection-is a m It' I' . 109 t e more auto-I

u ip icny of complexcceptua structures, many of them superimposed on-I h upon or knotted imon~ anot er, which are at once strange. irregular and in .. 0

which he must contrive somehow first to grasp d' h explicit, andthis is true at the most down t . an t en to render.Andtivity: interviewing i'nforma~t~-eabrth, J~ngle. field work levels of his ac

. ' 0 serving rituals elicit' kitracing property lines ce susi h ,lOg In terms,. ' n uSing ousehoIds . . "Doing ethnography is like tryi t .' . . Writing his Journal.reading of') a ,ng 0 read (in the sense of "constructa

manuscnpt-foreign faded-f I 'encies, suspicious ernendati d'.' U I of ellipses, incober-

. IOns, an tendentious com .not In conventionalized ra hs . mentanes, butwrittenshaped behavior. g p of sound but 10 transient examplesof

10

III

CUlture this, acted document thus ! .__mock sheep raid. Th h.' u~ IS public, like a burlesqued wink or ahead. th oug Ideational it d ., ough unphysical it . ,oes not exist in someone's~ecallse lInterminable d 'b I IS ~o~ an occult entity. The interminableIS "subj· ' e ate WIthin anth I 't H ectJve" or "objective" t ropo ogy as to whether culturei:ri:~~'~~] ,,~nsults ("idealist'!" ~~~her ~i~h t,~e mutual exchange of in-wh II·' Impressionist'" " ". atenalJst! ; "mentalist!"-"behav-o Y misco' " - positIvist I") hi h1'. ncerved On h . W IC accompanies it is

irne ; there ce uman beh . . 'nation in are true tWitches) symb --I' aV.lOr IS seen as (most of the

speech pi 0 IC action act' hi ,music si"fi ' igmem 10 pai ti . - Jon w Ich. like pho-, gO! es th n IIlg line in " .duct Or a f - e question as t' wntlllg. or sonance in

~ ram _.. 0 wh th .loses sen e of mll1d Or e - e__er culture IS alter e c n-se. Th h' ' ven the t -

I raid is not whet Jng to ask abou~ b Wo ..§..o..m.ehQ~ed.Joge.lher,\rocks On th at their ontolog' I a urlesqued wink or a mock sheep'

e one h d lca status' I(World, The th' an and dream IS, t is the same as that ofch I Ing to k s on the otha lenge, irony as is_w..bat the"' er-they are things of thisand th or ange If 1m art 'S' h "fOugh the" r, snobbery " . w at It IS, ridicule orTh'" If agency " Or pnde th . .IS may seem 1.k ' IS getting said ' at, In their occurrence

I e an ob . .VIOUS truth, but ther e are a number of ways

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive !heory of Culture 11

to obscure it. One is to imagine that culture is a self-contained "super-organic" reality with forces and purposes of its own; that is, to reify it.Another is to claim that it consists in the brute pattern of behavioralevents we observe in fact to occur in some identifiable community orother; that is, to reduce it. But though both these confusions still exist,and doubtless will be always with us, the main source of theoretical~uddlement' in contempma!)' anthropo~~,,~which ~eloped10 reaction to them and is nght now very widely held---'-':::-n~mely,that, toquote Ward Goodenough, perhaps its leading proponent: "culture [isIpcate.cLl_iILtbs:minds and hearts of me ."Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive

anthropology (a terminological wavering which reflects a deeper uncer-tainty), this school of thought holds that culture is composed of psycho-logical structures by .means of which individuals or groups of individu-als g~ide their behavior. "~~ociety's c~~.-!~....9uote q60denou'gE)again, this time in a passage which has become the locus classicus of thewhole movement, '~onsists of whatev~,r it is ,Ql.leha§"..!.Q Jnow or believe <, -in order to oger te a manner acceptable ~~oits__wembers_" And from \thiS view of what culture is follows a view, equally assured, of what de-scribing it is-the writing out of systematic rules, an ethnographic algo-rithm, which, if followed, would make it possible so to operate, to pass ,I(physical appearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extreme subjec- /tivism is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an ex-plosion of debate as to whether particular analyses (which come in theform of taxonomies, paradigms, tables, trees, and other ingenuities) re-flect what the natives "really" think or are merely clever simulations, Iogi-cally equivalent but substantively different, of what they think.As, on first glance, this approach may look close enough to the one

being developed here to be mistaken for it, it is useful to be explicit asto what divides them. If, leaving our winks and "sheep behind for themoment, we take, say, a Beethoven quartet as an, admittedly rather spe-cial but, for these purposes, nicely 'illustrative, sample of culture, no onewould, I think, identify it with its score, with the skills and knowledgeneeded to play it, with the understanding of it pos~essed by its .perform-ers or auditors, nor, to take care, en pm;sant, of the reductionists andreifiers, with a particular performance of it or with some mysterious en-tity transcending material existence. The "no one" is perhaps too stron.

g

here, for there are always incorrigibles. But that a Beethoven quartet ISa temporally developed tonal structure, a coherent sequence of modeled

I,