THE
INTERPRETATION
OF
CULTURES
SELECTED ESSAYS
BY
Clifford Geertz
Basic Books, Inc., Puhlishers
NEW YORK
© 1973 by Basic Books, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-81196
SBN: 465-03425-X
Manufactured in the United States of America
76 77 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Contents
Preface
PART I
4 Chapter 11 Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive
vii
Theory of Culture 3
PART II
Chapter 21 The Impact of the Concept of Culture on
the Concept of Man 33
Chapter 31 The Growth of Culture and the Evolution
of Mind 55
PART III
Chapter 41 Religion As a Cultural System 87
Chapter 51 Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of
Sacred Symbols 126
Chapter 61 Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese
Example 142
Chapter 71 "Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali 170
vi CONTENTS
PART IV
Chapter 8/ Ideology As a Cultural System
Chapter 9/ After the Revolution: The Fate of
Nationalism in the New States
Chapter 10/ The Integrative Revolution: Primordial
193
234
Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States 255
Chapter 111 The Politics of Meaning 311
Chapter 12/ Politics Past, Politics Present: Some Notes on
the Uses of Anthropology in Understanding
the New States 327
PART V
Chapter 13/ The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude
Levi-Strauss 345
Chapter 14/ Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 360
-4- Chapter 15/ Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 412
Acknowledgments 455
Index 457
Preface
When an anthropologist, urged on by an attentive publisher, begins to
gather together certain of his essays for a kind of retrospective exhibition
of what he has been doing, or trying to do, over the fifteen-year period
since his release from graduate school, he is faced by two tearing
decisions: what to include, and how reverently to treat what is included.
All of us who write social science journal pieces have a nonbook in us,
and more and more of us are publishing them; all of us imagine that
anything our past self has done our present self could do better, and
stand ready to perpetrate improvements upon our own work we would
never stand for from any editor. To try to find the figure in the carpet
of one's writings can be as chilling as trying to find it in one's life; to
weave, post facto, a figure in-"this is what I meant to say"-is an intense
temptation.
I have faced up to the first of these decisions by including in this
collection only those of my essays which bear, directly and explicitly,
on the concept of culture. The majority of the essays are, in fact, empirical
studies rather than theoretical disquisitions, for I grow uncomfortable
when I get too far away from the immediacies of social life. But all
of them are basically concerned with pushing forward, instant case by
instant case, a particular, some would say peculiar, view of what culture
is, what role it plays in social life, and how it ought properly to be studied.
Though this redefinition of culture has perhaps been my most persistent
interest as an anthropologist, I have also worked with some extensiveness
in the areas of economic development, social organization,
comparative history, and cultural ecology-concerns which are, save
tangentially, not reflected here. Thus, what is ostensibly a set of essays
viii PREFACE
emerges, so I hope, somewhat as a treatise-a treatise in cultural theory
as developed through a series of concrete analyses. Not just an "and
then I wrote . . ." review of a somewhat vagrant professional career,
this book has an argument to make.
The second decision has been a bit trickier to deal with. In general, I
hold to a stare decisis view of published pieces, if only because if they
need very much revision they probably ought not to be reprinted at all,
but should be replaced with a wholly new article getting the damn thing
right. Further, correcting one's misjudgments by writing changed views
back into earlier works seems to me not wholly cricket, and it obscures
the development of ideas that one is supposedly trying to demonstrate
in collecting the essays in the first place.
However, for all that, there does seem justification for a certain
amount of retroactive editing in cases where the substance of the argument
is not seriously affected but to leave things exactly as originally
written is either to purvey out-of-date information or undercut a still
valid discussion by tying it too closely to a particular set of now faded
events.
There are two places in the essays below where these considerations
seemed to me relevant, and where I have therefore made some changes
in what I originally wrote. The first is in the two essays of Part II on
culture and biological evolution, where the fossil datings given in the
original essays have been definitely superseded. The dates have, in general,
been moved back in time, and as this change leaves my central arguments
essentially intact, I see no harm in introducing the newer estimations.
There seems little point in continuing to tell the world that
Australopithecines go back a million years when archeologists are now
finding fossils datable to four or five million years. The second is in
connection with Chapter 10, in Part IV, "The Integrative Revolution,"
where the flow-if that is what it should be called-of new state history
since the article was written in the early 1960s makes some of the
passages read oddly. As Nasser is dead, Pakistan has split, Nigeria has
been defederalized, and the Communist Party has disappeared from the
Indonesian scene, to write as though these things had not occurred is to
give a sense of unreality to the discussion, a discussion which, again, I
regard as still valid, even if it is Nehru's daughter rather than Nehru
who now leads India and the Republic of Malaya has expanded into the
Federation of Malaysia. Thus, I have in that essay made two sorts of
changes. First, I have changed tenses, introduced clauses, added a footnote
or two, and so on, in the body of the text to make it read a little
Preface ix
less as though the last ten years had not occurred. I have not, however,
changed anything of substance so as to improve my argument. Second, I
have added to each of the case histories-and clearly set off from them
-a paragraph summary of relevant developments since the essay was
written, so as to indicate that, if anything, those developments demonstrate
the continued relevance of the issues the essay treats in terms of
earlier events, and again to dissipate the Rip Van Winkle effect. Except
for minor typographical and grammatical corrections (and changes in
referencing style for the sake of consistency), the remainder of the book
is essentially unaltered.
I have added, however, a new chapter, the first one, in an attempt to
state my present position as generally as I can. As my views on the
matters the chapters discuss have evolved over the fifteen years they
span, there are indeed some differences in the way certain things are
put in this introductory chapter and the way they are put in some of the
reprinted ones. Some of my earlier concerns-with functionalism, for
example-now are less prominent in my mind; some of my later ones
-with semiotics, for example-are now more so. But the trend of
thought in the essays-which are arranged in a logical, not a chronological,
order-seems to me relatively consistent, and the introductory
chapter represents an effort to state more explicitly and systematically
what that trend of thought is: an attempt, in fine, to say what I have
been saying.
I have eliminated all the acknowledgments contained in the original
essays. Those who have helped me know that they have and how very
much they have. I can only hope that by now they know that I know it
too. Rather than implicate them in my confusions once again, let me instead
take the rather peculiar tack of thanking three remarkable academic
institutions that have provided me with the kind of setting for
scholarly work I am convinced could not be surpassed right now anywhere
in the world: The Department of Social Relations of Harvard
University, where I was trained ; the Department of Anthropology of
the University of Chicago, where I taught for a decade; and The Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I now work. At a time
when the American university system is under attack as irrelevant or
worse, I can only say that it has been for me a redemptive gift.
Princeton
1973
C. G.
PART I
Chapter 1 /Thick
Description: Toward an
Interpretive Theory of
Culture
I
In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that
certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous
force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they
seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems,
clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame
of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which
a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of
such a grande idee, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is
due, she says, "to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at
once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose,
experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations
and derivatives."
After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it
has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expec-
4 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive
popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe
view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the
problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend
it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist
where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in
truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part
of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising
scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had.
The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection,
or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the
means of production does not explain everything, not even everything
human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating
just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of
pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also
given rise.
Whether or not this is, in fact, the way all centrally important scientific
concepts develop, I don't know. But certainly this pattern fits the
concept of culture, around which the whole discipline of anthropology
arose, and whose domination that discipline has been increasingly concerned
to limit, specify, focus, and contain. It is to this cutting of the
culture concept down to size, therefore actually insuring its continued
importance rather than undermining it, that the essays below are all, in
their several ways and from their several directions, dedicated. They all
argue, sometimes explicitly, more often merely through the particular
analysis they develop, for a narrowed, specialized, and, so I imagine,
theoretically more powerful concept of culture to replace E. B. Tylor's
famous "most complex whole," which, its originative power not denied,
seems to me to have reached the point where it obscures a good deal
more than it reveals.
The conceptual morass into which the Tylorean kind of pot-au-feu
theorizing about culture can lead, is evident in what is still one of the
better general introductions to anthropology, Clyde Kluckhohn's Mirror
for Man. In some twenty-seven pages of his chapter on the concept,
Kluckhohn managed to define culture in turn as: (1) "the total way of
life of a people"; (2) "the social legacy the individual acquires from his
group"; (3) "a way of thinking, feeling, and believing"; (4) "an abstraction
from behavior"; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist
about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a "store-
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 5
house of pooled learning"; (7) "a set of standardized orientations to recurrent
problems" ; (8) "learned behavior"; (9) a mechanism for the
normative regulation of behavior; ( 10) "a set of techniques for adjusting
both to the external environment and to other men"; ( 1 1) "a precipitate
of history"; and turning, perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, as
a sieve, and as a matrix. In the face of this sort of theoretical diffusion,
even a somewhat constricted and not entirely standard concept of culture,
which is at least internally coherent and, more important, which
has a definable argument to make is (as, to be fair, Kluckhohn himself
keenly realized) an improvement. Eclecticism is self-defeating not because
there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because
there are so many: it is necessary to choose.
The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below
attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with
Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it
to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive
one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after,
construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement,
a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.
II
Operationalism as a methodological dogma never made much sense so
far as the social sciences are concerned, and except for a few rather too
well-swept corners-Skinnerian behaviorism, intelligence testing, and
so on-it is largely dead now. But it had, for all that, an important
point to make, which, however we may feel about trying to define charisma
or alienation in terms of operations, retains a certain force: if you
want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance
not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its
apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it
do.
In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners
do is ethnography. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or
more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made to-
6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of
knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods.
From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is
establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies,
mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these
things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise.
What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture
in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description."
Ryle's discussion of "thick description" appears in two recent essays of
his (now reprinted in the second volume of his 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 the eyelids of their right
eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial
signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical;
from an l-am-a-camera, "phenomenalistic" observation of them alone,
one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed
whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however
unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate
enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The
winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise
and special way: (I) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to
impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established
code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. As Ryle
points out, the winker has not done two things, contracted his eyelids
and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracted his eyelids.
Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public
code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking.
That's all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, andvoila!-a
gesture.
That, however, is just the beginning. Suppose, he continues, there is a
third boy, who, "to give malicious amusement to his cronies," parodies
the first boy's wink, as amateurish, clumsy, obvious, and so on. He, of
course, does this in the same way the second boy winked and the first
twitched: by contracting his right eyelids. Only this boy is neither winking
nor twitching, he is parodying someone else's, as he takes it, laughable,
attempt at winking. Here, too, a socially established code exists (he
will "wink" laboriously, overobviously, perhaps adding a grimace-the
usual artifices of the clown) ; and so also does a message. Only now it is
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 7
not conspiracy but ridicule that is in the air. If the others think he is actually
winking, his whole project misfires as completely, though with
somewhat different results, as if they think he is twitching. One can go
further: uncertain of his mimicking abilities, the would-be satirist may
practice 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 record
he is just rapidly contracting his right eyelids like all the others. Complexities
are possible, if not practically without end, at least logically so.
The original winker might, for example, actually have been fake-winking,
say, to mislead outsiders into imagining there was a conspiracy
afoot when there in fact was not, in which case our descriptions of what
the parodist is parodying and the rehearser rehearsing of course shift
accordingly. But the point is that between what Ryle calls the "thin description"
of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher . . .) is
doing ("rapidly contracting his right eyelids") and the "thick description"
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")
lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful
structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals
of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and
without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which,
as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches)
in fact exist, 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-winking,
rehearsed-burlesque-fake-winking, may seem a bit artificial. In way
of adding a more empirical note, let me give, deliberately unpreceded
by any prior explanatory comment at all, a not untypical excerpt from
my own field journal to demonstrate that, however evened off for didactic
purposes, Ryle's example presents an image only too exact of the
sort of piled-up structures of inference 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 twenty
or so small forts between here, the town, and the Marmusha area up in the
middle of the mountains, placing them on promontories so they could survey
the countryside. But for all this they couldn't guarantee safety, especially
at night, so although the mezrag, trade-pact, system was supposed to
be legally abolished it in fact continued as before.
8 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
One night, when Cohen (who speaks fluent Berber), was up there, at Marmusha,
two other Jews who were traders to a neighboring tribe came by to
purchase some goods from him. Some Berbers, from yet another neighboring
tribe, tried to break into Cohen's place, but he fired his rifle in the air.
(Traditionally, Jews were not allowed to carry weapons; but at this period
things were so unsettled many did so anyway.) This attracted the attention
of the French and the marauders fled.
The next night, however, they came back, one of them disguised as a
woman who knocked on the door with some sort of a story. Cohen was suspicious
and didn't want to let "her" in, but the other Jews said, "oh, it's all
right, it's only a woman." So they opened the door and the whole lot came
pouring in. They killed the two visiting Jews, but Cohen managed to barricade
himself in an adjoining room. He heard the robbers planning to burn
him alive in the shop after they removed his goods, and so he opened the
door and, laying about him wildly with a club, managed to escape through a
window.
He went up to the fort, then, to have his wounds dressed, and complained
to the local commandant, one Captain Dumari, saying he wanted his 'ari.e.,
four or five times the value of the merchandise stolen from him. The
robbers were from a tribe which had not yet submitted to French authority
and were in open rebellion against it, and he wanted authorization to go
with his mezrag-holder, the Marmusha tribal sheikh, to collect the indemnity
that, under traditional rules, he had coming to him. Captain Dumari
couldn't officially give him permission to do this, because of the French prohibition
of the mezrag relationship, but he gave him verbal authorization,
saying, "If you get killed, it's your problem."
So the sheikh, the Jew, and a small company of armed Marmushans went
off ten or fifteen kilometers up into the rebellious area, where there were of
course no French, and, sneaking up, captured the thief-tribe's shepherd and
stole its herds. The other tribe soon came riding out on horses after them,
armed with rifles and ready to attack. But when they saw who the "sheep
thieves" were, they thought better of it and said, "all right, we'll talk." They
couldn't really deny what had happened-that some of their men had
robbed Cohen and killed the two visitors-and they weren't prepared to
start the serious feud with the Marmusha a scuffle with the invading party
would bring on. So the two groups talked, and talked, and talked, there on
the plain amid the thousands of sheep. and decided finally on five-hundredsheep
damages. The two armed Berber groups then lined up on their horses
at opposite ends of the plain, with the sheep herded between them, and
Cohen, in his black gown, pillbox hat, and flapping slippers, went out alone
among the sheep, picking out, one by one and at his own good speed, the
best ones for his payment.
So Cohen got his sheep and drove them back to Marmusha. The French,
up in their fort, heard them coming from some distance ("Ba, ba, ba" said
Cohen, happily, recalling the image) and said, "What the hell is that?" And
Cohen said, "That is my 'ar." The French couldn't believe he had actually
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 9
done what he said he had done, and accused him of being a spy for the rebellious
Berbers, put him in prison, and took his sheep. In the town, his
family, 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, but
without his sheep. He then went to the Colonel in the town, the Frenchman
in charge of the whole region, to complain. But the Colonel said, "I can't do
anything about the matter. 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 of how much goes into
ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort-how extraordinarily
"thick" it is. In finished anthropological writings, including
those collected here, this fact-that what we call our data are really our
own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their
compatriots are up to-is obscured because most of what we need to
comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated
as background information before the thing itself is directly examined.
(Even to reveal that this little drama took place in the highlands
of central Morocco in 19 12-and was recounted there in
1968-is to determine much of our understanding of it.) There is nothing
particularly wrong with this, and it is in any case inevitable. But it
does lead to a view of anthropological research as rather more of an observational
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, of
the whole enterprise, we are already explicating: and worse, explicating
explications. Winks upon winks upon winks.
Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification-what
Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it
makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when
it is much more like that of the literary critic-and determining their
social ground and import. Here, in our text, such sorting would begin
with distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredient
in the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French, and would then move on
to show how (and why) at that time, in that place, their copresence produced
a situation in which systematic misunderstanding reduced traditional
form to social farce. What tripped Cohen up, and with him the
whole, 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 details of the text itself. The point for now is only that ethnography
10 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
is thick description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced withexcept
when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized
routines of data collection-is a multiplicity of complex conceptual
structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into
one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and
which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And
this is true at the 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 sense of "construct a
reading of') a manuscript-foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies,
suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written
not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of
shaped behavior.
III
Culture, this acted document, thus is public, like a burlesqued wink or a
mock sheep raid. Though ideational, it does not exist in someone's
head; though unphysical, it is not an occult entity. The interminable,
because unterminable, debate within anthropology as to whether culture
is "subjective" or "objective," together with the mutual exchange of intellectual
insults ("idealist!"-"materialist!"; "mentalist!"-"behaviorist!";
"impressionist!"-"positivist!") which accompanies it, is
wholly misconceived. Once human behavior is seen as (most of the
time; there are true twitches) symbolic action-action which, like phonation
in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in
music, signifies-the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct
or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together,
loses sense. The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep
raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of
rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other-they are things of this
world. The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is, ridicule or
challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that, in their occurrence
and through their agency, is getting said.
This may seem like an obvious truth, but there are a number of ways
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 11
to obscure it. One is to imagine that culture is a self-contained "superorganic"
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 behavioral
events we observe in fact to occur in some identifiable community or
other; that is, to reduce it. But though both these confusions still exist,
and doubtless will be always with us, the main source of theoretical
muddlement in contemporary anthropology is a view which developed
in reaction to them and is right now very widely held-namely, that, to
quote Ward Goodenough, ·perhaps its leading proponent, "culture [is
located] in the minds and hearts of men."
Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive
anthropology (a terminological wavering which reflects a deeper uncertainty),
this school of thought holds that culture is composed of psychological
structures by means of which individuals or groups of individuals
guide their behavior. "A society's culture," to quote Goodenough
again, this time in a passage which has become the locus classicus of the
whole movement, "consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe
in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members." And from
this view of what culture is follows a view, equally assured, of what describing
it is-the writing out of systematic rules, an ethnographic algorithm,
which, if followed, would make it possible so to operate, to pass
(physical appearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extreme subjectivism
is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an explosion
of debate as to whether particular analyses (which come in the
form of taxonomies, paradigms, tables, trees, and other ingenuities) reflect
what the natives "really" think or are merely clever simulations, logically
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 as
to what divides them. If, leaving our winks and sheep behind for the
moment, we take, say, a Beethoven quartet 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 knowledge
needed to play it, with the understanding of it possessed by its performers
or auditors, nor, to take care, en passant, of the reductionists and
reifiers, with a particular performance of it or with some mysterious entity
transcending material existence. The "no one" is perhaps too strong
here, for there are always incorrigibles. But that a Beethoven quartet is
a temporally developed tonal structure, a coherent sequence of modeled
12 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
sound-in a word, music-and not anybody's knowledge of or belief
about anything, including how to play it, is a proposition to which most
people are, upon reflection, likely to assent.
To play the violin it is necessary to possess certain habits, skills,
knowledge, and talents, to be in the mood to play, and (as the old joke
goes) to have a violin. But violin playing is neither the habits, skills,
knowledge, and so on, nor the mood, nor (the notion believers in "material
culture" apparently embrace) the violin. To make a trade pact in
Morocco, you have to do certain things in certain ways (among others,
cut, while chanting Quranic Arabic, the throat of a lamb before the assembled,
undeformed, adult male members of your tribe) and to be possessed
of certain psychological characteristics (among others, a desire
for distant things). But a trade pact is neither the throat cutting nor the
desire, though it is real enough, as seven kinsmen of our Marmusha
sheikh discovered when, on an earlier occasion, they were executed by
him following the theft of one mangy, essentially valueless sheepskin
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 a sheep raid (or mimic
one) without knowing what it is to steal a sheep and how practically to
go about it. But to draw from such truths the conclusion that knowing
how to wink is winking and knowing how to steal a sheep is sheep raiding
is to betray as deep a confusion as, taking thin descriptions for
thick, to identify winking with eyelid contractions or sheep raiding with
chasing woolly animals out of pastures. The cognitivist fallacy-that
culture consists (to quote another spokesman for the movement, Stephen
Tyler) of "mental phenomena which can [he means "should"] be analyzed
by formal methods similar to those of mathematics and logic"-is
as destructive of an effecttve use of the concept as are the behaviorist
and idealist fallacies to which it is a misdrawn correction. Perhaps, as its
errors are more sophisticated and its distortions subtler, it is even more
so.
The generalized attack on privacy theories of meaning is, since early
Husserl and late Wittgenstein, so much a part of modern thought that it
need not be developed once more here. What is necessary is to see to it
that the news of it reaches anthropology; and in particular that it is
made clear that to say that culture consists of socially established structures
of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal con-
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 13
spiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them, is no more
to say that it is a psychological phenomenon, a characteristic of someone's
mind, personality, cognitive structure, or whatever, than to say
that Tantrism, genetics, the progressive form of the verb, the classification
of wines, the Common Law, or the notion of "a conditional curse"
(as Westermarck defined the concept of 'ar in terms of which Cohen
pressed his claim to damages) is. What, in a place like Morocco, most
prevents those of us who grew up winking other winks or attending
other sheep from grasping what people are up to is not ignorance as to
how cognition works (though, especially as, one assumes, it works the
same among them as it does among us, it would greatly help to have
less of that too) as a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe
within which their acts are signs. As Wittgenstein has been invoked, he
may as well be quoted:
We . . . say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however,
important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete
enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country
with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of
the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of
not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet
with them.
IV
Finding our feet, an unnerving business which never more than distantly
succeeds, is what ethnographic research consists of as a personal experience;
trying to formulate the basis on which one imagines, always excessively,
one has found them is what anthropological writing consists
of as a scientific endeavor. We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either
to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic
them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are
seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very
much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more
difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. " If
speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process," Stanley
Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone does
not seem mysterious enough."
14 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of
the universe of human discourse. That is not, of course, its only aiminstruction,
amusement, practical counsel, moral advance, and the discovery
of natural order in human behavior are others; nor is anthropology
the only discipline which pursues it. But it is an aim to which a
semiotic concept of culture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked
systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would
call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events,
behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a
context, something within which they can be intelligibly-that is,
thickly-described.
The famous anthropological absorption with the (to us) exoticBerber
horsemen, Jewish peddlers, French Legionnaires-is, thus, essentially
a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with
which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to
one another is concealed from us. Looking at the ordinary in places
where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as has so often been
claimed, the arbitrariness of human behavior (there is nothing especially
arbitrary about taking sheep theft for insolence in Morocco), but the degree
to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by
which it is informed. Understanding a people's culture exposes their
normalness without reducing their particularity. (The more I manage to
follow what the Moroccans are up to, the more logical, and the more
singular, they seem.) It renders them accessible: setting them in the
frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
It is this maneuver, usually too casually referred to as "seeing things
from the actor's point of view," too bookishly as "the verstehen approach,"
or too technically as "ernie analysis," that so often leads to the
notion that anthropology is a variety of either long-distance mind reading
or cannibal-isle fantasizing, and which, for someone anxious to navigate
past the wrecks of a dozen sunken philosophies, must therefore be
executed with a great deal of care. Nothing is more necessary to
comprehending what anthropological interpretation is, and the degree to
which it is interpretation, than an exact understanding of what it means
-and what it does not mean-to say that our formulations of other
peoples' symbol systems must be actor-oriented.•
1 Not only other peoples': anthropology can be trained on the culture of which
it is itself a part, and it increasingly is; a fact of profound importance, but which,
as it raises a few tricky and rather special second order problems, I shall put to
the side for the moment.
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 15
What it means is that descriptions of Berber, Jewish, or French culture
must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine Berbers,
Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through, the formulae
they use to define what happens to them. What it does not mean is that
such descriptions are themselves Berber, Jewish, or French-that is,
part of the reality they are ostensibly describing; they are
anthropological-that is, part of a developing system of scientific analysis.
They must be cast in terms of the interpretations to which persons
of a particular denomination subject their experience, because that is
what they profess to be descriptions of ; they are anthropological because
it is, in fact, anthropologists who profess them. Normally, it is not
necessary to point out quite so laboriously that the object of study is
one thing and the study of it another. It is clear enough that the physical
world is not physics and A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake not
Finnegan's Wake. But, as, in the study of culture, analysis penetrates
into the very body of the object-that is, we begin with our own interpretations
of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to,
and then systematize those-the line between (Moroccan) culture as a
natural fact and (Moroccan) culture as a theoretical entity tends to get
blurred. All the more so, as the latter is presented in the form of an actor's-eye
description of (Moroccan) conceptions of everything from violence,
honor, divinity, and justice, to tribe, property, patronage, and
chiefship.
In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations; and
second and third order ones to boot. (By definition, only a "native"
makes first order ones: it's his culture.) 2 They are, thus, fictions; fictions,
in the sense that they are "something made," "something
fashioned" -the original meaning of fictio-not that they are false, unfactual,
or merely "as if" thought experi ments. To construct actor-oriented
descriptions of the involvements of a Berber chieftain, a Jewish
merchant, and a French soldier with one another in 19 1 2 Morocco is
clearly an imaginative act, not all that different from constructing similar
descriptions of, say, the involvements with one another of a provincial
French doctor, his silly, adulterous wife, and her feckless lover in
2 The order problem is, again, complex. Anthropological works based on other
anthropological works (Levi-Strauss', for example) may, of course, be fourth
order or higher, and informants frequently, even habitually, make second order
interpretations-what have come to be known as "native models." In literate cultures,
where "native" interpretation can proceed to higher levels-in connection
with the Maghreb, one has only to think of Ibn Khaldun; with the United States,
Margaret Mead-these matters become intricate indeed.
16 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
nineteenth century France. In the latter case, the actors are represented
as not having existed and the events as not having happened, while in
the former they are represented as actual, or as having been so. This is
a difference of no mean importance; indeed, precisely the one Madame
Bovary had difficulty grasping. But the importance does not lie in the
fact that her story was created while Cohen's was only noted. The conditions
of their creation, and the point of it (to say nothing of the manner
and the quality) differ. But the one is as much a fictio-"a making"-as
the other.
Anthropologists have not always been as aware as they might be of
this fact: that although culture exists in the trading post, the hill fort, or
the sheep run, anthropology exists in the book, the article, the lecture,
the museum display, or, sometimes nowadays, the film. To become
aware of it is to realize that the line between mode of representation
and substantive content is as undrawable in cultural analysis as it is
in painting; and that fact in turn seems to threaten the objective status
of anthropological knowledge by suggesting that its source is not social
reality but scholarly artifice.
It does threaten it, but the threat is hollow. The claim to attention of
an ethnographic account does not rest on its author's ability to capture
primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home like a mask or a
carving, but on the degree to which he is able to clarify what goes on in
such places, to reduce the puzzlement-what manner of men are these?
-to which unfamiliar acts emerging out of unknown backgrounds naturally
give rise. This raises some serious problems of verification, all
right-or, if "verification" is too strong a word for so soft a science (I,
myself, would prefer "appraisal"), of how you can tell a better account
from a worse one. But that is precisely the virtue of it. If ethnography
is thick description and ethnographers those who are doing the describing,
then the determining question for any given example of it, whether
a field journal squib or a Malinowski-sized monograph, is whether it
sorts winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones. It is not
against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that
we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power
of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of
strangers. It is not worth it, as Thoreau said, to go round the world to
count the cats in Zanzibar.
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 17
v
Now, this proposition, that it is not in our interest to bleach human behavior
of the very properties that interest us before we begin to examine
it, has sometimes been escalated into a larger claim: namely, that as
it is only those properties that interest us, we need not attend, save cursorily,
to behavior at all. Culture is most effectively treated, the argument
goes, purely as a symbolic system (the catch phrase is, "in its own
terms"), by isolating its elements, specifying the internal relationships
among those elements, and then characterizing the whole system in
some general way-according to the core symbols around which it is
organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression,
or the ideological principles upon which it is based. Though a distinct
improvement over "learned behavior" and "mental phenomena" notions
of what culture is, and the source of some of the most powerful theoretical
ideas in contemporary anthropology, this hermetical approach to
things seems to me to run the danger (and increasingly to have been
overtaken by it) of locking cultural analysis away from its proper object,
the informal logic of actual life. There is little profit in extricating a
concept from the defects of psychologism only to plunge 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 find it as well, of course, in various
sorts of artifacts, and various states of consciousness; but these
draw their meaning from the role they play (Wittgenstein would say
their "use") in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic relationships
they bear to one another. It is what Cohen, the sheikh, and
"Captain Dumari" were doing when they tripped over one another's
purposes-pursuing trade, defending honor, establishing dominancethat
created our pastoral drama, and that is what the drama is, therefore,
"about." Whatever, or wherever, symbol systems "in their own
terms" may be, we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events,
not by arranging abstracted entities into unified patterns.
A further implication of this is that coherence cannot be the major
test of validity for a cultural description. Cultural systems must have a
minimal degree of coherence, else we would not call them systems; and,
18 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
by observation, they normally have a great deal more. But there is nothing
so coherent as a paranoid's delusion or a swindler's story. The force
of our interpretations cannot rest, as they are now so often made to do,
on the tightness with which they hold together, or the assurance with
which they are argued. Nothing has done more, I think, to discredit cultural
analysis than the construction of impeccable depictions of formal
order in whose actual existence nobody can quite believe.
If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what
happens, then to divorce it from what happens-from what, in this time
or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them,
from the whole vast business of the world-is to divorce it from its applications
and render it vacant. A good interpretation of anything-a
poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society-takes us
into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When it does not
do that, but leads us instead somewhere else-into an admiration of its
own elegance, of its author's cleverness, or of the beauties of Euclidean
order-it may have its intrinsic charms ; but it is something else than
what the task at hand-figuring out what all that rigamarole with the
sheep is about--calls for.
The rigamarole with the sheep-the sham theft of them, the reparative
transfer of them, the political confiscation of them-is (or was) essentially
a social discourse, even if, as I suggested earlier, one conducted
in multiple tongues and as much in 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 the indemnity; anxious to make clear to
sheikhs and peddlers alike who was now in charge here, the French
showed the imperial hand. As in any discourse, code does not determine
conduct, and what was actually said need not have been. Cohen
might not have, given its 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 rather than negotiate. The French,
were they more habile and less dur (as, under Mareschal Lyautey's seigniorial
tutelage, they later in fact became), might have permitted Cohen
to keep his sheep, winking-as we say-at the continuance of the trade
pattern and its limitation to their authority. And there are other possibilities:
the Marmushans might have regarded the French action as too
great an insult to bear and gone into dissidence themselves ; the French
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 19
might have attempted not just to clamp down on Cohen but to bring the
sheikh himself more closely to heel; and Cohen might have concluded
that between renegade Berbers and Beau Geste soldiers, driving trade in
the Atlas highlands was no longer worth the candle and retired to the
better-governed confines of the town. This, indeed, is more or less what
happened, somewhat further along, as the Protectorate moved toward
genuine sovereignty. But the point here is not to describe what did or
did not take place in Morocco. (From this simple incident one can
widen out into enormous complexities of social experience.) It is to
demonstrate what a piece of anthropological interpretation consists in:
tracing the curve of a social discourse; fixing it into an inspectable
form.
The ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse; he writes it down. In
so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own
moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions
and can be reconsulted. The sheikh is long dead, killed in the process of
being, as the French called it, "pacified"; "Captain Dumari," his pacifier,
lives, retired to his souvenirs, in the south of France; and Cohen
went last year, part refugee, part pilgrim, part dying patriarch, "home"
to Israel. But what they, in my extended sense, "said" to one another on
an Atlas plateau sixty years ago is-very far from perfectly-preserved
for study. "What," Paul Ricoeur, from whom this whole idea of the inscription
of action is 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 intentional exteriorization constitutive of the
aim of discourse thanks to which the sagen-the saying-wants to become
Aus-sage-the enunciation. the enunciated. In short, what we write is the
noema ["thought," "content," "gist"] of the speaking. It is the meaning of
the speech event, not the event as event.
This is not itself so very "said"-if Oxford philosophers run to little
stories, phenomenological ones run to large sentences; but it brings us
anyway to a more precise answer to our generative question, "What
does the ethnographer do?"-he writes.a This, too, may seem a less
than startling discovery, and to someone familiar with the current "liter-
3 Or, again, more exactly, "inscribes." Most ethnography is in fact to be found
in books and articles, rather than in films, records, museum displays, or whatever;
but even in them there are, of course, photographs, drawings, diagrams, tables,
and so on. Self-consciousness about modes of representation (not to speak of
experiments with them) has been very lacking in anthropology.
zo THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ature," an implausible one. But as the standard answer to our question
has been, "He observes, he records, he analyzes"-a kind of veni, vidi,
vici conception of the matter-it may have more deep-going consequences
than are at first apparent, not the least of which is that distinguishing
these three phases of knowledge-seeking may not, as a matter
of fact, normally be possible; and, indeed, as autonomous "operations"
they may not in fact ·exist.
The situation is even more delicate, because, as already noted, what
we inscribe (or try to) is not raw social discourse, to which, because,
save very marginally or very specially, we are not actors, we do not
have direct access, but only that small part of it which our informants
can lead us into understanding.4 This is not as fatal as it sounds, for, in
fact, not all Cretans are liars, and it is not necessary to know everything
in order to understand something. But it does make the view of anthropological
analysis as the conceptual manipulation of discovered facts, a
logical reconstruction of a mere reality, seem rather lame. To set forth
symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity
in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autogenous
principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or
vast, a priori weltanschauungen, is to pretend a science that does not
exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found. Cultural analysis is (or
should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory
conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent
of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape.
VI
So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it is interpretive;
what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and
the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the "said" of such
discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms. The
kula is gone or altered; but, for better or worse, The Argonauts of the
4 So far as it has reinforced the anthropologist's impulse to engage himself
with his informants as persons rather than as objects, the notion of "participant
observation" has been a valuable one. But, to the degree it has lead the anthropologist
to block from his view the very special, culturally bracketed nature of
his own role and to imagine himself something more than an interested (in both
senses of that word) sojourner, it has been our most powerful source of bad faith.
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 21
Western Pacific remains. But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic
of such description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic.
This is not to say that there are no large-scale anthropological interpretations
of whole societies, civilizations, world events, and so on. Indeed,
it is such extension of our analyses to wider contexts that, along
with their theoretical implications, recommends them to general attention
and justifies our constructing them. No one really cares anymore,
not even Cohen (well . . . maybe, Cohen), about those sheep as such.
History may have its unobtrusive turning points, "great noises in a little
room" ; but this little go-round was surely not one of them.
It is merely to say that the anthropologist characteristically approaches
such broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from
the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely
small matters. He confronts the same grand realities that othershistorians,
economists, political scientists, sociologists-confront in
more fateful settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Passion,
Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige; but he confronts
them in contexts obscure enough-places like Marmusha and lives like
Cohen's-to take the capital letters off them. These all-too-human constancies,
"those big words that make us all afraid," take a homely form
in such homely contexts. But that is exactly the advantage. There are
enough profundities in the world already.
Yet, the problem of how to get from a collection of ethnographic
miniatures on the order of our sheep story-an assortment of remarks
and anecdotes-to wall-sized culturescapes of the nation, the epoch, the
continent, or the civilization is not so easily passed over with vague allusions
to the virtues of concreteness and the down-to-earth mind. For a
science born in Indian tribes, Pacific islands, and African lineages and
subsequently seized with grander ambitions, this has come to be a major
methodological problem, and for the most part a badly handled one.
The models that anthropologists have themselves worked out to justify
their moving from local truths to general visions have been, in fact, as
responsible for undermining the effort as anything their criticssociologists
obsessed with sample sizes, psychologists with measures, or
economists with aggregates-have been able to devise against them.
Of these, the two main ones have been: the Jonesville-is-the-USA
"microcosmic" model; and the Easter- Island-is-a-testing-case "natural
experiment" model. Either heaven in a grain of sand, or the farther
shores of possibility.
The Jonesville-is-America writ small (or America-is-Jonesville writ
22 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
large) fallacy is so obviously one that the only thing that needs explanation
is how people have managed to believe it and expected others to
believe it. The notion that one can find the essence of national societies,
civilizations, great religions, or whatever summed up and simplified in
so-called "typical" small towns and villages is palpable nonsense. What
one finds in small towns and villages is (alas) small-town or village life.
If localized, microscopic studies were really dependent for their greater
relevance upon such a premise-that they captured the great world in the
little-they wouldn't have any relevance.
But, of course, they are not. The locus of study is not 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 some things-for example, what colonial domination
does to established frames of moral expectation-you can best
study in confined localities. But that doesn't make the place what it is
you are studying. In the remoter provinces of Morocco and Indonesia I
have wrestled with the same questions other social scientists have wrestled
with in more central locations-for example, how comes it that
men's most importunate claims to humanity are cast in the accents of
group pride?-and with about the same conclusiveness. One can add a
dimension-one much needed in the present climate of size-up-andsolve
social science; but that is all. There is a certain value, if you are
going to run on about the exploitation of the masses in having seen a
Javanese sharecropper turning earth in a tropical downpour or a Moroccan
tailor embroidering kaftans by the light of a twenty-watt bulb.
But the notion that this gives you the thing entire (and elevates you to
some moral vantage ground from which you can look down upon the
ethically less privileged) is an idea which only someone too long in the
bush could possibly entertain.
The "natural laboratory" notion has been equally pernicious, not
only because the analogy is false-what kind of a laboratory is it where
none of the parameters are manipulable?-but because it leads to a notion
that the data derived from ethnographic studies are purer, or more
fundamental, or more solid, or less conditioned (the most favored word
is "elementary") than those derived from other sorts of social inquiry.
The great natural variation of cultural forms is, of course, not only anthropology's
great (and wasting) resource, but the ground of its deepest
theoretical dilemma: how is such variation to be squared with the biological
unity of the human species? But it is not, even metaphorically,
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 2.3
experimental variation, because the context in which it occurs varies
along with it, and it is not possible (though there are those who try) to
isolate the y's from x's to write a proper function.
The famous studies purporting to show that the Oedipus complex was
batkwards in the Trobriands, sex roles were upside down in Tchambuli,
and the Pueblo Indians lacked aggression (it is characteristic that they
were all negative-"but not in the South"), are, whatever their empirical
validity may or may not be, not "scientifically tested and approved"
hypotheses. They are interpretations, or misinterpretations, like any
others, arrived at in the same way as any others, and as inherently inconclusive
as any others, and the attempt to invest them with the authority
of physical experimentation is but methodological sleight of
hand. Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular: another
country heard from. To regard them as anything more (or anything less)
than that distorts both them and their implications, which are far profounder
than mere primitivity, for social theory.
Another country heard from: the reason that protracted descriptions
of distant sheep raids (and a really good ethnographer would have gone
into what kind of sheep they were) have general relevance is that they
present the sociological mind with bodied stuff on which to feed. The
important thing about the anthropologist's findings is their complex specificness,
their circumstantiality. It is with the kind of material produced
by long-term, mainly (though not exclusively) qualitative, highly participative,
and almost obsessively fine-comb field study in confined contexts
that the mega-concepts with which contemporary social science is
affticted-legitimacy, modernization, integration, conflict, charisma,
structure, . . . meaning-can be given the sort of sensible actuality that
makes it possible to think not only realistically and concretely about
them, but, what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with
them.
The methodological problem which the microscopic nature of ethnography
presents is both real and critical. But it is not to be resolved by
regarding a remote locality as the world in a teacup or as the sociological
equivalent of a cloud chamber. It is to be resolved-or, anyway, decently
kept at bay-by realizing that social actions are comments on
more than themselves; that where an interpretation comes from does not
determine where it can be impelled to go. Small facts speak to large issues,
winks to epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they
are made to.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
VII
Which brings us, finally, to theory. The besetting sin of interpretive approaches
to anything-literature, dreams, symptoms, culture-is that
they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation
and thus to escape systematic modes of assessment. You either grasp an
interpretation or you do not, see the point of it or you do not, accept it
or you do not. Imprisoned in the immediacy of its own detail, it is presented
as self-validating, or, worse, as validated by the supposedly developed
sensitivities of the person who presents it; any attempt to cast
what it says in terms other than its own is regarded as a travesty-as,
the anthropologist's severest term of moral abuse, ethnocentric.
For a field of study which, however timidly (though I, myself, am not
timid about the matter at all), asserts itself to be a science, this just will
not do. There is no reason why the conceptual structure of a cultural interpretation
should be any less formulable, and thus less susceptible to
explicit canons of appraisal, than that of, say, a biological observation
or a physical experiment-no reason except that the terms in which
such formulations can be cast are, if not wholly nonexistent, very nearly
so. We are reduced to insinuating theories because we lack the power to
state them.
At the same time, it must be admitted that there are a number of
characteristics of cultural interpretation which make the theoretical development
of it more than usually difficult. The first is the need for
theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in
sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction.
Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology;
longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements
with formal symmetry. The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture
is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual
world in which our subjects Jive so that we can, in some extended sense
of the term, converse with them. The tension between the pull of this
need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolic action and the requirements
of technical advance in the theory of culture, between the
need to grasp and the need to analyze, is, as a result, both necessarily
great and essentially irremovable. Indeed, the further theoretical development
goes, the deeper the tension gets. This is the first condition for
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 25
cultural theory: it is not its own master. As it is unseverable from the
immediacies thick description presents, its freedom to shape itself in
terms of its internal logic is rather limited. What generality it contrives
to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of
its abstractions.
And from this follows a peculiarity in the way, as a simple matter of
empirical fact, our knowledge of culture . . . cultures . . . a culture . . .
grows: in spurts. Rather than following a rising curve of cumulative
findings, cultural analysis breaks up into a disconnected yet coherent sequence
of bolder and bolder sorties. Studies do build on other studies,
not in the sense that they take up where the others leave off, but in the
sense that, better informed and better conceptualized, they plunge more
deeply into the same things. Every serious cultural analysis starts from
a sheer beginning and ends where it manages to get before exhausting
its intellectual impulse. Previously discovered facts are mobilized, previously
developed concepts used, previously formulated hypotheses tried
out; but the movement is not from already proven theorems to newly
proven ones, it is from an awkward fumbling for the most elementary
understanding to a supported claim that one has achieved that and surpassed
it. A study is an advance if it is more incisive-whatever that
may mean-than those that preceded it; but it less stands on their
shoulders than, challenged and challenging, runs by their side.
It is for this reason, among others, that the essay, whether of thirty
pages or three hundred, has seemed the natural genre in which to present
cultural interpretations and the theories sustaining them, and why,
if one looks for systematic treatises in the field, one is so soon disappointed,
the more so if one finds any. Even inventory articles are rare
here, and anyway of hardly more than bibliographical interest. The
major theoretical contributions not only lie in specific studies-that is
true in almost any field-but they are very difficult to abstract from
such studies and integrate into anything one might call ..culture theory"
as such. Theoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations
they govern that they don't make much sense or hold much interest
apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they
are not general, they are not theoretical), but because, stated independently
of their applications, they seem either commonplace or vacant.
One can, and this in fact is how the field progresses conceptually, take a
line of theoretical attack developed in connection with one exercise in
ethnographic interpretation and employ it in another, pushing it for-
z6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ward to greater precision and broader relevance; but one cannot write a
"General Theory of Cultural Interpretation." Or, rather, one can, but
there appears to be little profit in it, because the essential task of theory
building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description
possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within
them.
To generalize within cases is usually called, at least in medicine and
depth psychology, clinical inference. Rather than beginning with a set
of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law,
such inference begins with a set of (presumptive) signifiers and attempts
to place them within an intelligible frame. Measures are matched to theoretical
predictions, but symptoms (even when they are measured) are
scanned for theoretical peculiarities-that is, they are diagnosed. In the
study of culture the signifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symptoms,
but symbolic acts or clusters of symbolic acts, and the aim is not
therapy but the analysis of social discourse. But the way in which
theory is used-to ferret out the unapparent import of things-is the
same.
Thus we are lead to the second condition of cultural theory: it is not,
at least in the strict meaning of the term, predictive. The diagnostician
doesn't predict measles; he decides that someone has them, or at the
very most anticipates that someone is rather likely shortly to get them.
But this limitation, which is real enough, has commonly been both misunderstood
and exaggerated, because it has been taken to mean that cultural
interpretation is merely post facto: that, like the peasant in the old
story, we first shoot the holes in the fence and then paint the bull's-eyes
around them. It is hardly to be denied that there is a good deal of that
sort of thing around, some of it in prominent places. It is to be denied,
however, that it is the inevitable outcome of a clinical approach to the
use of theory.
It is true that in the clinical style of theoretical formulation, conceptualization
is directed toward the task of generating interpretations of
matters already in hand, not toward projecting outcomes of experimental
manipulations or deducing future states of a determined system. But
that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to
generate cogent interpretations of) realities past; it has also to survive
-intellectually survive-realities to come. Although we formulate our
interpretation of an outburst of winking or an instance of sheep-raiding
after its occurrence, sometimes long after, the theoretical framework in
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 27
terms of which such an interpretation is made must be capable of continuing
to yield defensible interpretations as new social phenomena
swim into view. Although one starts any effort at thick description, beyond
the obvious and superficial, from a state of general bewilderment
as to what the devil is going on-trying to find one's feet-one does
not start (or ought not) intellectually empty-handed. Theoretical ideas
are not created wholly anew in each study; as I have said, they are
adopted from other, related studies, and, refined in the process, applied
to new interpretive problems. If they cease being useful with respect to
such problems, they tend to stop being used and are more or less abandoned.
If they continue 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 interpretive science suggests
that the distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the experimental
or observational sciences between "description" and "explanation"
appears here as one, even more relative, between "inscription"
("thick description") and "specification" ("diagnosis")-between setting
down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose
actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the
knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is
found and, beyond that, about social life as such. Our double task is to
uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects' acts, the
"said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in
whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them
because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants
of human behavior. In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide
a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself
-that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be expressed.
Aside from a couple of orienting pieces concerned with more foundational
matters, it is in such a manner that theory operates in the
5 Admittedly, this is something of an idealization. Because theories are seldom
if ever decisively disproved in clinical use but merely grow increasingly awkward,
unproductive, strained, or vacuous, they often persist long after all but a handful
of people (though they are often most passionate) have lost much interest in
them. Indeed, so far as anthropology is concerned, it is almost .more of a problem
to get exhausted ideas out of the literature than it is to get productive ones in,
and so a great deal more of theoretical d iscussion than one would prefer is critical
rather than constructive, and whole careers have been devoted to hastening
the demise of moribund notions. As the field advances one would hope that this
sort of intellectual weed control would become a less prominent part of our activities.
But, for the moment, it remains true that old theories tend less to die
than to go into second editions.
z8 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
essays collected here. A repertoire of very general, made-in-the-academy
concepts and systems of concepts-"integration," "rationalization,"
"symbol," "ideology," "ethos," "revolution," "identity," "metaphor,"
"structure," "ritual," "world view," "actor," "function,"
"sacred," and, of course, "culture" itself-is woven into the body of
thick-description ethnography in the hope of rendering mere occurrences
scientifically eloquent.& The aim is to draw large conclusions
from small, but very densely textured facts ; to support broad assertions
about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging
them exactly with complex specifics.
Thus it is not only interpretation that goes all the way down to the
most immediate observational level: the theory upon which such interpretation
conceptually depends does so also. My interest in Cohen's
story, like Ryle's in winks, grew out of some very general notions indeed.
The "confusion of tongues" model-the view that social conflict
is not something that happens when, out of weakness, indefiniteness, obsolescence,
or neglect, cultural forms cease to operate, but rather something
which happens when, like burlesqued winks, such forms are
pressed by unusual situations or unusual intentions to operate in unusual
ways-is not an idea I got from Cohen's story. It is one, instructed
by colleagues, students, and predecessors, I brought to it.
Our innocent-looking "note in a bottle" is more than a portrayal of
the frames of meaning of Jewish peddlers, Berber warriors, and French
proconsuls, or even of their mutual interference. It is an argument that
to rework the pattern of social relationships is to rearrange the coordinates
of the experienced world. Society's forms are culture's substance.
VIII
There is an Indian story-at least I heard it as an Indian story-about
an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform
which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on
6 The overwhelming bulle. of the following chapters concern Indonesia rather
than Morocco, for I have just begun to face up to the demands of my North Af·
rican material which, for the most part, was gathered more recently. Field work
in Indonesia was carried out in 1952- 1 954, 1 957- 1958, and 197 1 ; in Morocco in
1964, 1965- 1966, 1 968- 1 969, and 1972.
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 29
the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the
way they behave), what did 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 know how long it
would be profitable to meditate on the encounter of Cohen, the sheikh,
and "Dumari" (the period has perhaps already been exceeded); but I
do know that however long I did so I would not get anywhere near to
the bottom of it. Nor have I ever gotten anywhere near to the bottom of
anything I have ever written about, either in the essays below or elsewhere.
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than
that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science
whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in
which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion,
both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting
it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions,
is what being an ethnographer is like.
There are a number of ways to escape this-turning culture into
folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it
into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying
with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semiotic
concept of culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it
is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as, to borrow
W. B. Gallie's by now famous phrase, "essentially contestable." Anthropology,
or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress
is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement
of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each
other.
This is very difficult to see when one's attention is being monopolized
by a single party to the argument. Monologues are of little value here,
because there are no conclusions to be reported; there is merely a discussion
to be sustained. Insofar as the essays here collected have any
importance, it is less in what they say than what they are witness to: an
enormous increase in interest, not only in anthropology, but in social
studies generally, in the role of symbolic forms in human life. Meaning,
that elusive and ill-defined pseudoentity we were once more than content
to leave philosophers and literary critics to fumble with, has now
come back into the heart of our discipline. Even Marxists are quoting
Cassirer; even positivists, Kenneth Burke.
My own position in the midst of all this has been to try to resist sub-
30 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
jectivism on the one hand and cabbalism on the other, to try to keep the
analysis of symbolic forms as closely tied as I could to concrete social
events and occasions, the public world of common life, and to organize
it in such a way that the connections between theoretical formulations
and descriptive interpretations were unobscured by appeals to dark sciences.
I have never been impressed by the argument that, as complete
objectivity is impossible in these matters (as, of course, it is), one might
as well let one's sentiments run loose. As Robert Solow has remarked,
that is like saying that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible,
one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer. Nor, on the other hand,
have I been impressed with claims that structural linguistics, computer
engineering, or some other advanced form of thought is going to enable
us to understand men without knowing them. Nothing will discredit a
semiotic approach to culture more quickly than allowing it to drift into
a combination of intuitionism and alchemy, no matter how elegantly the
intuitions are expressed or how modern the alchemy is made to look.
The danger that cultural analysis, in search of all-too-deep-lying turtles,
will lose touch with the hard surfaces of life-with the political,
economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere
contained-and with the biological and physical necessities on which
those surfaces rest, is an ever-present one. The only defense against it,
and against, thus, turning cultural analysis into a kind of sociological
aestheticism, is to train such analysis on such realities and such necessities
in the first place. It is thus that I have written about nationalism,
about violence, about identity, about human nature, about legitimacy,
about revolution, about ethnicity, about urbanization, about stat1,1s,
about death, about time, and most of all about particular attempts by
particular peoples to place these things in some sort of comprehensible,
meaningful frame.
To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action�art, religion,
ideology, science, law, morality, common sense-is not to turn away
from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of deemotionalized
forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential
vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions,
but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other
sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consuitable
record of what man has said.
PA R T I I
Chapter 2 /The Impact
of the Concept of Culture
on the Concept of Man
I
Toward the end of his recent study of the ideas used by tribal peoples,
La Pensee Sauvage, the French anthropologist Levi-Strauss remarks
that scientific explanation does not consist, as we have been led to imaghie,
in the reduction of the complex to the simple. Rather, it consists,
he says, in a substitution of a complexity more intelligible for one
which is less. So far as the study of man is concerned, one may go even
further, I think, and argue that explanation often consists of substituting
complex pictures for simple ones while striving somehow to retain the
persuasive clarity that went with the simple ones.
Elegance remains, I suppose, a general scientific ideal; but in the social
sciences, it is very often in departures from that ideal that truly
creative developments occur. Scientific advancement commonly consists
in a progressive complication of what once seemed a beautifully simple
set of notions but now seems an unbearably simplistic one. It is after
this sort of disenchantment occurs that intelligibility, and thus explanatory
power, comes to rest on the possibility of substituting the involved
but comprehensible for the involved but incomprehensible to which
34 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Uvi-Strauss refers. Whitehead once offered to the natural sciences the
maxim "Seek simplicity and distrust it" ; to the social sciences he might
well have offered "Seek complexity and order it."
Certainly the study of culture has developed as though this maxim
were being followed. The rise of a scientific concept of culture
amounted to, or at least was connected with, the overthrow of the view
of human nature dominant in the Enlightenment-a view that, whatever
else may be said for or against it, was both clear and simple-and its
replacement by a view not only more complicated but enormously less
clear. The attempt to clarify it, to reconstruct an intelligible account of
what man is, has underlain scientific thinking about culture ever since.
Having sought complexity and, on a scale grander than they ever imagined,
found it, anthropologists became entangled in a tortuous effort to
order it. And the end is not yet in sight.
The Enlightenment view of man was, of course, that he was wholly of
a piece with nature and shared in the general uniformity of composition
which natural science, under Bacon's urging and Newton's guidance,
had discovered there. There is, in brief, a human nature as regularly organized,
as thoroughly invariant, and as marvelously simple as Newton's
universe. Perhaps some of its laws are different, but there are laws; perhaps
some of its immutability is obscured by the trappings of local fashion,
but it is immutable.
A quotation that Lovejoy (whose magisterial analysis I am following
here) gives from an Enlightenment historian, Mascou, presents the position
with the useful bluntness one often finds in a minor writer:
The stage setting [in different times and places) is. indeed, altered, the actors
change their garb and their appearance; but their inward motions arise
from the same desires and passions of men, and produce their effects in the
vicissitudes of kingdoms and peoples.1
Now, this view is hardly one to be despised ; nor, despite my easy references
a moment ago to "overthrow," can it be said to have disappeared
from contemporary anthropological thought. The notion that
men are men under whatever guise and against whatever backdrop has
not been replaced by "other mores, other beasts."
Yet, cast as it was, the Enlightenment concept of the nature of human
nature had some much less acceptable implications, the main one being
that, to quote Lovejoy himself this time, "anything of which the intelli-
1 A. 0. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1960), p. 173.
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 35
gibility, verifiability, or actual affirmation is limited to men of a special
age, race, temperament, tradition or condition is [in and of itself)
without truth or value, or at all events without importance to a reasonable
man." 2 The great, vast variety of differences among men, in beliefs
and values, in customs and institutions, both over time and from
place to place, is essentially without significance in defining his nature.
It consists of mere accretions, distortions even, overlaying and obscuring
what is truly human-the constant, the general, the universal-in
man.
Thus, in a passage now notorious, Dr. Johnson saw Shakespeare's genius
to lie in the fact that "his characters are not modified by the customs
of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the
peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate upon but small
numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary
opinions." a And Racine regarded the success of his plays on classical
themes as proof that "the taste of Paris . . . conforms to that of Athens;
my spectators have been moved by the same things which, in other
times, brought tears to the eyes of the most cultivated classes of
Greece." 4
The trouble with this kind of view, aside from the fact that it sounds
comic coming from someone as profoundly English as Johnson or as
French as Racine, is that the image of a constant human nature independent
of time, place, and circumstance, of studies and professions,
transient fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion, that
what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what
he believes that it is inseparable from them. It is precisely the consideration
of such a possibility that led to the rise of the concept of culture
and the decline of the uniformitarian view of man. Whatever else modern
anthropology asserts-and it seems to have asserted almost everything
at one time or another-it is firm in the conviction that men unmodified
by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist, have
never existed, and most important, could not in the very nature of the
case exist. There is, there can be, no backstage where we can go to
catch a glimpse of Mascou's actors as "real persons" lounging about in
street clothes, disengaged from their profession, displaying with artless
candor their spontaneous desires and unprompted passions. They may
2 Ibid., p. 80.
3 " Preface to Shakespeare," Johnson on Shakespeare (London, 193 1), pp.
1 1 - 12.
4 From the Preface to lphigenie.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
change their roles, their styles of acting, even the dramas in which they
play; but-as Shakespeare himself of course remarked-they are always
performing.
This circumstance makes the drawing of a line between what is natural,
universal, and constant in man and what is conventional, local, and
variable extraordinarily difficult. In fact, it suggests that to draw such a
line is to falsify the human situation, or at least to misrender it seri­
ously.
Consider Balinese trance. The Balinese fall into extreme dissociated
states in which they perform all sorts of spectacular activities-biting
off the heads of living chickens, stabbing themselves with daggers,
throwing themselves wildly about, speaking with tongues, performing
miraculous feats of equilibration, mimicking sexual intercourse, eating
feces, and so on-rather more easily and much more suddenly than
most of us fall asleep. Trance states are a crucial part of every ceremony.
In some, fifty or sixty people may fall, one after the other ("like
a string of firecrackers going off," as one observer puts it), emerging
anywhere from five minutes to several hours later, totally unaware of
what they have been doing and convinced, despite the amnesia, that
they have had the most extraordinary and deeply satisfying experience a
man can have. What does one learn about human nature from this sort
of thing and from the thousand similarly peculiar things anthropologists
discover, investigate, and describe? That the Balinese are peculiar sorts
of beings, South Sea Martians? That they are just the same as we at
base, but with some peculiar, but really incidental, customs we do not
happen to have gone in for? That they are innately gifted or even instinctively
driven in certain directions rather than others? Or that
human nature does not exist and men are pure and simply what their
culture makes them?
It is among such interpretations as these, all unsatisfactory, that anthropology
has attempted to find its way to a more viable concept of
man, one in which culture, and the variability of culture, would be
taken into account rather than written off as caprice and prejudice, and
yet, at the same time, one in which the governing principle of the field,
"the basic unity of mankind," would not be turned into an empty
phrase. To take the giant step away from the uniformitarian view of
human nature is, so far as the study of man is concerned, to leave the
Garden. To entertain the idea that the diversity of custom across time
and over space is not a mere matter of garb and appearance, of stage
settings and comedic masques, is to entertain also the idea that human-
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 37
ity is as various in its essence as it is in its expression. And with that
reflection some well-fastened philosophical moorings are loosed and an
uneasy drifting into perilous waters begins.
Perilous, because if one discards the notion that Man with a capital
"M," is to be looked for "behind," "under," or "beyond" his customs
and replaces it with the notion that man, uncapitalized, is to be looked
for "in" them, one is in some danger of losing sight of him altogether. Either
he dissolves, without residue, into his time and place, a child and a
perfect captive of his age, or he becomes a conscripted soldier in a vast
Tolstoian army, engulfed in one or another of the terrible historical determinisms
with which we have been plagued from Hegel forward. We
have had, and to some extent still have, both of these aberrations in the
social sciences-one marching under the banner of cultural relativism,
the other under that of cultural evolution. But we also have had, and
more commonly, attempts to avoid them by seeking in culture patterns
themselves the defining elements of a human existence which, although
not constant in expression, are yet distinctive in character.
II
Attempts to locate man amid the body of his customs have taken several
directions, adopted diverse tactics; but they have all, or virtually
all, proceeded in terms of a single overall intellectual strategy: what I
will call, so as to have a stick to beat it with, the "stratigraphic" conception
of the relations between biological, psychological, social, and
cultural factors in human life. In this conception, man is a composite of
"levels," each superimposed upon those beneath it and underpinning
those above it. As one analyzes man, one peels off layer after layer,
each such layer being complete and irreducible in itself, revealing another,
quite different sort of layer underneath. Strip off the motley
forms of culture and one finds the structural and functional regularities
of social organization. Peel off these in turn and one finds the underlying
psychological factors-"basic needs" or what-have-you-that support
and make them possible. Peel off psychological factors and one is
left with the biological foundations-anatomical, physiological, neurological--of
the whole edifice of human life.
The attraction of this sort of conceptualization, aside from the fact
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
that it guaranteed the established academic disciplines their independence
and sovereignty, was that it seemed to make it possible to have
one's cake and eat it. One did not have to assert that man's culture was
all there was to him in order to claim that it was, nonetheless, an essential
and irreducible, even a paramount ingredient in his nature. Cultural
facts could be interpreted against the background of noncultural facts
without dissolving them into that background or dissolving that background
into them. Man was a hierarchically stratified animal, a sort of
evolutionary deposit, in whose definition each level-organic, psychological,
social, and cultural-had an assigned and incontestable place.
To see what he really was, we had to superimpose findings from the
various relevant sciences-anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology
-upon one another like so many patterns in a moire; and when that
was done, the cardinal importance of the cultural level, the only one
distinctive to man, would naturally appear, as would what it had to tell
us, in its own right, about what he really was. For the eighteenth century
image of man as the naked reasoner that appeared when he took his
cultural costumes off, the anthropology of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries substituted the image of man as the transfigured animal
that appeared when he put them on.
At the level of concrete research and specific analysis, this grand
strategy came down, first, to a hunt for universals in culture, for empirical
uniformities that, in the face of the diversity of customs around the
world and over time, could be found everywhere in about the same
form, and, second, to an effort to relate such universals, once found, to
the established constants of human biology, psychology, and social organization.
If some customs could be ferreted out of the cluttered catalogue
of world culture as common to all local variants of it, and if these
could then be connected in a determinate manner with certain invariant
points of reference on the subcultural levels, then at least some progress
might be made toward specifying which cultural traits are essential to
human existence and which merely adventitious, peripheral, or ornamental.
In such a way, anthropology could determine cultural dimensions
of a concept of man commensurate with the dimensions provided,
in a similar way, by biology, psychology, or sociology.
In essence, this is not altogether a new idea. The notion of a consensus
gentium (a consensus of all mankind)-the notion that there are
some things that all men will be found to agree upon as right, real, just,
or attractive and that these things are, therefore, in fact right, real, just,
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 39
or attractive-was present in the Enlightenment and probably has been
present in some form or another in all ages and climes. It is one of
those ideas that occur to almost anyone sooner or later. Its development
in modern anthropology, however-beginning with Clark Wissler's
elaboration in the 1 920s of what he called "the universal cultural pattern,"
through Bronislaw Malinowski's presentation of a list of "universal
institutional types" in the early forties, up to G. P. Murdock's elaboration
of a set of "common-denominators of culture" during and since
Wor ld War 11-added something new. It added the notion that, to
quote Clyde Kluckhohn, perhaps the most persuasive of the consensus
gentium theorists, "some aspects of culture take their specific forms
solely as a result of historical accidents; others are tailored by forces
which can properly be designated as universal." s With this, man's cultural
life is split in two: part of it is, like Mascou's actors' garb, independent
of men's Newtonian "inward motions"; part is an emanation of
those motions themselves. The question that then arises is: Can this
halfway house between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries really
stand?
Whether it can or not depends on whether the dualism between empirically
universal aspects of culture rooted in subcultural realities and
empirically variable aspects not so rooted can be established and sustained.
And this, in turn, demands ( l ) that the universals proposed be
substantial ones and not empty categories; (2) that they be specifically
grounded in particular biological, psychological, or sociological processes,
not just vaguely associated with "underlying realities"; and (3)
that they can convincingly be defended as core elements in a definition
of humanity in comparison with which the much more numerous cultural
particularities are of clearly secondary importance. On all three of
these counts it seems to me that the consensus gentium approach fails;
rather than moving toward the essentials of the human situation it
moves away from them.
The reason the first of these requirements-that the proposed universals
be substantial ones and not empty or near-empty categories-has
not been met is that it cannot be. There is a logical conflict between asserting
that, say, "religion," "marriage," or "property" are empirical
universals and giving them very much in the way of specific content, for
to say that they are empirical universals is to say that they have the
same content, and to say they have the same content is to fly in the face
5 A. L. Kroeber, ed., Anthropology Today (Chicago, 1 953), p. S 16.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
of the undeniable fact that they do not. If one defines religion generally
and indeterminately-as man's most fundamental orientation to reality,
for example-then one cannot at the same time assign to that orientation
a highly circumstantial content; for clearly what composes the most
fundamental orientation to reality among the transported Aztecs, lifting
pulsing hearts torn live from the chests of human sacrifices toward the
heavens, is not what comprises it among the stolid Zuiii, dancing their
great mass supplications to the benevolent gods of rain. The obsessive
ritualism and unbuttoned polytheism of the Hindus express a rather
different view of what the "really real" is really like from the uncompromising
monotheism and austere legalism of Sunni Islam. Even if one
does try to get down to less abstract levels and assert, as Kluckhohn
did, that a concept of the afterlife is universal, or as Malinowski did,
that a sense of Providence is universal, the same contradiction haunts
one. To make the generalization about an afterlife stand up alike for the
Confucians and the Calvinists, the Zen Buddhists and the Tibetan
Buddhists, one has to define it in most general terms, indeed-so general,
in fact, that whatever force it seems to have virtually evaporates.
So, too, with any notion of a sense of Providence, which can include
under its wing both Navajo notions about the relations of gods to men
and Trobriand ones. And as with religion, so with "marriage," "trade,"
and all the rest of what A. L. Kroeber aptly called "fake universals,"
down to so seemingly tangible a matter as "shelter." That everywhere
people mate and produce children, have some sense of mine and thine,
and protect themselves in one fashion or another from rain and sun are
neither false nor, from some points of view, unimportant; but they are
hardly very much help in drawing a portrait of man that will be a true
and honest likeness and not an unteneted "John Q. Public" sort of car­
toon.
My point, which should be clear and I hope will become even clearer
in a moment, is not that there are no generalizations that can be made
about man as man, save that he is a most various animal, or that the
study of culture has nothing to contribute toward the uncovering of such
generalizations. My point is that such generalizations are not to be discovered
through a Baconian search for cultural universals, a kind of
public-opinion polling of the world's peoples in search of a consensus
gentium that does not in fact exist, and, further, that the attempt to do
so leads to precisely the sort of relativism the whole approach was expressly
designed to avoid. "Zuni culture prizes restraint," Kluckhohn
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 41
writes; " Kwakiutl culture encourages exhibitionism on the part of the
individual. These are contrasting values, but in adhering to them the
Zuni and Kwakiutl show their allegiance to a universal value; the prizing
of the distinctive norms of one's culture." & This is sheer evasion,
but it is only more apparent, not more evasive, than discussions of cultural
universals in general. What, after all, does it avail us to say, with
Herskovits, that "morality is a universal, and so is enjoyment of beauty,
and some standard for truth," if we are forced in the very next sentence,
as he is, to add that "the many forms these concepts take are but products
of the particular historical experience of the societies that manifest
them"? 7 Once one abandons uniformitarianism, even if, like the consensus
gentium theorists, only partially and uncertainly, relativism is a
genuine danger; but it can be warded off only by facing directly and
fully the diversities of human culture, the Zuni's restraint and the
Kwakiutl's exhibitionism, and embracing them within the body of one's
concept of man, not by gliding past them with vague tautologies and
forceless banalities.
Of course, the difficulty of stating cultural universals which are at the
same time substantial also hinders fulfillment of the second requirement
facing the consensus gentium approach, that of grounding such universals
in particular biological, psychological, or sociological processes.
But there is more to it than that: the "stratigraphic" conceptualization
of the relationships between cultural and noncultural factors hinders
such a grounding even more effectively. Once culture, psyche, society,
and organism have been converted into separate scientific "levels," complete
and autonomous in themselves, it is very hard to bring them back
together again.
The most common way of trying to do so is through the utilization of
what are called "invariant points of reference." These points are to be
found, to quote one of the most famous statements of this strategy-the
"Toward a Common Language for the Areas of the Social Sciences"
memorandum produced by Talcott Parsons, Kluckhohn, 0. H. Taylor,
and others in the early fortiesin
the nature of social systems, in the biological and psychological nature of
the component individuals, in the external situations in which they live and
act, in the necessity of coordination in social systems. In [culture]
e C. Kluckhohn, Culture and Behavior (New York, 1962), p. 280.
7 M. J. Herskovits, Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1 9SS), p. 364.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
these "foci" of structure are never ignored. They must in some way be
"adapted to" or "taken account of."
Cultural universals are conceived to be crystallized responses to these
unevadable realities, institutionalized ways of coming to terms with
them.
Analysis consists, then, of matching assumed universals to postulated
underlying necessities, attempting to show there is some goodness of fit
between the two. On the social level, reference is made to such irrefragable
facts as that all societies, in order to persist, must reproduce their
membership or allocate goods and services, hence the universality of
some form of family or some form of trade. On the psychological level,
recourse is had to basic needs like personal growth-hence the ubiquity
of educational institutions--or to panhuman problems, like the Oedipal
predicament-hence the ubiquity of punishing gods and nurturant goddesses.
Biologically, there is metabolism and health; culturally, dining
customs and curing procedures. And so on. The tack is to look at underlying
human requirements of some sort or other and then to try to
show that those aspects of culture that are universal are, to use Kluckhohn's
figure again, "tailored" by these requirements.
The problem here is, again, not so much whether in a general way
this sort of congruence exists, but whether it is more than a loose and
indeterminate one. It is not difficult to relate some human institutions to
what science (or common sense) tells us are requirements for human existence,
but it is very much more difficult to state this relationship in an
unequivocal form. Not only does almost any institution serve a multiplicity
of social, psychological, and organic needs (so that to say marriage
is a mere reflex of the social need to reproduce, or that dining
customs are a reflex of metabolic necessities, is to court parody), but
there is no way to state in any precise and testable way the interlevel relationships
that are conceived to hold. Despite first appearances, there is
no serious attempt here to apply the concepts and theories of biology,
psychology, or even sociology to the analysis of culture (and, of course,
not even a suggestion of the reverse exchange) but merely a placing of
supposed facts from the cultural and subcultural levels side by side so
as to induce a vague sense that some kind of relationship between them
-an obscure sort of "tailoring"--obtains. There is no theoretical integration
here at all but a mere correlation, and that intuitive, of separate
findings. With the levels approach, we can never, even by invoking "in-
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 43
variant points of reference," construct genuine functional interconnections
between cultural and noncultural factors, only more or less persuasive
analogies, parallelisms, suggestions, and affinities.
However, even if I am wrong (as, admittedly, many anthropologists
would hold) in claiming that the consensus gentium approach can produce
neither substantial universals nor specific connections between cultural
and noncultural phenomena to explain them, the question still remains
whether such universals should be taken as the central elements
in the definition of man, whether a lowest-common-denominator view of
humanity is what we want anyway. This is, of course, now a philosophical
question, not as such a scientific one; but the notion that the essence
of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those features
of human culture that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive
to this people or that is a prejudice we are not necessarily obliged
to share. Is it in grasping such general facts-that man has everywhere
some sort of "religion"-or in grasping the richness of this religious
phenomenon or that-Balinese trance or Indian ritualism, Aztec human
sacrifice or Zuni rain-dancing-that we grasp him? Is the fact that
"marriage" is universal (if it is) as penetrating a comment on what we
are as the facts concerning Himalayan polyandry, or those fantastic
Australian marriage rules, or the elaborate bride-price systems of Bantu
Africa? The comment that Cromwell was the most typical Englishman
of his time precisely in that he was the oddest may be relevant in this
connection, too: it may be in the cultural particularities of people-in
their oddities-that some of the most instructive revelations of what it
is to be generically human are to be found; and the main contribution
of the science of anthropology to the construction-or reconstruction
-of a concept of man may then lie in showing us how to find them.
III
The major reason why anthropologists have shied away from cultural
particularities when it came to a question of defining man and have
taken refuge instead in bloodless universals is that, faced as they are
with the enormous variation in human behavior, they are haunted by a
fear of historicism, of becoming lost in a whirl of cultural relativism so
44 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
convulsive as to deprive them of any fixed bearings at all. Nor has there
not been some occasion for such a fear: Ruth Benedict's Patterns of
Culture, probably the most popular book in anthropology ever published
in this country, with its strange conclusion that anything one
group of people is inclined toward doing is worthy of respect by another,
is perhaps only the most outstanding example of the awkward positions
one can get into by giving oneself over rather too completely to
what Marc Bloch called "the thrill of learning singular things." Yet the
fear is a bogey. The notion that unless a cultural phenomenon is empirically
universal it cannot reflect anything about the nature of man is
about as logical as the notion that because sickle-cell anemia is, fortunately,
not universal, it cannot tell us anything about human genetic
processes. It is not whether phenomena are empirically common that is
critical in science-else why should Becquerel have been so interested
in the peculiar behavior of uranium?-but whether they can be made to
reveal the enduring natural processes that underly them. Seeing heaven
in a grain of sand is not a trick only poets can accomplish.
In short, we need to look for systematic relationships among diverse
phenomena, not for substantive identities am�mg similar ones. And to
do that with any effectiveness, we need to replace the "stratigraphic"
conception of the relations between the various aspects of human existence
with a synthetic one; that is, one in which biological, psychological,
sociological, and cultural factors can be treated as variables within
unitary systems of analysis. The establishment of a common language in
the social sciences is not a matter of mere coordination of terminologies
or, worse yet, of coining artificial new ones; nor is it a matter of imposing
a single set of categories upon the area as a whole. It is a matter of
integrating different types of theories and concepts in such a way that
one can formulate meaningful propositions embodying findings now
sequestered in separate fields of study.
In attempting to launch such an integration from the anthropological
side and to reach, thereby, a more exact image of man, I want to propose
two ideas. The first of these is that culture is best seen not as complexes
of concrete behavior patterns-customs, usages, traditions, habit
clusters-as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of
control mechanisms-plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer
engineers call "programs")-for the governing of behavior. The second
idea is that man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent
upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural
programs, for ordering his behavior.
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 45
Neither of these ideas is entirely new, but a number of recent developments,
both within anthropology and in other sciences (cybernetics,
information theory, neurology, molecular genetics) have made them susceptible
of more precise statement as well as lending them a degree of
empirical support they did not previously have. And out of such reformulations
of the concept of culture and of the role of culture in human
life comes, in turn, a definition of man stressing not so much the empirical
commonalities in his behavior, from place to place and time to
time, but rather the mechanisms by whose agency the breadth and indeterminateness
of his inherent capacities are reduced to the narrowness
and specificity of his actual accomplishments. One of the most significant
facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural
equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having
lived only one.
The "control mechanism" view of culture begins with the assumption
that human thought is basically both social and public-that its natural
habitat is the house yard, the marketplace, and the town square. Thinking
consists not of "happenings in the head" (though happenings there
and elsewhere are necessary for it to occur) but of a traffic in what have
been called, by G. H. Mead and others, significant symbols-words for
the most part but also gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical
devices like clocks, or natural objects like jewels-anything, in fact,
that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning
upon experience. From the point of view of any particular individual,
such symbols are largely given. He finds them already current in the
community when he is born, and they remain, with some additions, subtractions,
and partial alterations he may or may not have had a hand in,
in circulation after he dies. While he lives he uses them, or some of
them, sometimes deliberately and with care, most often spontaneously
and with ease, but always with the same end in view: to put a construction
upon the events through which he lives, to orient himself within
"the ongoing course of experienced things," to adopt a vivid phrase of
John Dewey's.
Man is so in need of such symbolic sources of illumination to find his
bearings in the world because the nonsymbolic sort that are constitutionally
ingrained in his body cast so diffused a light. The behavior patterns
of lower animals are, at least to a much greater extent, given to
them with their physical structure; genetic sources of information order
their actions within much narrower ranges of variation, the narrower
and more thoroughgoing the lower the animal. For man, what are in-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
nately given are extremely general response capacities, which, although
they make possible far greater plasticity, complexity, and, on the scattered
occasions when everything works as it should, effectiveness of behavior,
leave it much less precisely regulated. This, then, is the second
face of our argument: Undirected by culture patterns-organized systems
of significant symbols-man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable,
a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience
virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such
patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but-the principal
basis of its specificity-an essential condition for it.
Within anthropology some of the most telling evidence in support of
such a position comes from recent advances in our understanding of
what used to be called the descent of man: the emergence of Homo sapiens
out of his general primate background. Of these advances three are
of critical importance: ( 1 ) the discarding of a sequential view of the relations
between the physical evolution and the cultural development of
man in favor of an overlap or interactive view; (2) the discovery that
the bulk of the biological changes that produced modern man out of his
most immediate progenitors took place in the central nervous system
and most especially in the brain; (3) the realization that man is, in
physical terms, an incomplete, an unfinished, animal; that what sets him
off most graphically from nonmen is less his sheer ability to learn (great
as that is) than bow much and what particular sorts of things he has to
learn before he is able to function at all. Let me take each of these
points in turn.
The traditional view of the relations between the biological and the
cultural advance of man was that the former, the biological, was for all
intents and purposes completed before the latter, the cultural, began.
That is to say, it was again stratigraphic: Man's physical being evolved,
through the usual mechanisms of genetic variation and natural selection,
up to the point where his anatomical structure had arrived at more or
less the status at which we find it today; then cultural development got
under way. At some particular stage in his phylogenetic history, a marginal
genetic change of some sort rendered him capable of producing
and carrying culture, and thenceforth his form of adaptive response to
envirortmental pressures was almost exclusively cultural rather than genetic.
As he spread over the globe, he wore furs in cold climates and
loin cloths (or nothing at all) in warm ones; he didn't alter his innate
mode of response to environmental temperature. He made weapons to
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 47
extend his inherited predatory powers and cooked foods to render a
wider range of them digestible. Man became man, the story continues,
when, having crossed some mental Rubicon, he became able to transmit
"knowledge, belief, law, morals, custom" (to quote the item� of Sir Edward
Tylor's classical definition of culture) to his descendants and his
neighbors through teaching and to acquire them from his ancestors and
his neighbors through learning. After that magical moment, the advance
of the hominids depended almost entirely on cultural accumulation, on
the slow growth of conventional practices, rather than, as it had for ages
past, on physical organic change.
The only trouble is that such a moment does not seem to have existed.
By the most recent estimates the transition to the cultural mode of
life took the genus Homo several million years to accomplish; and
stretched out in such a manner, it involved not one or a handful of marginal
genetic changes but a long, complex, and closely ordered sequence
of them.
In the current view, the evolution of Homo sapiens-modern manout
of his immediate presapiens background got definitely under way
nearly four million years ago with the appearance of the now famous
Australopithecines-the so-called ape men of southern and eastern
Africa-and culminated with the emergence of sapiens himself only
some one to two or three hundred thousand years ago. Thus, as at least
elemental forms of cultural, or if you wish protocultural, activity (simple
toolmaking, hunting, and so on) seem to have been present among
some of the Australopithecines, there was an overlap of, as I say, well
over a million years between the beginning of culture and the appearance
of man as we know him today. The precise dates-which are tentative
and which further research may later alter in one direction or
another-are not critical; what is critical is that there was an overlap
and that it was a very extended one. The final phases (final to date, at
any rate) of the phylogenetic history of man took place in the same
grand geological era-the so-called Ice Age-as the initial phases of
his cultural history. Men have birthdays, but man does not.
What this means is that culture, rather than being added on, so to
speak, to a finished or virtually finished animal, was ingredient, and
centrally ingredient, in the production of that animal itself. The slow,
steady, almost glacial growth of culture through the Ice Age altered the
balance of selection pressures for the evolving Homo in such a way as
to play a major directive role in his evolution. The perfection of tools,
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
the adoption of organized hunting and gathering practices, the beginnings
of true family organization, the discovery of fire, and, most critically,
though it is as yet extremely difficult to trace it out in any detail,
the increasing reliance upon systems of significant symbols (language,
art, myth, ritual) for orientation, communication, and self-control all
created for man a new environment to which he was then obliged to
adapt. As culture, step by infinitesimal step, accumulated and developed,
a selective advantage was given to those individuals in the population
most able to take advantage of it-the effective hunter, the persistent
gatherer, the adept toolmaker, the resourceful leader-until what had
been a small-brained, protohuman Australopithecus became the largebrained
fully human Homo sapiens. Between the cultural pattern, the
body, and the brain, a positive feedback system was created in which
each shaped the progress of the other, a system in which the interaction
among increasing tool use, the changing anatomy of the hand, and the
expanding representation of the thumb on the cortex is only one of the
more graphic examples. By submitting himself to governance by symbolically
mediated programs for producing artifacts, organizing social life,
or expressing emotions, man determined, if unwittingly, the culminating
stages of his own biological destiny. Quite literally, though quite inadvertently,
he created himself.
Though, as I mentioned, there were a number of important changes
in the gross anatomy of genus Homo during this period of his
crystallization-in skull shape, dentition, thumb size, and so on-by
far the most important and dramatic were those that evidently took
place in the central nervous system; for this was the period when the
human brain, and most particularly the forebrain, ballooned into its
present top-heavy proportions. The technical problems are complicated
and controversial here; but the main point is that though the Australopithecines
had a torso and arm configuration not drastically different
from our own, and a pelvis and leg formation at least well-launched toward
our own, they had cranial capacities hardly larger than those of
the living apes-that is to say, about a third to a half of our own. What
sets true men off most distinctly from protomen is apparently not overall
bodily form but complexity of nervous organization. The overlap period
of cultural and biological change seems to have consisted in an intense
concentration on neural development and perhaps associated
refinements of various behaviors-of the hands, bipedal locomotion,
and so on-for which the basic anatomical foundations-mobile shoul-
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 49
ders and wrists, a broadened ilium, and so on-had already been securely
laid. In itself, this is perhaps not altogether startling; but, combined
with what I have already said, it suggests some conclusions about
what sort of animal man is that are, I think, rather far not only from
those of the eighteenth century but from those of the anthropology of
only ten or fifteen years ago.
Most bluntly, it suggests that there is no such thing as a human nature
independent of culture. Men without culture would not be the
clever savages of Golding's Lord of the Flies thrown back upon the cruel
wisdom of their animal instincts; nor would they be the nature's noblemen
of Enlightenment primitivism or even, as classical anthropological
theory would imply, intrinsically talented apes who had somehow failed
to find themselves. They would be unworkable monstrosities with very
few useful instincts, fewer recognizable sentiments, and no intellect:
mental basket cases. As our central nervous system-and most particularly
its crowning curse and glory, the neocortex-grew up in great part
in interaction with culture, it is incapable of directing our behavior or
organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of
significant symbols. What happened to us in the Ice Age is that we were
obliged to abandon the regularity and precision of detailed genetic control
over our conduct for the flexibility and adaptability of a more generalized,
though of course no less real, genetic control over it. To supply
the additional information necessary to be able to act, we were
forced, in turn, to rely more and more heavily on cultural sources-the
accumulated fund of significant symbols. Such symbols are thus not
mere expressions, instrumentalities, or correlates of our biological, psychological,
and social existence ; they are prerequisites of it. Without
men, no culture, certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without
culture, no men.
We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or
finish ourselves through culture-and not through culture in general but
through highly particular forms of it: Dobuan and Javanese, Hopi and
Italian, upper-class and lower-class, academic and commercial. Man's
great capacity for learning, his plasticity, has often been remarked, but
what is even more critical is his extreme dependence upon a certain sort
of learning: the attainment of concepts, the apprehension and application
of specific systems of symbolic meaning. Beavers build dams, birds
build nests, bees locate food, baboons organize social groups, and mice
mate on the basis of forms of learning that rest predominantly on the
so THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
instructions encoded in their genes and evoked by appropriate patterns
of external stimuli: physical keys inserted into organic locks. But men
build dams or shelters, locate food, organize their social groups, or find
sexual partners under the guidance of instructions encoded in flow
charts and blueprints, hunting lore, moral systems and aesthetic judgments:
conceptual structures molding formless talents.
We live, as one writer has neatly put it, in an "information gap." Between
what our body tells us and what we have to know in order to
function, there is a vacuum we must fill ourselves, and we fill it with information
(or misinformation) provided by our culture. The boundary
between what is innately controlled and what is culturally controlled in
human behavior is an ill-defined and wavering one. Some things are, for
all intents and purposes, entirely controlled intrinsically: we need no
more cultural guidance to learn how to breathe than a fish needs to
learn how to swim. Others are almost certainly largely cultural ; we do
not attempt to explain on a genetic basis why some men put their trust
in centralized planning and others in the free market, though it might be
an amusing exercise. Almost all complex human behavior is, of course,
the interactive, nonadditive outcome of the two. Our capacity to speak
is surely innate ; our capacity to speak English is surely cultural. Smiling
at pleasing stimuli and frowning at unpleasing ones are surely in some
degree genetically determined (even apes screw up their faces at noxious
odors) ; but sardonic smiling and burlesque frowning are equally
surely predominantly cultural, as is perhaps demonstrated by the Balinese
definition of a madman as someone who, like an American,
smiles when there is nothing to laugh at. Between the basic ground
plans for our life that our genes lay down-the capacity to speak or to
smile-and the precise behavior we in fact execute-speaking English
in a certain tone of voice, smiling enigmatically in a delicate social
situation-lies a complex set of significant symbols under whose direction
we transform the first into the second, the ground plans into the ac­
tivity.
Our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous
system itself, cultural products-products manufactured, indeed,
out of tendencies, capacities, and dispositions with which we were born,
but manufactured nonetheless. Chartres is made of stone and glass. But
it is not just stone and glass; it is a cathedral, and not only a cathedral,
but a particular cathedral built at a particular time by certain members
of a particular society. To understand what it means, to perceive it for
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 5 1
what it is, you need to know rather more than the generic properties of
stone and glass and rather more than what is common to all cathedrals.
You need to understand also-and, in my opinion, most critically-the
specific concepts of the relations among God, man, and architecture
that, since they have governed its creation, it consequently embodies. It
is no different with men: they, too, every last one of them, are cultural
artifacts.
IV
Whatever differences they may show, the approaches to the definition of
human nature adopted by the Enlightenment and by classical anthropology
have one thing in common: they are both basically typological.
They endeavor to construct an image of man as a model, an archetype,
a Platonic idea or an Aristotelian form, with respect to which actual
men-you, me, Churchill, Hitler, and the Bornean headhunter-are but
reflections, distortions, approximations. In the Enlightenment case, the
elements of this essential type were to be uncovered by stripping the
trappings of culture away from actual men and seeing what then was
left-natural man. In classical anthropology, it was to be uncovered by
factoring out the commonalities in culture and seeing what then appeared
--consensual man. In either case, the result is the same as that which
tends to e merge in all typological approaches to scientific problems generally
: the differences among individuals and among groups of individuals
are rendered secondary. Individuality comes to be seen as eccentricity,
distinctiveness as accidental deviation from the only legitimate object
of study for the true scientist: the underlying, unchanging, normative
type. In such an approach, however elaborately formulated and resourcefully
defended, living detail is drowned in dead stereotype: we are in
quest of a metaphysical entity, Man with a capital "M," in the interests
of which we sacrifice the empirical entity we in fact encounter, man
with a small "m."
The sacrifice is, however, as unnecessary as it is unavailing. There is
no opposition between general theoretical understanding and circumstantial
understanding, between synoptic vision and a fine eye for detail.
It is, in fact, by its power to draw general propositions out of particular
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
phenomena that a scientific theory-indeed, science itself-is to be
judged. If we want to discover what man amounts to, we can only find it
in what men are: and what men are, above all other things, is various. It
is in understanding that variousness-its range, its nature, its basis, and
its implications-that we shall come to construct a concept of human
nature that, more than a statistical shadow and less than a primitivist
dream, has both substance and truth.
It is here, to come round finally to my title, that the concept of culture
has its impact on the concept of man. When seen as a set of symbolic
devices for controlling behavior, extrasomatic sources of information,
culture provides the link between what men are intrinsically
capable of becoming and what they actually, one by one, in fact become.
Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual
under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems
of meaning in terms of which we give form, order, point, and direction
to our lives. And the cultural patterns involved are not general but
specific-not just " marriage" but a particular set of notions about what
men and women are like, how spouses should treat one another, or who
should properly marry whom ; not just "religion" but belief in the wheel
of karma, the observance of a month of fasting, or the practice of cattle
sacrifice. Man is to be defined neither by his innate capacities alone, as
the Enlightenment sought to do, nor by his actual behaviors alone, as
much of contemporary social science seeks to do, but rather by the link
between them, by the way in which the first is transformed into the second,
his generic potentialities focused into his specific performances. It
is in man's career, in its characteristic course, that we can discern, however
dimly, his nature, and though culture is but one element in determining
that course, it is hardly the least important. As culture shaped
us as a single species-and is no doubt still shaping us-so too it
shapes us as separate individuals. This, neither an unchanging subcultural
self nor an established cross-cultural consensus, is what we really
have in common.
Oddly enough-though on second thought, perhaps not so oddlymany
of our subjects seem to realize this more clearly than we anthropologists
ourselves. In Java, for example, where I have done much of my
work, the people quite flatly say, "To be human is to be Javanese." Small
children, boors, simpletons, the insane, the flagrantly immoral, are said to
be ndurung djawa, "not yet Javanese." A "normal" adult capable of
acting in terms of the highly elaborate system of etiquette, possessed of
The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man 53
the delicate aesthetic perceptions associated with music, dance, drama,
and textile design, responsive to the subtle promptings of the divine residing
in the stillnesses of each i ndividual's inward-turning consciousness,
is sampun djawa, "already Javanese," that is, already human. To be
human is not just to breathe; it is to control one's breathing, by yogalike
techniques, so as to hear in inhalation and exhalation the literal voice of
God pronouncing His own name-"hu Allah." It is not just to talk, it
is to utter the appropriate words and phrases in the appropriate social
situations in the appropriate tone of voice and with the appropriate evasive
indirection. It is not just to eat; it is to prefer certain foods cooked
in certain ways and to follow a rigid table etiquette in consuming them.
It is not even just to feel but to feel certain quite distinctively Javanese
(and essentially untranslatable) emotions-"patience," "detachment,"
"resignation," "respect."
To be human here is thus not to be Everyman; it is to be a particular
kind of man, and of course men differ: "Other fields," the Javanese say,
"other grasshoppers." Within the society, differences are recognized,
too-the way a rice peasant becomes human and Javanese differs from
the way a civil servant does. This is not a matter of tolerance and ethical
relativism, for not all ways of being human are regarded as equally
admirable by far; the way the local Chinese go about it is, for example,
intensely dispraised. The point is that there are different ways; and to
shift to the anthropologist's perspective now, it is in a systematic review
and analysis of these--of the Plains Indian's bravu ra, the Hindu's obsessiveness,
the Frenchman's rationalism, the Berber's anarchism, the
American's optimism (to list a series of tags I should not like to have to
defend as such)-that we shall find out what it is, or can be, to be a
man.
We must, in short, descend into detail, past the misleading tags, past
the metaphysical types, past the empty similarities to grasp firmly the
essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts
of individuals within each culture, if we wish to encounter humanity
face to face. In this area, the road to the general, to the revelatory simplicities
of science, lies through a concern with the particular, the circumstantial,
the concrete, but a concern organized and directed in terms
of the sort of theoretical analyses that I have touched upon-analyses
of physical evolution, of the functioning of the nervous system, of social
organization, of psychological process, of cultural patterning, and so on
-and, most especially, in terms of the interplay among them. That is
54 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
to say, the road lies, like any genuine Quest, through a terrifying com­
plexity.
"Leave him alone for a moment or two," Robert Lowell writes, not
as one might suspect of the anthropologist but of that other eccentric inquirer
into the nature of man, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Leave him alone for a moment or two,
and you'll see him with his head
bent down, brooding, brooding,
eyes fixed on some chip,
some stone, some common plant,
the commonest thing,
as if it were the clue.
The disturbed eyes rise,
furtive, foiled, dissatisfied
from meditation on the true
and insignificant.s
Bent over his own chips, stones, and common plants, the anthropologist
broods, too, upon the true and insignificant, glimpsing in it, or so
he thinks, fleetingly and insecurely, the disturbing, changeful image of
himself.
8 Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and Faber &
Faber, Ltd., from "Hawthorne," in For the Union Dead, p. 3 9. Copyright e 1 964
by Robert Lowell.
Chapter 3 /The Growth
of Culture and the
Evolution of Mind
The statement •'the mind is its own place," as theorists
might construe it, is not true, for the mind is not even a
metaphorical "place." On the contrary, the chessboard,
the platform, the scholar's desk, the judge's bench, the
lorry-driver's seat, the studio and the football field are
among its places. These are where people work and play
stupidly or intelligently. "Mind" is not the name of another
person, working or frolicking behind an impenetrable
screen; it is not the name of another place where
work is done or games are played; and it is not the
name of another tool with which work is done, or another
appliance with which games are played.
GILB ERT RYLE
I
In the intellectual history of the behavioral sciences the concept of
"mind" has played a curious double role. Those who have regarded the
development of such sciences as involving a rectilinear extension of the
methods of physical science into the realm of the organic have used it
as a devil word, the referent of which was all those methods and theories
which failed to measure up to a rather heroic ideal of "objectivism."
Terms such as insight, understanding, conceptual thinking, image,
idea, feeling, reflection, fantasy, and so on, have been stigmatized as
mentalistic, "i.e., contaminated with the subjectivity of consciousness,"
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
and the appeal to them castigated as a lamentable failure of scientific
nerve. t But those who have, on the contrary, regarded the move from a
physical to an organic, and most especially to a human, subject matter
as implying far-reaching revisions in theoretical approach and research
procedure have tended to use "mind" as a cautionary concept, one intended
more to point to defects in understanding than to repair them,
more to stress the limits of positive science than to extend them. For
such thinkers its main function has been to give a vaguely defined but
intuitively valid expression to their settled conviction that human experience
has important dimensions of order which physical theory (and,
pari passu, psychological and social theories modeled on physical
theory) omits to consider. Sherrington's image of "naked mind"-"all
that counts in life. Desire, zest, truth, love, knowledge, values"-going
"in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost," serves as an epitome
of this position, as Pavlov's reported practice of levying fines on any of
his students who so much as uttered mentalistic words in his laboratory
does of the opposite.2
In fact, with some exceptions, the term "mind" has not functioned as
a scientific concept at all but as a rhetorical device, even when its use
has been forbidden. More exactly, it has acted to communicate-and
sometimes to exploit-a fear rather than to define a process, a fear of
subjectivism on the one hand and of mechanism on the other. " Even
when fully aware of the nature of anthropomorphic subjectivism and its
dangers," Clark Hull warns us solemnly, "the most careful and experienced
thinker is likely to find himself a victim to its seductions," and
urges as a "prophylaxis" the strategy of viewing all behavior as if it
were produced by a dog, an albino rat, or, safest of all, a robot.3 While,
for the opposition, Gordon Allport professes · to see a threat to human
dignity in such an approach, complaining that "the models we have
been following lack the long-range orientation which is the essence of
morality . . . . An addiction to machines, rats, or infants leads us to
overplay those features of human behavior that are peripheral, signaloriented,
or genetic [and ] to underplay those features that are central,
1 M. Scheerer, "Cognitive Theory," in Handbook of Social Psychology (Reading,
Mass. , 1954).
2 C. Sherrington, Man on His Nature, 2nd ed. (New York, 1953), p. 1 6 1 ; L. S.
Kubie, "Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Considerations of the Problem of Consciousness,"
in Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness, ed. E. Adrian et al. (Oxford,
England, 1 954), pp. 444-467.
3 C. L. Hull, Principles of Behavior (New York, 1 943).
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 57
future-oriented, or symbolic." 4 In the face of such contradictory descriptions
of the specter that is haunting the study of man, it is small
wonder that a recent group of psychologists, torn between their wish to
present a convincing analysis of the directional aspects of human behavior
and to meet scientific canons of objectivity, found themselves
tempted by the rather desperate stratagem of referring to themselves as
"subjective behaviorists." �
So far as the concept of mind is concerned, this state of affairs is extremely
unfortunate because an extraordinarily useful notion and one
for which there is no precise equivalent, save perhaps the archaism
"psyche," is turned into a shibboleth. It is even more unfortunate because
the fears which have so crippled the term are largely baseless, the
dying echoes of the great mock civil war between materialism and dualism
generated by the Newtonian revolution. Mechanism, as Ryle has
said, is a bogey, because the fear of it rests on the assumption that it is
somehow contradictory to say that one and the same occurrence is governed
by mechanical laws and moral principles, as though a golfer cannot
at once conform to the laws of ballistics, obey the rules of golf, and
play with elegance.6 But subjectivism is a bogey too, for the fear of it
rests on the equally peculiar assumption that because I cannot know
what you dreamed of last night, thought of while memorizing a string of
nonsense syllables, or feel about the doctrine of infant damnation unless
you choose to tell me, any theorizing I may do about the role such mental
facts play in your behavior must be based on a false "anthropomorphic"
analogy from what I know or think I know, about the role
they play in mine. Lashley's tart comment that "metaphysicians and
theologians have spent so many years weaving fairy tales about [mind 1
that they have come to believe one another's phantasies," is inaccurate
only in that it neglects to note that a great many behavioral scientists
have been engaged in the same sort of collective autism. 7
One of the most frequently suggested methods for rehabilitating mind
as a useful scientific concept is to transform it i nto a verb or participle,
" Mind is minding, the reaction of an organism as a whole as a coherent
4 G. W. Allport, "Scientific Models and Human Morals," Psychol. Rev. 54
( 1 947): 1 82- 192.
5 G. A. Miller, E. H. Galanter, and K. H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of
Behavior (New York, 1960).
6 G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York, 1949).
1 K. S. Lashley, "Cerebral Organization and Behavior," in The Brain and
Human Behavior, ed. H. Solomon et al. (Baltimore, 1958).
ss THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
unit . [a view which ] releases us from the verbal bondage of a sterile
and paralyzing metaphysics, and sets us free to sow and reap in a
field what will bear fruit." 8 But this "cure" involves falling in with the
school bench story that "a noun is a word that names a person, place,
or thing," which was not true in the first place. The use of nouns as dispositional
terms-i.e., words denoting capacities and propensities
rather than entities or activities-is actually a standard and indispensable
practice in English, both natural and scientific.9 If "mind" is to go,
"faith," "hope," and "charity" will have to go with it, as well as
"cause," "force," and "gravitation" and "motive," "role," and "culture."
"Mind is minding" may be all right, "science is sciencing" at
least bearable. •o But "superego is superegoing" is a little awkward.
Even more important, although it is true that part of the fog of confusion
which has arisen around the concept of mind is a result of a false
analogy with nouns which do name persons, places, or things, it mainly
springs from much deeper sources than the merely linguistic. Consequently,
making it into a verb is no real protection at all against "a sterile
and paralyzing metaphysics." Like mechanists, subjectivists are men
of infinite resource, and an occult activity may simply be substituted for
an occult entity, as in the case, for example, of "introspecting."
From the scientific point of view, to identify mind with behavior,
"the reaction of the organism as a whole," is to render it as uselessly redundant
as to identify it with an entity "more ghostly than a ghost."
The notion that it is more defensible to transform a reality into another
reality than to transform it into an unreality is not correct: a rabbit disappears
just as completely when he is magically changed into a horse as
he does when he is changed into a ·centaur. "Mind" is a term denoting a
class of skills, propensities, capacities, tendencies, habits; it refers in
Dewey's phrase to an "active and eager background which lies in wait
and engages whatever comes its way." 1 1 And, as such, it is neither an
action nor a thing, but an organized system of dispositions which finds
its manifestation in some actions and some things. As Ryle has pointed
out, if a clumsy man trips accidentally, we do not regard it proper to ascribe
his actions to the workings of his mind, but if a clown trips on
purpose, we do feel it proper to say this:
8 L. A. White, The Science of Culture (New York, 1949).
9 Ryle, The Concept of Mind.
to White, The Science of Culture.
1 1 J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1 934).
The Growth of Cult.ue and the Evolution of Mind 59
The cleverness of the clown may be exhibited in his tripping and tu mbling.
He trips and tumbles just as clumsy people do, except that he trips and tumbles
on purpose and after m uch rehearsal and at the golden moment and
where the children can see him and so as not to hurt himself. The spectators
applaud his skill at seeming clumsy, but what they applaud is not some
extra hidden performance executed "'in his head ." It is his visible performance
that they admire, but they admire it not for bei ng an effect of any
h idden i nternal causes but for bei ng an exercise of skil l . Now a skill is not
an act . It is therefore neither a witnessable nor an unwitnessable act . To recognize
that a performance is an exercise of a skill is indeed to appreciate it
in the l ight of a factor which could not be separately recorded by a camera.
But the reason why the skill exercised in a performance cannot be separately
recorded by a camera is not that it is an occult or ghostly happening, but
that it is not a happening at all . It is a disposition, or complex of dispositions,
and a d isposition is a factor of the wrong logical type to be seen or
unseen, recorded or unrecorded . Just as the habit of talking loudly is not itself
loud or quiet, since it is not the sort of term of which "loud" or "quiet"
can be predicated, or just as a susceptibility to headaches is for the same
reason not itself u nendurable or endurable, so the skills, tastes, and bents
which are exercised in overt or i nternal operations are not themselves overt
or i nternal, witnessable or unwitnessable.12
A similar argument applies to objects; we would not refer, save in a
metaphorical way, to the legendary burned pig the Chinese produced by
accidentally setting fire to his house as "cooked," even though he ate it,
because it did not result from the exercise of a mental capability called
"knowledge of cooking." But we would so refer to the second such pig
the now-educated Chinese produced by deliberately burning down his
house again, because it did result from such a capability, no matter how
crude. Such judgments, being empirical, may be wrong; a man may
have really tripped when we thought he was only clowning, or a pig
really been cooked when we thought it merely burned. But the point is
that when we attribute mind to an organism, we are talking about neither
the organism's actions nor its products per se, but about its capacity
and its proneness, its disposition, to perform certain kinds of actions
and produce certain kinds of products, a capacity and a proneness we of
course infer from the fact that he does sometimes perform such actions
and produce such products. · There is nothing extramundane about this;
it merely indicates that a language lacking dispositional terms would
make the scientific description and analysis of human behavior extraordi-
12 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. 3 3 . Quoted by permission of Barnes & Noble
Books and Hutchinson Publ ishing Group Ltd.
6o THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
narily difficult, and severely cripple its conceptual development, in the
same way that a language, such as the Arapesh, in which you must enumerate
by saying "one, two, two and one, one dog (i.e., 'four'), one dog
and one, one dog and two, one dog and two and one, two dogs, . . .
etc.," cripples mathematical development by making counting so troublesome
that people find it such an effort to go beyond two dogs and
two dogs and two dogs (i.e., "twenty-four") that they refer to all larger
quantities as "a lot." 1 a
Further, within such a general conceptual framework it is possible to
discuss the biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural determinants
of man's mental life concurrently without making any reductionist
hypotheses a� all. This is because a capacity for something, or a proneness
to do something, not being an entity or a performance, is simply
not susceptible to reduction. In the case of Ryle's clown, I could say, no
doubt incorrectly, that his tumbling was reducible to a chain of conditioned
reflexes, but I could not say that his skill was so reducible, because
by his skill I only mean to say that he can tumble. For "the clown
can tumble," it is possible, if simplistic, to write "(this organism) can
(produce the described reflex series)," but it is possible to get the "can"
out of the sentence only by replacing it with "is able to," "has the capacity
to," etc., which is not a reduction but merely an immaterial shift
from a verbal to an adjectival or nounal form. All one can do in the analysis
of skills is to show the way in which they are (or are not) dependent
upon various factors such as nervous system complexity, repressed
desires to exhibit, the existence of social institutions such as circuses, or
the presence of a cultural tradition of mimicking clumsiness for the purposes
of satire. Once dispositional predicates are admitted into scientific
description they are not eliminated by shifts in the "level" of description
employed. And, with the recognition of this fact, a whole range of
pseudoproblems, false issues, and unrealistic fears can simply be set
aside.
In perhaps no area of inquiry is such an avoidance of manufactured
paradoxes more useful than that of the study of mental evolution. Burdened
in the past by almost all the classic anthropological fallaciesethnocentrism,
an overconcern with human uniqueness, imaginatively
reconstructed history, a superorganic concept of culture, a priori stages
of evolutionary change-the whole search for the origins of human
13 M. Mead, "Comment," in Discussions in Child Development, ed. J. Tanner
and B. Inhelder (New York, n.d.), 1 :480-503.
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 61
mentality has tended to fall into disrepute, or at any rate to be neglected.
But legitimate questions-and how man came to have his mind
is a legitimate question-are not invalidated by misconceived answers.
So far as anthropology is concerned, at least, one of the most important
advantages of a dispositional answer to the question, "What is mind?"
is that it permits us to reopen a classic issue without reviving classic
controversies.
II
Over the past half century, two views of the evolution of the human
mind, both inadequate, have been current. The first is the thesis that the
sort of human thought processes Freud called "primary"-substitution,
reversal, condensation, and so on-are phylogenetically prior to those
he called "secondary"--directed, logically ordered, reasoning, and so
on.l4 Within the confines of anthropology, this thesis has been based on
the assumption that it is possible simply to identify patterns of culture
and modes of thought. !�> On such an assumption, groups of people lacking
the cultural resources of modern science which have been, at least
in certain contexts, so effectively employed in directive reasoning in the
West are considered ipso facto to lack the very capacity for intellection
these resources serve; as though the confinement of the Arapesh to combinations
of "one," "two," and "dog" were a result rather than a cause
of their lack of mathematical facility. If one then adds to this argument
the invalid empirical generalization that tribal peoples employ whatever
meager culture resources they do have for intellection less frequently,
less persistently, and less circumspectly than do Western peoples, the
proposition that primary process thinking proceeds secondary process
thinking phylogenetically needs only the final mistake of viewing tribal
peoples as primitive forms of humanity, "living fossils," to complete
it. J6
14 S. Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams," trans. in The Basic Writings of
Sigmund Freud, ed. A. A. Brill (New York., 1938), pp. 179-548; S. Freud, "Formulations
Regarding Two Principles in Mental Functioning," in Collected Papers
of Sigmund Freud (London, 1946), 4: 13-27.
IS L. Levy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (London, 1923).
16 In addition, this proposition has been supported, as Hallowell (A. I. Hallowell,
"The Recapitulation Theory and Culture," reprinted in Culture and Experi-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
It was in reaction to this tissue of errors that the second view of
human mental evolution arose, namely, that not only is the existence of
the human mind in essentially its modern form a prerequisite for the acquisition
of culture, but the growth of culture in itself has been without
any significance for mental evolution:
The bird gave up a pair of walking limbs to acquire wings. It added a new
faculty by transforming part of an old one. . . . The airplane, on the contrary,
gave men a new faculty without diminishing or even impairing any of
those they had previously possessed. It led to no visible bodily changes, no
alterations of mental capacity.t7
But, in turn, this argument implies two corollaries, one of which, the
doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind, has found increasing empirical
substantiation as anthropological research has proceeded, but the
other of which, the "critical point" theory of the appearance of culture,
has become increasingly tenuous. The doctrine of the psychic unity of
mankind, which so far as I am aware, is today not seriously questioned
by any reputable anthropologist, is but the direct contradictory of the
primitive mentality argument; it asserts that there are no essential differences
in the fundamental nature of the thought process among the
various living races of man. If the existence of a modern type of mind
is held to be prerequisite to the acquisition of culture, the universal possession
of culture by all contemporary human groups, of course, makes
of the psychic unity doctrine a simple tautology; but whether genuinely
tautological or not, it is a proposition for whose empirical validity the
ethnographic and psychological evidence is altogether overwhelming. 1s
As for the critical point theory of the appearance of culture, it postulates
that the development of the capacity for acquiring culture was a
sudden, aU-or-none type of occurrence in the phylogeny of the prience,
by A. I. Hallowell [Philadelphia, 1939] , pp. 14-3 1) has pointed out, by an
uncritical application of Haeckel's now rejected "law of recapitulation," in which
presumed parallels in the thought of children, psychotics, and savages were used
as evidence of the phylogenetic priority of autism. For suggestions that primary
processes are not even ontogenetically prior to secondary ones. see: H. Hartmann,
"Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation," trans. and abridged in
Organization and Pathology of Thought, ed. D. Rappaport (New York, 195 1), pp.
362-396; and H. Hartmann, E. Kris, and R. Lowenstein, "Comments on the Formation
of Psychic Structure," in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New
York, 1946), 2: 1 1-38.
1 7 A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York, 1948).
1 8 C. Kluckhohn, "Universal Categories of Culture," in Anthropology Today,
ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago, 1953), pp. 507-523; see also, Kroeber, Anthropology,
p. 573.
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind
mates.J9 At some specific moment in the new unrecoverable history of
hominidization a portentous, but in genic or anatomical terms probably
quite minor, organic alteration took place-presumably in cortical
structure-in which an animal whose parents had not been disposed "to
communicate, to learn and to teach, to generalize from the endless chain
of discrete feelings and attitudes" was so disposed and "therewith he
began to be able to act as a receiver and transmitter and begin the accumulation
that is culture." 20 With him culture was born, and, once born,
set on its own course so as to grow wholly independently of the further
organic evolution of man. The whole process of the creation of
modern man's capacity for producing and using culture, his most distinctive
mental attribute, is conceptualized as one of a marginal quantitative
change giving rise to a radical qualitative difference, as when
water, reduced degree by degree without any loss of fluidity suddenly
freezes at 0°C., or when a taxiing plane gains sufficient speed to launch
itself into flight.21
But we are talking of neither water nor airplanes, and the question is
can the sharp line between enculturated man and nonenculturated nonman
th'at this view implies in fact be drawn, or, if we must have analogies,
would not a more historical one, such as the unbroken gradual
rise of modern out of medieval England, be more apt. Within the physical
branch of anthropology, the doubt that one can talk about the appearance
of man "as if he had suddenly been promoted from colonel to
brigadier general, and had a date of rank" has grown with increasing
rapidity as the Australopithecine fossils originally of South Africa but
now quite widely found, have come to be placed more and more in the
hominid 1ine.22 These fossils, which date from the upper Pliocene and
lower Pleistocene periods of three or four million years ago, show a
striking mosaic of primitive and advanced morphological characteristics,
in which the most outstanding features are a pelvis and leg formation
strikingly similar to that of modern man and a cranial capacity
hardly larger than that of living apes.23 Although the initial tendency
1 9 Kroeber, Anthropology, pp. 7 1 -72.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid; White, The Science of Culture, p. 33.
22 W. W. Howells, "Concluding Remarks of the Chairman," in Cold Spring
Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 1 5 ( 1950):79-86.
23 On the original discoveries of Australopithecines, see R. A. Dart, Adventures
with the Missing Link (New York, 1 959); for a recent review, see P. V.
Tobias, "The Taxonomy and Phylogeny of the Australopithecines," in Taxonomy
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
was to regard this conjunction of a "manlike" bipedal locomotive system
and an "apelike" brain as indicating that the Australopithecines
represented an aberrant and ill-fated line of development separate from
both hominids and pongids, the contemporary consensus follows Howells'
conclusion that "the first hominids were small-brained, newly bipedal,
protoaustralopith hominoids, and that what we have always meant
by 'man' represents later forms of this group with secondary adaptations
in the direction of large brains and modified skeletons of the same
form." 24
Now, these more-or-less erect, small-brained hominids, their hands
freed from locomotion, manufactured tools and probably hunted small
animals. But that they could have had a developed culture comparable
to that of, say, the Australian aborigine or possessed language in the
modern sense of the term with 500 cubic centimeters of brain is unlikely.2:;
In the Australopithecines we seem to have, therefore, an odd
sort of "man" who evidently was capable of acquiring some elements of
culture-simple toolmaking, sporadic "hunting," and perhaps some system
of communication more advanced than that of contemporary apes
and less advanced than that of true speech-but not others, a state of affairs
which casts fairly serious doubt on the viability of the "critical
point" theory.26 In fact, as the Homo sapiens brain is about three times
as large as that of the Australopithecines, the greater part of human
cortical expansion has followed, not preceded, the "beginning" of culture,
a rather inexplicable circumstance if the capacity for culture is
considered to have been the unitary outcome of a quantitatively slight
and Phylogeny of Old World Primates with Reference to the Origin of Man, ed.
B. Chiarelli (Turin, 1968), pp. 277-3 15.
24 By "hominoid" is meant the superfamily of animals, living and extinct, to
which both man and the pongid apes (gorilla, orang, chimpanzee, and gibbon)
belong, and by "hominid," the family of animals, living and extinct, to which
man belongs, but not the apes. For the "aberrant" view, see E. Hooton, Up From
the Ape, rev. ed. (New York, 1 949); for the consensus, Howells, "Concluding Remarks
of the Chairman." The statement that the Australopithecines were the
"first hominids" would now, I think, have to be modified.
25 For a general review, see A. I. Hallowell, "Self, Society and Culture in Phylogenetic
Perspective," in The Evolution of Man, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1960), pp.
309-372. In the past decade, the whole discussion has proceeded with accelerating
speed and increasing precision. For a series of references, see the inventory
article by R. L. Holloway and Elizabeth Szinyei-Merse, "Human Biology: a Catholic
Review," in Biennial Review of Anthropology, 1 971 , ed. B. J . Siegel (Stanford,
1 972), pp. 83-166.
26 For a general discussion of "critical point" theory in light of recent anthropological
work, see C. Geertz, "The Transition to Humanity," in Horizons of
Anthropology, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1964), pp. 37-48.
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind
but qualitatively metastatic change of the freezing-of-water sort.27 Not
only has it now become misleading to employ the appointment of rank
image for the appearance of man, but "it is equally doubtful whether we
should any longer talk in terms of the 'appearance of culture,' as if culture,
too, along with 'man,' had suddenly leaped into existence." 2s
As paradox is a sign of antecedent error, the fact that one of its corollaries
seems to be valid while the other does not suggests that the thesis
which holds mental evolution and cultural accumulation to be two
wholly separate processes, the first having been essentially completed
before the second began, is itself incorrect. And if this is the case, it becomes
necessary to find some way in which we can rid ourselves of such
a thesis without at the same time undermining the doctrine of psychic
unity, in whose absence "we should have to consign most of history, anthropology
and sociology to the scrap heap and begin over again with a
psychosomatic genetic interpretation of man and his varieties." 29 We
need to be able both to deny any significant relationship between
(group) cultural achievement and innate mental capacity in the present,
and to affirm such a relationship in the past.
The means by which to accomplish this oddly two-headed task lies in
what may appear to be a simple technical trick, but is actually an important
methodological reorientation, the choice of a more finely graduated
time scale in terms of which to discriminate the stages of evolutionary
change which have produced Homo sapiens out of an Eocene
protohominoid. Whether one sees the appearance of the capacity for
culture as a more-or-less abrupt, instantaneous occurrence, or a slowly
moving, continuous development, obviously depends, at least in part, on
the size of the elementary units in one's time scale; for a geologist, measuring
by eons, the whole evolution of the primates may look like an
undifferentiated qualitative burst. In fact, the argument against the critical
point theory might be more precisely phrased in terms of a complaint
that it derives from an inappropriate choice of time scale, a time
scale whose basal intervals are too large for a refined analysis of recent
evolutionary history, in the same way as a biologist foolish enough to
27 S. L. Washburn, "Speculations on the Interrelations of Tools and Biological
Evolution," in The Evolution of Man·s Capacity for Culture, ed. J. M. Spuhler
(Detroit, 1 959), pp. 2 1 -3 1 .
28 A. I . Hallowell, "Culture, Personality and Society," in Anthropology Today,
ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago, 1 953), pp. 597-620. Cf. A. I. Hallowell, "Behavioral
Evolution and the Emergence of the Self," in Evolution and Anthropology: A
Centennial Appraisal, ed. B. J . Meggers (Washington, D.C., 1 959), pp. 36-60.
29 Kroeber, Anthropology, p. 573.
66 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
study human maturation with decades as his interval would see adulthood
as a sudden transformation of childhood and miss adolescence al­
together.
A good example of such a cavalier approach to temporal considerations
is implicit in what is probably the most frequent kind of scientific
data invoked in support of the "difference in kind rather than difference
in degree" view of human culture; the comparison of man with his closest
living relatives, the pongids, and particularly the chimpanzee. Man
can talk, can symbolize, can acquire culture, this argument goes, but the
chimpanzee (and, by extension, all less-endowed animals) cannot.
Therefore, man is unique in this regard, and insofar as mentality is concerned
"we are confronted by a series of leaps, not an ascending
continuum." ao But this overlooks the fact that, although the pongids
may be man's closest relatives, "close" is an elastic term and, given a
realistic time scale from the evolutionary point of view, they are really
not so close at all, last common ancestor being at the very least an
upper Pliocene (and at the very most an upper Oligocene) ape and phyletic
differentiation having proceeded with ever-increasing rapidity since
that time. The fact that chimpanzees do not talk is both interesting and
important, but to draw from that fact the conclusion that speech is an
ali-or-nothing-at-all phenomenon is to collapse anywhere from one to
forty million years into a single instant of time and lose the whole presapiens
hominid line as surely as our biologist lost adolescence. Interspecific
comparison of living animals is, if handled with care, a legitimate
and, in fact, indispensable device for deducing general evolutionary
trends; but in the same way that the finite wave length of light
limits the discrimination possible in physical measurements, so the
fact that the closest living relatives of man are at best pretty far removed
cousins (not ancestors) limits the degree of refinement in the
measure of evolutionary change in the hominoid line when one confines
oneself entirely to contrasts between extant forms.a t
If, on the contrary, we spread hominid phylogeny out along a more
appropriate time scale, training our attention on what seems to have
happened in the "human" line since the radiation of the hominoids, and
30 L. A. White, "Four Stages in the Evolution of Minding," in The Evolution
of Man, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1 960), pp. 239-253; the argument is very common.
31 For a general discussion of the dangers involved in an uncritical use of
comparisons among contemporaneous forms to generate historical hypotheses, see
G. Simpson, "Some Principles of Historical Biology Bearing on Human Organisms,"
in Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 1 5 ( 1 950):55-66.
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind
in particular since the emergence of Australopithecus toward the end of
the Pliocene, a subtler analysis of the evolutionary growth of mind is
made possible. Most crucially, it then becomes apparent that not only
was cultural accumulation under way well before organic development
ceased, but that such accumulation very likely played an active role in
shaping the final stages of that development. Though it is apparently
true enough that the invention of the airplane led to no visible bodily
changes, no alterations of (innate) mental capacity, this was not necessarily
the case for the pebble tool or the crude chopper, in whose wake
seems to have come not only more erect stature, reduced dentition, and
a more thumb-dominated hand, but the expansion of the human brain to
its present size.32 Because tool manufacture puts a premium on manual
skill and foresight, its introduction must have acted to shift selection
pressures so as to favor the rapid growth of the forebrain as, in all likelihood,
did the advances in social organization, communication, and
moral regulation which there is reason to believe also occurred during
this period of overlap between cultural and biological change. Nor were
such nervous system changes merely quantitative; alterations in the interconnections
among neurons and their manner of functioning may have
been of even greater importance than the simple increase in their number.
Details aside, however-and the bulk of them remain to be
determined-the point is that the innate, generic constitution of modern
man (what used, in a simpler day, to be called "human nature") now
appears to be both a cultural and a biological product in that "it is
probably more correct to think of much of our structure as a result of
culture rather than to think of men anatomically like ourselves slowly
discovering culture." 33
The Pleistocene period, with its rapid and radical variations in climate,
land formations, and vegetation, has long been recognized to be a
period in which conditions were ideal for the speedy and efficient evolutionary
development of man ; now it seems also to have been a period in
which a cultural environment increasingly supplemented the natural environment
in the selection process so as to further accelerate the rate of
hominid evolution to an unprecedented speed. The Ice Age appears not
to have been merely a time of receding brow ridges and shrinking jaws,
but a time in which were forged nearly all those characteristics of man's
existence which are most graphically human: his thoroughly encephe-
32 Washburn, "Speculations on the Interrelations."
33 Ibid.
68 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
lated nervous system, his incest-taboo-based social structure, and his capacity
to create and use symbols. The fact that these distinctive features
of humanity emerged together in complex interaction with one another
rather than serially as for so long supposed is of exceptional importance
in the interpretation of human mentality, because it suggests that man's
nervous system does not merely enable him to acquire culture, it positively
demands that he do so if it is going to function at all. Rather than
culture acting only to supplement, develop, and extend organically
based capacities logically and genetically prior to it, it would seem to be
ingredient to those capacities themselves. A cultureless human being
would probably turn out to be not an intrinsically talented though unfulfilled
ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently unworkable monstrosity.
Like the cabbage it so much resembles, the Homo sapiens
brain, having arisen within the framework of human culture, would not
be viable outside of it. 34
In fact, this type of reciprocally creative relationship between somatic
and extrasomatic phenomena seems to have been of crucial significance
during the whole of the primate advance. That any (living or extinct)
infrahominid primates can be said to possess true culture-in the
narrowed sense of "an ordered system of meaning and symbols . . . in
terms of which individuals define their world, express their feelings and
make their judgments"-is, of course, extremely doubtful.35 But that
apes and monkeys are such through-and-through social creatures as to
be unable to achieve emotional maturity in isolation, to acquire a great
many of their most important performance capacities through imitative
learning, and to develop distinctive, intraspecifically variable collective
social traditions which are transmitted as a nonbiological heritage from
generation to generation is now well established.36 As DeVore remarks
in summary of the available material, "Primates literally have a 'social
brain'." 37 Thus, well before it was influenced by cultural forces as such,
34 As for "wolf-children" and other feral fantasies, see K. Lorenz, "Comment,"
in Discussions on Child Development, ed. J. Tanner and B. Inhelder (New York,
n.d.), 1 :95-96.
35 See Chapter 6 in this book, p. 145.
36 On isolation, see H. Harlow, "Basic Social Capacity of Primates," in The
Evolution of Man's Capacity for Culture, ed. J . Spuhler (Detroit, 1959), pp.
40-52; on imitative learning, H. W. Nissen, "Problems of Mental Evolution 'in
the Primates," in The Non-Human Primates and Human Evolution, ed. J. Gavan
(Detroit, 1 95.5), pp. 99- 1 09.
31 B. I. DeVore, "Primate Behavior and Social Evolution" (unpublished, n.d.).
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 6g
the evolution of what eventually developed into the human nervous system
was positively shaped by social ones.38
On the other hand, however, a denial of a simple independence of sociocultural
and biological processes in pre-Homo sapiens man does not
imply a rejection of the doctrine of psychic unity, because phyletic differentiation
within the hominid line effectively ceased with the terminal
Pleistocene spread of Homo sapiens over nearly the whole world and
the extinction of whatever other Homo species may have been in existence
at that time. Thus, although some minor evolutionary changes
have no doubt occurred since the rise of modern man, all living peoples
form part of a single polytypical species and, as such, vary anatomically
and physiologically within a very narrow range.39 The combination of
weakened mechanisms of reproductive isolation, an extended period of
individual sexual immaturity, and the accumulation of culture to the
point where its importance as an adaptive factor almost wholly dominated
its role as a selective one, produced such an extreme deceleration
of the hominid rate of evolution that the development of any significant
variation in innate mental capacity among human subgroups seems to
have been precluded. With the unequivocal triumph of Homo sapiens
and the cessation of the glaciations, the link between organic and cultural
change was, if not severed, at least greatly weakened. Since that
time organic evolution in the human line has slowed to a walk, while
the growth of culture had continued to proceed with ever-increasing
rapidity. It is, therefore, unnecessary to postulate either a discontinuous,
"difference-in-kind" pattern of human evolution or a nonselective
role for culture during all phases of hominid development in order to
preserve the empirically established generalization that "as far as their
[inborn ] capacity to learn, maintain, transmit, and transform culture is
concerned, different groups of Homo sapiens must be regarded as
equally competent." 40 Psychic unity may no longer be a tautology, but
it is still a fact.
38 Some subprimate mammals also follow a definitely social mode of life, so
that this whole process probably predates primates altogether. The social behavior
of some birds and insects is of less immediate relevance, however, because
these orders are tangential to the human developmental line.
39 M. F. A. Montagu, "A Consideration of the Concept of Race," in Cold
Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 1 5 ( 1950):3 1 5-334.
40 M. Mead, "Cultural Determinants of Behavior," in Culture and Behavior,
ed. A. Roe and G. Simpson (New Haven, 1 958).
70 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
III
One of the more encouraging-if strangely delayed-developments in
the behavioral sciences is the current attempt of physiological psychology
to arouse itself from its long enthrallment with the wonders of the
reflex arc. The conventional picture of a sensory impulse making its
way through a maze of synapses to a motor nerve culmination is coming
to be revised, a quarter century after its most illustrious proponent
pointed out that it was inadequate to explain the integrative aspects of
the behavior of a sparrow or a sheep dog, much less that of a man.41
Sherrington's solution was a spectral mind to pull things together (as
Hull's was a no less mysterious automatic switchboard).42 But today the
stress is upon a more verifiable construct: the concept of rhythmic,
spontaneous, centrally proceeding pattern of nervous activity upon
which peripheral stimulus configurations are superimposed and out of
which authoritative effector commands emerge. Advancing under the
banner of "an active organism," and supported by the closed circuit anatomizing
of Cayal and de No, 43 this new persuasion emphasizes the
way in which the ongoing processes both of the brain and subordinate
neuronal aggregates select precepts, fix experiences, and order responses
so as to produce a delicately modulated pattern of behavior:
The working of the central nervous system is a hierarch ic affair in which
functions at the higher levels do not deal directly with the ultimate structural
units, such as neurons or motor units, but operate by activating lower
patterns that have their own relatively autonomous structural unity. The
same is true for the sensory input, which does not project itself down to the
last final path of motor neurons, but operates by affecting, distorting, and
somehow modifying the pre-existing, preformed patterns of central coord ination,
which, in turn, then confer their distortions upon the lower patterns of
effection and so on. The fi nal output is then the outcome of this hierarchical
passing down of distortions and modifications of intrinsically performed pat-
41 C. Sherrington, Man.
42 C. L. Hull, Principles.
43 L. de N6, "Cerebral Cortex Architecture," in The Physiology of the Nervous
System, ed. J. F. Fulton (New York, 1943); J. S. Bruner, "Neural Mechanisms
in Perception," in The Brain and Human Behavior, ed. H. Solomon et al.
(Baltimore, 1 958), pp. 1 1 8-143; R. W. Gerard, "Becoming: The Residue of
Change," in The Evolution of Man, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1 960), pp. 255-268; K.
S. Lashley, "The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior," in Cerebral Mechanisms
and Behavior, ed. L. Jeffress (New York, 1 95 1 ), pp. 1 12- 1 36.
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 7 1
terns of excitation which are in no way replicas of the input. The structure
of the input does not produce the structure of the output, but merely modifies
intrinsic nervous activities that have a structural organization of their
own.44
Further development of this theory of an autonomously excited, hierarchically
organized central nervous system not only promises to make
the brisk competence of Sherrington's sheep dog as it collects its scattered
flock from the hillside less of a physiological mystery, but it
should also prove valuable in providing a credible neurological underpinning
for the complex of skills and propensities which constitute the
human mind; the ability to follow a logic proof or a tendency to become
flustered when called upon to speak demand more than a reflex arc,
conditioned or otherwise, to support them biologically. And, as Hebb
has pointed out, the very notion of "higher" and "lower" evolutionary
levels of mentality seems in itself to imply a comparable gradation in
degree of central nervous system autonomy:
I hope I do not shock biological scientists by saying that one feature of the
phylogenetic development is an increasing evidence of what is known in
some circles as free will; in my student days also referred to as the Harvard
Law, which asserts that any well-trained experimental animal, on controlled
stimulation, will do as he damn well pleases. A more scholarly formulation
is that the higher animal is less stimulus-bound. Brain action is less fully
controlled by afferent input, behavior therefore less fully predictable from
the situation in which the animal is put. A greater role of ideational activity
is recognizable in the animal's ability to "hold" a variety of stimulations for
some time before acting on them and in the phenomenon of purposive behavior.
There is more autonomous activity in the higher brain, and more selectivity
as to which afferent activity will be integrated with the "stream of
thought," the dominant, ongoing activity in control of behavior. Traditionally,
we say that the subject is "interested" in this part of the environment,
not interested in that; in these terms, the higher animal has a wider variety
of interests and the interest of the moment plays a greater part in behavior,
which means a greater unpredictability as to what stimulus will be responded
to and as to the form of the response.45
These overall evolutionary trends-increasing ability to focus attention,
delay response, vary interest, sustain purpose, and, in general, deal
44 P. Weiss, "Comment on Dr. Lashley's Paper," in Cerebral Mechanisms in
Behavior, ed. L. A. Jeffress (New York, 1 95 1), pp. 140- 1 42.
45 D. 0. Hebb, "The Problem of Consciousness and Introspection," in Brain
Mechanics and Consciousness, ed. E. Adrian et al. (Oxford, 1954), pp. 402-4 17.
References omitted.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
positively with the complexities of present stimulation-culminate in
man to make of him the most active of active organisms, as well as the
most unpredictable. The extreme intricacy, flexibility, and comprehensiveness
of what Kluckhohn and Murray have aptly called regnant processes
in the human brain-the processes which make these abilities
physically possible-are but the outcome of a definable phylogenetic
development which is traceable back at least to the coelenterates.46
Though they lack a central nervous concentration-a brain-and therefore
the various parts of the animal operate in relative independence,
each possessing its own set of sensory, neural, and motor elements,
these humble jellyfish, sea anemones, and the like nevertheless show a
surprising degree of intrinsic modulation of nervous activity: a strong
stimulus received in the daytime may be followed by locomotion during
the following night; certain corals experimentally subjected to excessive
stimulation luminesce for several minutes afterward with a spontaneous
frenzy which suggests "beserking" ; and regularized stimulation may
lead, through some still obscure form of "memory" to a coordination of
activity in different muscles and to a patterned recurrence of activity
over timeY In the higher invertebrates (crustaceans, etc.) multiple pathways,
graded synaptic potentials, and triggered responses all appear,
permitting precise pacemaker control of internal functions as in the
lobster heart, while with the arrival of the lower vertebrates both peripheral
sensory and effector elements and neuronal conduction between
them-i.e., the celebrated reflex arc-are essentially perfected.48 And,
finally, the bulk of the fundamental innovations in the design of nervous
circuits-i.e., closed loops, the superposition of higher level loops on
lower ones, and so on-probably were accomplished with the arrival of
the mammals, at which time at least the basic differentiations of the forebrain
were also achieved.49 In functional terms, the whole process
seems to be one of a relatively steady expansion and diversification of
endogenous nervous activity and the consequent increasing centraliza-
46 C. Kluckhohn and H. Murray, eds., Personality in Nature, Society and Culture
(New York, 1 948); T. H. Bullock, "Evolution of Neurophysiological Mechanisms,"
in Behavior and Evolution, ed. A. Roe and G. Simpson (New Haven,
1958), pp. 165- 177.
47 Bullock, "Evolution."
48 Ibid.; Gerard, "Becoming."
49 Bullock, "Evolution"; K. H. Pribram, "Comparative Neurology and the
Evolution of Behavior," in Behavior and Evolution, ed. A. Roe and G. Simpson
(New Haven, 1958), pp. 140- 164.
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 73
tion of what we:-e previously more isolated, independently acting part­
processes.
What sort of neural evolution has taken place during the phyletic differentiation
of the mammals-i.e., in particular, during the advance of
the primates and hominids-is evidently rather less clear and more controversial,
however. On the one hand, Gerard has argued that the
changes have been almost entirely quantitative, a growth in the sheer
number of neurons, as reflected in the rapid expansion of the brain size:
The further gains in capacity, seen most strikingly in the primate line and
culminating in man are due to simple increase in numbers rather than to
improvement in units or patterns. The increasing brain size parallels richer
performance, even for particular regions and functions (e.g., tongue motor
area and speech), is a commonplace; how this operates is less clear. Sheer
increase in number, without secondary specification (which does also occur),
might seem unable to generate new capacities but only to intensify old ones,
but this is not the case. . . . In the brain, an increase in the anatomical
neurone population raises the limit on the physiological neurone reserve and
so allows greater variety of selection and greater richness of analysis and
combination expressed in modifiable and insightful behavior.�o
But Bullock, though agreeing that the nervous systems of the higher
animals and man show no important differences in terms of known neurophysiological
mechanisms or architecture, sharply questions this point
of view, and argues that there is a pressing need to search for yet undiscovered
parameters of nervous functioning, "emergent levels of physiological
relations between neurons in masses," to account for the
subtleties of behavior in advanced organisms:
Though we cannot point to fundamentally new elements in the neuronal
mechanisms of the higher centers, still it is difficult to assume that their
greatly enlarged accomplishments are solely attributable to the great increase
in numbers and interconnections between them, unless this in itself
brings on new properties and mechanisms. Many apparently assume as a
first approximation that the main factor in increasing behavioral complexity
in evolution is the number of neurons-even invoking a kind of critical
mass which permits new levels of behavior . . . [but ] it seems clear that
the number of neurons correlates with behavioral complexity so poorly as
to explain little unless we add as the really essential part that certain kinds
of neurons, not now definable, or-what is the same thing-certain kinds of
newer properties of consequences or neuronal architecture, are the impor-
5o Gerard, "Becoming"; see also R. W. Gerard, "Brains and Behavior," in The
Evolution of Man's Capacity for Culture, ed. J. Spuhler (Detroit, 1959), pp.
14-20.
74 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tant substratum of advance. . . . I do not believe that our present physiology
of neurons, extrapolated, can account for behavior. The main factor in
evolutionary advance is not just numbers of cells and connections. . . . Our
hope lies in the discovery of new parameters of neuronal systems.5 1
To an outsider, perhaps the most striking aspect of this controversy is
the degree to which both parties seem somewhat uneasy and vaguely
dissatisfied with the unalloyed versions of their own argument, the degree
to which it seems not to be entirely plausible even to themselves.
On the one side there is an admission that the precise nature of the relation
between brain size and behavioral Complexity is indeed unclear
and some sotto voce reservations about "secondary specification"; on
the other, a frank puzzlement concerning the apparent absence of novel
mechanisms in advanced nervous systems and a hopeful murmuring
about "emergent. properties." There is actually something of an agreement
that the attribution of the secular increase in mammalian mental
capacity solely and simply to a gross increase in neuron population
taxes credulity. The difference is that in one case doubts are quieted by
a stress on the fact that a parallelism between increasing brain size and
richer performance does, anyhow, obtain; while, on the other, doubts
are accentuated by a stress on the fact that something seems to be missing
to make this parallelism satisfactorily explicable.
This issue may eventually be clarified as Gerard suggests, by advances
in work with computer circuits where performance does improve
with a simple multiplication of identical units; or, as Bullock suggests,
by further refinements in the analysis of chemical differences between
nerve cells.52 But it is even more likely that the main avenue to its resolution
lies in the abandonment of the wholly nativistic conceptualization
of nervous functioning in the higher mammals which seems to be
implicit in both these approaches. The synchronic emergence in primates
of an expanded forebrain, developed forms of social organization,
and, at least after Australopithecines got their hands on tools,
institutionalized patterns of culture indicates that the standard procedure
of treating biological, social, and cultural parameters serially-the
first being taken as primary to the second, and the second to the third
-is ill-advised. On the contrary, these so-called levels should be seen
as reciprocally interrelated and considered conjointly. And if this is
done, the sort of novel properties we shall search for within the central
51 Bullock, "Evolution."
52 R. W. Gerard, "Brains and Behavior"; Bullock, "Evolution."
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 75
nervous system to serve as a physical basis for the striking development
of autonomous fields of recurrent neural excitation in primates generally,
and in man particularly, will differ radically from the sort of properties
we would seek were we to regard those fields as "logically and genetically
prior" to society and culture, and therefore requiring a full
determination in terms of intrinsic physiological parameters alone. Perhaps
we have been asking too much of neurons; or, if not too much, at
least the wrong things.
In fact, so far as man is concerned, one of the most striking characteristics
of his central nervous system is the relative incompleteness with
which, acting within the confines of autogenous parameters alone, it is
able to specify behavior. By and large, the lower an animal, the more it
tends to respond to a "threatening" stimulus with an intrinsically connected
series of performed activities which taken together comprise a
comparatively stereotyped-which is not to say unlearned-"ftight" or
"fight" response.5=1 Man's intrinsic response to such a stimulus tends to
consist, however, of a diffuse, variably intense, "fear" or "rage" excitability
accompanied by few, if any, automatically preset, well-defined behavioral
sequences.54 Like a frightened animal, a frightened man may
run, hide, bluster, dissemble, placate, or, desperate with panic, attack;
but in his case the precise patterning of such overt acts is guided predominantly
by cultural rather than genetic templates. In the always diagnostic
area of sex, where control of behavior proceeds phylogenetically
from gonadal, to pituitary, to central nervous system prepotency, a
similar evolutionary trend away from fixed activity sequences toward
generalized arousal and "increasing flexibility and modifiability of sexual
patterns" is apparent; a trend of which the justly famous cultural
53 K. Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring (London, 1952).
54 D. 0. Hebb and W. R. Thompson, "The Social Significance of Animal Studies,"
in Handbook of Psychology (Reading, Mass., 1 954), pp. 532-56 1 . The uncritical
use of the term "instinct" so as to confuse three separate (but not unrelated)
contrasts-that between behavior patterns which rest on learning and those
which do not; that between behavior patterns which are innate (i.e., an outcome
of genetically programmed · physical processes) and those which are not (i.e., an
outcome of extragenetically programmed physical processes); and that between
behavior patterns which are inftexible (stereotyped) and those which are ftexible
(variable)-has led to an incorrect assumption that to say a behavior pattern is
innate is to say that it is inflexible in its expression. (See K. H. Pribram, "Comparative
Neurology and Evolution"; and F. A. Beach, "The De-scent of Instinct," Psychol.
Rev. 62 ( 1955] :401-410.) Here, the term "intrinsic," as against "extrinsic," is used
to characterize behavior which, on comparative grounds, seems to rest largely, or
at least preponderantly, on innate dispositions, independently ofquestions of learning
or flexibility as such.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
variation in the sexual practices of man would seem to represent a logical
extension.55 Thus, in apparent paradox, an increasing autonomy,
hierarchical complexity, and regnancy of ongoing central nervous system
activity seem to go hand in hand with a less fully detailed determination
of such activity by the structure of the central nervous system in
and of itself; i.e., intrinsically. All of which suggests that some of the
more important developments in neural evolution which occurred during
the period of overlap between biological and sociocultural change
may turn out to consist of the appearance of properties which improve
the performance capacity of the central nervous system but reduce its
functional self-sufficiency.
From this standpoint, the accepted view that mental functioning is essentially
an intracerebral process, which can only be secondarily assisted
or amplified by the various artificial devices which that process
has enabled man to invent, appears to be quite wrong. On the contrary,
a fully specified, adaptively sufficient definition of regnant neural processes
in terms of intrinsic parameters being impossible, the human
brain is thoroughly dependent upon cultural resources for its very operation;
and those resources are, consequently, not adjuncts to, but constituents
of, mental activity. In fact, thinking as an overt, public act, involving
the purposeful manipulation of objective materials, is probably
fundamental to human beings; and thinking as a covert, private act, and
without recourse to such materials, a derived, though not unuseful, capability.
As the observation of how school children learn to calculate
shows, adding numbers in your head is actually a more sophisticated
mental accomplishment than adding them with a paper and pencil,
through an arrangement of tally sticks, or by counting, piggy-fashion,
one's fingers and toes. Reading aloud is a more elementary achievement
55 F. A. Beach, "Evolutionary Aspects of Psycho-Endocrinology,'' in Culture
and Behavior, ed. A. Roe and G. Simpson (New Haven, 1958), pp. 8 1 -102; C. S.
Ford and F. A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York, 195 1). But,
again, this general trend appears already well established in the subhuman primates:
"Some [male] chimpanzees have to learn to copulate. It has been noted
that sexually mature but inexperienced males placed with the receptive female
show signs of marked sexual excitement, but the resulting attempts to acco�p)jsh
copulation are usually unsuccessful. The naive male appears incapable of carrying
out his part of the mating act, and it has been suggested that a great deal of
practice and learning is essential to biologically effective coition in this species.
Adult male rodents which have been reared in isolation copulate normally the
first time they are offered an estrous female." [F. A. Beach, "Evolutionary
Changes in the Physiological Control of Mating Behavior in Mammals," Psycho/.
Rev. 54 (1947):293-3 15.] For some vivid descriptions of generalized fear and
rage in chimpanzees, see Hebb and Thompson, "Social Significance."
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 77
than reading to oneself, the latter ability having only arisen, as a matter
of fact, in the Middle Ages.56 And a similar point about speech has
often been made; except in our less naive moments, we are all like Forester's
little old lady-we don't know what we think until we see what
we say.
It has sometimes been argued against this last point that "the comparative
evidence, as well as the literature on aphasia, clearly makes
thought prior to speech, not conditional on it." 57 But, though true
enough in itself, this does not undermine the general position taken
here-namely, that human culture is an ingredient not supplementary
to human thought-for several reasons. First, the fact that subhuman
animals learn to reason with sometimes startling effectiveness, without
learning to speak, does not prove that men can do so, any more than the
fact that a rat can copulate without the mediation of imitative learning
or practice proves that a chimpanzee can do so. Second, aphasics are
people who have learned to speak and to interiorize speech, and then
lost (or, more usually, partially lost) the former capacity, not people
who have never learned to speak at all. Third, and most important,
speech in the specific sense of vocalized talk is far from being the sole
public instrumentality available to individuals projected into a pre-existing
cultural milieu. Such phenomena as Helen Keller learning to think
through a combination of the manipulation of such cultural objects as
mugs and water taps and the purposeful patterning (by Miss Sullivan) of
tactile sensations on her hand, or a prespeech child developing the concept
of ordinal number through the setting up of two parallel lines of
matched blocks, demonstrate that what is essential is the existence of an
overt symbol system of any sort.58 For man, in particular, to conceive
of thinking as essentially a private process is to overlook almost completely
what people actually do when they go about reasoning:
Imaginal thinking is neither more nor less than constructing an image of the
environment, running the model faster than the environment, and predicting
that the environment will behave as the model does. . . . The first step i n
the solution of a problem consists in the construction of a model o r image
56 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. 27.
57 Hebb, "Problem of Consciousness and Introspection."
58 On ordinal numbers, see K. S. Lashley, "Persistent Problems in the Evolution
of Mind," Quart. Rev. 24 ( 1 949):28-42. It is perhaps advisable also to point
out explicitly that the view that humans normally learn to talk intelligently aloud
and with others before they learn to "talk" to themselves, in silence, does not involve
either a motor theory of thought or an argument that all coven mentation
takes place in terms of imagined words.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
of the "relevant features" of the [environment ] . These models can be constructed
from many things, including parts of the organic tissue of the body
and, by man, paper· and pencil or actual artifacts. Once a model has been
constructed it can be manipulated under various hypothetical conditions and
constraints. The organism is then able to "observe" the outcome of these
manipulations, and to project them onto the environment so that prediction
is possible. According to this view, an aeronautical engineer is thinking
when he manipulates a model of a new airplane in a wind tunnel. The motorist
is thinking when he runs his finger over a line on a map, the finger
serving as a model of the relevant aspects of the automobile, the map as a
model of the road. External models of this kind are often used in thinking
about complex [environments) . Images used in covert thinking depend
upon the availability of the physico-chemical events of the organism which
must be used to form models.59
It is a further implication of this view of reflective thought as consisting
not of happenings in the head but of a matching of the states and
processes of symbolic models against the states and processes of the
wider world, that it is stimulus deficit which initiates mental activity
and stimulus "discovery" which terminates it.60 The motorist running
his finger over a road map is doing so because he lacks information
about how to get where he is going, and he will cease doing so when he
has acquired that information. The engineer performs his experiments
in the wind tunnel in order to find out how his model airplane behaves
under various artificially produced aerodynamic conditions, and he will
quit performing it if and when he indeed finds out. A man searching for
a coin in his pocket does so because he lacks a coin in hand, and he
stops searching when he gets hold of one-or, of course, when he
comes to the conclusion that the whole project is bootless, because it
happens that there is no coin in his pocket, or that it is uneconomical,
because the effort involved is such that the search "costs more than it
comes to." 6 1 Motivational problems (which involve another sense of
"because") aside, directive reasoning begins in puzzlement and ends in
either the abandonment of inquiry or the resolution of puzzlement:
"The function of reflective thought is . . . to transform a situation in
which there is experienced obscurity . . . of some sort, into a situation
that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious." 62
:;9 E. Galanter and M. Gerstenhaber, "On Thought: The Extrinsic Theory,"
Psycho/. Rev. 63 ( 1956):2 18-227.
60 J. A. Deutsch, "A New Type of Behavior Theory," British Journal of Psychology
44 ( 1 953):304-3 17.
6' 1bid.
62 J. Dewey, Intelligence and the Modern World, ed. J. Ratner (New York,
1 939), p. 85 1 .
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind 79
In sum, human intellection, in the specific sense of directive reasoning,
depends upon the manipulation of certain kinds of cultural resources
in such a manner as to produce (discover, select) environmental
stimuli needed-for whatever purpose-by the organism; it is a search
for information. And this search is the more pressing because of the
high degree of generality of the information intrinsically available to the
organism from genetic sources. The lower an animal, the less it needs to
find out in detail from the environment prior to behavioral performance;
birds need not build wind tunnels to test aerodynamic principles
before learning to fly-those they already "know." The "uniqueness" of
man has often been expressed in terms of how much and how many different
sorts of things he is capable of learning. Although monkeys, pigeons,
and even octopuses may now and then disconcert us with the
rather "human" things they prove capable of learning to do, in a general
way this is true enough. But it is of perhaps even more fundamental
theoretical importance to stress how much and how many things man
has to learn. That, "fetalized," "domesticated," and generally unhardy
as he is, man would be a physically unviable animal independently of
culture has often been pointed out.63 That he would be mentally unviable
as well has been rather less frequently noted.64
All this is no less true for the affective side of human thought than it
is for the intellective. In a series of books and papers, Hebb has developed
the intriguing theory that the human nervous system (and to a correspondingly
lesser extent, that of lower animals) demands a relatively
continuous stream of optimally existing environmental stimuli as a precondition
to competent performance.6:> On the one hand, man's brain
is "not like a calculating machine operated by an electric motor, which
can lie idle, without input, for indefinite periods; instead it must be kept
warmed up and working by a constantly varied input during the waking
period at least, if it is to function effectively." 66 On the other hand,
given the tremendous intrinsic emotional susceptibility of man, such
input cannot be too intense, too varied, too disturbing, because then
63 For example, W. La Barre, The Human Animal (Chicago, 1954).
64 But see J. Dewey, "The Need for a Social Psychology," Psycho/. Rev. 24
(1 91 7):266-277; A. I. Hallowell, "Culture, Personality and Society."
" D. 0. Hebb, "Emotion in M an and Animal: An Analysis of the Intuitive
Process of Recognition," Psycho/. Rev. 53 (1 946):88-106; D. 0. Hebb, The Organization
ofBehavior (New York, 1 949); D. 0. Hebb, "Problem of Consciousness and
Introspection"; D. 0.· Hebb and W. R. Thompson, "Social Significance of Animal
Studies."
" D. 0. Hebb, "Problem of Consciousness and Introspection."
So THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
emotional collapse and a complete breakdown of the thought process
ensue. Both boredom and hysteria are enemies of reason.67
Thus, as "man is the most emotional as wdl as the most rational animal,"
a very careful cultural control of frightening, enraging, suggestive,
etc., stimuli-through taboos, homogenization of behavior, rapid "rationalization"
of strange stimuli in terms of familiar concepts, and so on
-is necessary to prevent continual affective instability, a constant oscillation
between the extremes of passion.68 But, as man cannot
perform efficiently in the absence of a fairly high degree of reasonably
persistent emotional activation, cultural mechanisms assuring the ready
availability of the continually varying sort of sensory experience that
can sustain such activities are equally essential. Institutionalized regulations
against the open display of corpses outside of well-defined contexts
(funerals, etc.) protect a peculiarly high-strung animal against the
fears aroused by death and bodily destruction; watching or participating
in automobile races (not all of which take place at tracks) deliciously
stimulates the same fears. Prize fighting arouses hostile feelings; a firmly
institutionalized interpersonal affability moderates them. Erotic impulses
are titillated by a series of devious artifices of which there is, evidently,
no end; but they are kept from running riot by an insistence on
the private performance of explicitly sexual activities.
But, contrary to what these rather simplistic examples suggest, the
achievement of a workable, well-ordered, clearly articulated emotional
life in man is not a simple matter of ingenious instrumental control, a
kind of clever hydraulic engineering of affect. Rather, it is a matter of
giving specific, explicit, determinate form to the general, diffuse, ongoing
flow of bodily sensation; of imposing upon the continual shifts in
sentience to which we are inherently subject a recognizable, meaningful
order, so that we may not only feel but know what we feel and act ac­
cordingly:
[ It is] mental activity . . . [that] chiefly determines the way a person
meets his surrounding world. Pure sensation-now pain, now pleasurewould
have no unity, and would change the receptivity of the body for future
pains and pleasures only in rudimentary ways. It is sensation, remembered
and anticipated, feared or sought, or even imagined and eschewed that
67 P. Solomon et al., "Sensory Deprivation: A Review," American Journal of
Psychiatry, 1 14 ( 1957):357-363; L. F. Chapman, "Highest Integrative Functions
of Man During Stress," in The Brain and Human Behavior, ed. H. Solomon
(Baltimore, 1958), pp. 491 -534.
68 D. 0. Hebb and W. R. Thompson, "Social Significance of Animal Studies."
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind
is important in human life. It is perception molded by imagination that
gives us the outward world that we know. And it is the continuity of
thought that systematizes our emotional reactions into attitudes with distinct
feeling tones, and sets a certain scope for the individual's passions. In other
words: by virtue of our thought and imagination we have not only feelings,
but a life offeeling.69
In this context our mental task shifts from a gathering of information
about the pattern of events in the external world per se toward a determining
of the affective significance, the emotional import of that pattern
of events. We are concerned not with solving problems, but with clarifying
feelings. Nevertheless, the existence of cultural resources, of an adequate
system of public symbols, is just as essential to this sort of
process as it is to that of directive reasoning. And therefore, the development,
maintenance, and dissolution of "moods," "attitudes," "sentiments,"
and so on-which are "feelings" in the sense of states or conditions,
not sensations or motives-constitute no more a basically private
activity in human beings than does directive "thinking." The use of a
road map enables us to make our way from San Francisco to New York
with precision; the reading of Kafka's novels enables us to form a distinct
and well-defined attitude toward modern bureaucracy. We acquire
the ability to design flying planes in wind tunnels; we develop the capacity
to feel true awe in church. A child counts on his fingers before
he counts "in his head"; he feels love on his skin before he feels it "in
his heart." Not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in
man.70
Given the lack of specificity of intrinsic affect in man, the attainment
of an optimal flow of stimulation to his nervous system is a much more
complicated operation than a prudent steering between the extremes of
"too much" and "too little." Rather, it involves a very delicate qualitative
regulation of what comes in through the sensory apparatus; a matter,
here again, more of an active seeking for required stimuli than a
mere watchful waiting for them. Neurologically, this regulation is
achieved by efferent impulses from the central nervous system which
es S. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), p. 372; italics in original.
70 The kind of cultural symbols that serve the intellective and affective sides of
human mentality tend to d iffer-discursive language, experimental routines,
mathematics, and so on, on the one hand; myth, ritual, and art on the other. But
this contrast should not be drawn too sharply: mathematics has its affective uses,
poetry its intellectual; and the difference in any case is only functional, not sub­
stantial.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
modify receptor activity. 71 Psychologically, the same process may be
phrased in terms of the attitudinal control of perception.72 But the
point is that in man neither regnant fields nor mental sets can be formed
with sufficient precision in the absence of guidance from symbolic models
of emotion. In order to make up our minds we must know how we
feel about things; and to know how we feel about things we need the
public images of sentiment that only ritual, myth, and art can provide.
IV
The term "mind" refers to a certain set of dispositions of an organism.
The ability to count is a mental characteristic; so is chronic cheerfulness;
so also-though it has not been possible to discuss the problem
of motivation here-is greed. The problem of the evolution of mind is,
therefore, neither a false issue generated by a misconceived metaphysic,
nor one of discovering at which point in the history of life an invisible
anima was superadded to organic material. It is a matter of tracing the
development of certain sorts of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and propensities
in organisms and delineating the factors or types of factors
upon which the existence of such characteristics depends.
Recent research in anthropology suggests that the prevailing view
that the mental dispositions of man are genetically prior to culture and
that his actual capabilities represent the amplification or extension of
these pre-existent dispositions by cultural means is incorrect.73 The
apparent fact that the final stages of the biological evolution of man oc-
71 R. Granit, Receplors and Sensory Perceplion (New Haven, 1955).
72 J. S. Bruner and L. Postman, "Emotional Selectivity in Perception and Reaction,"
J. Personalily 16 ( 1947):69-77.
73 In using such variably employed terms as "mind" and "culture," the decision
of how far down the phylogenetic ladder to extend them-i.e., how broadly
to define them-is in great part but a matter of custom, policy, and taste. Here,
perhaps somewhat inconsistently, but in l ine with what seems to be common
usage, opposite choices have been made for mind and culture: mind has been defined
broadly to include the learned capacities of monkeys to communicate or
rats to solve T-mazes; culture has been defined narrowly to include only posttoolmaking
symbolic patterns. For an argument that culture should be defined as
"a learned pattern of the meaning of signals and signs" and extended through the
whole world of living organisms, see T. Parsons, "An Approach to Psychological
Theory in Terms of the Theory of Action," in Psychology: A SIUdy of a Science,
ed. S. Koch (New York, 1959), 3:6 1 2-7 1 1 .
The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind
curred after the initial stages of the growth of culture implies that
"basic," "pure," or "unconditioned," human nature, in the sense of the
innate constitution of man, is so functionally incomplete as to be unworkable.
Tools, hunting, family organization, and, later, art, religion,
and "science" molded man somatically; and they are, therefore, necessary
not merely to his survival but to his existential realization.
The application of this revised view of human evolution leads to the
hypothesis that cultural resources are ingredient, not accessory, to
human thought. As one moves from lower to higher animals phylogenetically,
behavior is characterized by increasing active unpredictability
with reference to present stimuli, a trend apparently supported physiologically
by an increasing complexity and regnancy of centrally proceeding
patterns of nervous activity. Up to the level of the lower mammals,
at least the major part of this growth of autonomous central fields can
be accounted for in terms of the development of novel neural mechanisms.
But in the higher mammals such novel mechanisms have as yet
not been found. Although, conceivably, mere increase in numbers of
neurons may in itself prove able fully to account for the florescence of
mental capacity in man, the fact that the large human brain and human
culture emerged synchronically, not serially, indicates that the most recent
developments in the evolution of nervous structure consist in the
appearance of mechanisms which both permit the maintenance of more
complex regnant fields and make the full determination of these fields in
terms of intrinsic (innate) parameters increasingly impossible. The
human nervous system relies, inescapably, on the accessibility of public
symbolic structures to build up its own autonomous, ongoing pattern of
activity.
This, in turn, implies that human thinking is primarily an overt act
conducted in terms of the objective materials of the common culture,
and only secondarily a private matter. In the sense both of directive
reasoning and the formulation of sentiment, as well as the integration of
these into motives, man's mental processes indeed take place at the
scholar's desk or the football field, in the studio or lorry-driver's seat,
on the platform, the chessboard, or the judge's bench. Isolationist claims
for the closed-system substantiality of culture, social organization, individual
behavior, or nervous physiology to the contrary notwithstanding,
progress in the scientific analysis of the human mind demands a joint attack
from virtually all of the behavioral sciences, in which the findings
of each will force continual theoretical reassessments upon all of the
others.
P A R T I I I
Chapter 4jReligion
As a Cultural System
Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular
language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have
a religion that shall be no religion in particular
. . . . Thus every living and healthy religion has a
marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special
and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation
gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries
it propounds are another world to live in; and another
world to live in-whether we expect ever to pass wholly
over into it or no-is what we mean by having a reli­
gion.
SANTAYANA, Reason in Religion
I
Two characteristics of anthropological work on religion accomplished
since the second world war strike me as curious when such work is
placed against that carried out just before and just after the first. One is
that it has made no theoretical advances of major importance. It is living
off the conceptual capital of its ancestors, adding very little, save a
certain empirical enrichment, to it. The second is that it draws what
concepts it does use from a very narrowly defined intellectual tradition.
There is Durkheim, Weber, Freud, or Malinowski, and in any particular
work the approach of one or two of these transcendent figures is followed,
with but a few marginal corrections necessitated by the natural
tendency to excess of seminal minds or by the expanded body of reliable
descriptive data. But virtually no one even thinks of looking
elsewhere-to philosophy, history, law, literature, or the "harder"
88 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
sciences-as these men themselves looked, for analytical ideas. And it
occurs to me, also, that these two curious characteristics are not unre­
lated.
If the anthropological study of religion is in fact in a state of general
stagnation, I doubt that it will be set going again by producing more
minor variations on classical theoretical themes. Yet one more meticulous
case in point for such well-established propositions as that ancestor
worship supports the jural authority of elders, that initiation rites are
means for the establishment of sexual identity and adult status, that ritual
groupings reftect political oppositions, or that myths provide charters
for social institutions and rationalizations of social privilege, may
well finally convince a great many people, both inside the profession
and out, that anthropologists are, like theologians, firmly dedicated to
proving the indubitable. In art, this solemn reduplication of the achievements
of accepted masters is called academicism; and I think this is the
proper name for our malady also. Only if we abandon, in a phrase of
Leo Steinberg's, that sweet sense of accomplishment which comes from
parading habitual skills and address ourselves to problems sufficiently
unclarified as to make discovery possible, can we hope to achieve work
which will not just reincarnate that of the great men of the first quarter
of this century, but match it. I
The way to do this is not to abandon the established traditions of social
anthropology in this field, but to widen them. At least four of the
contributions of the men who, as I say, dominate our thought to the
point of parochializing it�Durkheim's discussion of the nature of the
sacred, Weber's Verstehenden methodology, Freud's parallel between
personal rituals and collective ones, and Malinowski's exploration of the
distinction between religion and common sense-seem to me inevitable
starting-points for any useful anthropological theory of religion. But
they are starting-points only. To move beyond them we must place them
in a much broader context of contemporary thought than they, in and of
themselves, encompass. The dangers of such a procedure are obvious:
arbitrary eclecticism, superficial theory-mongering, and sheer intellectual
confusion. But I, at least, can see no other road of escape from
what, referring to anthropology more generally, Janowitz has called the
dead hand of competence.2
I L. Steinberg, "The Eye Is Part of the M ind," Partisan Review 1 0 ( 1 953):
1 94-2 1 2.
2 M. Janowitz, "Anthropology and the Social Sciences," Current Anthropology
4 ( 1 963): 1 39, 1 46- 1 54.
Religion As a Cultural System 8g
In working toward such an expansion of the conceptual envelope in
which our studies take place, one can, of course, move in a great number
of directions; and perhaps the most important initial problem is to
avoid setting out, like Stephen Leacock's mounted policeman, in all of
them at once. For my part, I shall confine my effort to developing what,
following Parsons and Shils, I refer to as the cultural dimension of religious
analysis.3 The term "culture" has by now acquired a certain aura
of ill-repute in social anthropological circles because of the multiplicity
of its referents and the studied vagueness with which it has all too often
been invoked. (Though why it should suffer more for these reasons than
"social structure" or "personality" is something I do not entirely understand.)
In any case, the culture concept to which I adhere has neither
multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes
an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols,
a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by
means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
knowledge about and attitudes toward life. Of course, terms such as
"meaning," "symbol," and "conception" cry out for explication. But
that is precisely where the widening, the broadening, and the expanding
come in. If Langer is right that "the concept of meaning, in all its varieties,
is the dominant philosophical concept of our time," that "sign,
symbol, denotation, signification, communication . . . are our [intellectual
] stock in trade," it is perhaps time that social anthropology, and
particularly that part of it concerned with the study of religion, became
aware of the fact.4
II
As we are to deal with meaning, let us begin with a paradigm: viz., that
sacred symbols function to synthesize a people's ethos-the tone, character,
and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style"llnd mood
-and their world view-the picture they have of the way things in
sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. In religious
belief and practice a group's ethos is rendered intellectually rea-
3 T. Parsons and E. Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge,
Mass., 1 95 1).
4 S. Langer, Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore, 1 962).
go THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
sonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the
actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is
rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an
actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a
way of life. This confrontation and mutual confirmation has two fundamental
effects. On the one hand, it objectivizes moral and aesthetic
preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of life implicit
in a world with a particular structure, as mere common sense given the
unalterable shape of reality. On the other, it supports these received beliefs
about the world's body by invoking deeply felt moral and aesthetic
sentiments as experiential evidence for their truth. Religious symbols
formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a
specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain
each with the borrowed authority of the other.
Phrasing aside, this much may perhaps be granted. The notion that
religion tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects
images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience is hardly
novel. But it is hardly investigated either, so that we have very little
idea of how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is accomplished.
We just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people
almost hourly; and we have an enormous ethnographic literature to
demonstrate it. But the theoretical framework which would enable us to
provide an analytic account of it, an account of the sort we can provide
for lineage segmentation, political succession, labor exchange, or the socialization
of the child, does not exist.
Let us, therefore, reduce our paradigm to a definition, for, although it
is notorious that definitions establish nothing, in themselves they do, if
they are carefully enough constructed, provide a useful orientation, or
reorientation, of thought, such that an extended unpacking of them can
be an effective way of developing and controlling a novel line of inquiry.
They have the useful virtue of explicitness: they commit themselves
in a way discursive prose, which, in this field especially, is always
liable to substitute rhetoric for argument, does not. Without further ado,
then, a religion is:
(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions
of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such
an aura offactuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely real­
istic.
Religion As a Cultural System 91
a system of symbols which acts to
Such a tremendous weight is being put on the term "symbol" here
that our first move must be to decide with some precision what we are
going to mean by it. This is no easy task, for, rather like "culture,"
"symbol" has been used to refer to a great variety of things, often a
number of them at the same time.
In some hands it is used for anything which signifies something else
to someone: dark clouds are the symbolic precursors of an on-coming
rain. In others it is used only for explicitly conventional signs of one
sort or another: a red flag is a symbol of danger, a white of surrender.
In others it is confined to something which expresses in an oblique and
figurative manner that which cannot be stated in a direct and literal one,
so that there are symbols in poetry but not in science, and symbolic
logic is misnamed. In yet others, however, it is used for any object, act,
event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for a conceptionthe
conception is the symbol's "meaning"-and that is the approach I
shall follow here.5 The number 6, written, imagined, laid out as a row
of stones, or even punched into the program tapes of a computer, is a
symbol. But so also is the Cross, talked about, visualized, shaped worriedly
in air or fondly fingered at the neck, the expanse of painted canvas
called "Guernica" or the bit of painted stone called a churinga, the
word "reality," or even the morpheme "-ing." They are all symbols, or
at least symbolic elements, because they are tangible formulations of
notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete
embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs.
To undertake the study of cultural activity-activity in which symbolism
forms the positive content-is thus not to abandon social analysis
for a Platonic cave of shadows, to enter into a mentalistic world of introspective
psychology or, worse, speculative philosophy, and wander
there forever in a haze of "Cognitions," "Affections," "Conations," and
other elusive entities. Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and
utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are
as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture.
They are not, however, exactly the same thing; or, more precisely,
the symbolic dimension of social events is, like the psychological, itself
theoretically abstractable from those events as empirical totalities.
There is still, to paraphrase a remark of Kenneth Burke's, a difference
5 S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 4th ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1 960).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
between building a house and drawing up a plan for building a house,
and reading a poem about having children by marriage is not quite the
same thing as having children by marriage.6 Even though the building
of the house may proceed under the guidance of the plan or-a less
likely occurrence-the having of children may be motivated by a reading
of the poem, there is something to be said for not confusing our
traffic with symbols with our traffic with objects or human beings, for
these latter are not in themselves symbols, however often they may
function as such.7 No matter how deeply interfused the cultural, the social,
and the psychological may be in the everyday life of houses, farms,
poems, and marriages, it is useful to distinguish them in analysis, and,
so doing; to isolate the generic traits of each against the normalized
background of the other two.
So far as culture patterns, that is, systems or complexes of symbols,
are concerned, the generic trait which is of first importance for us here
is that they are extrinsic sources of information. By "extrinsic," I mean
only that-unlike genes, for example-they lie outside the boundaries
of the individual organism as such in that intersubjective world of common
understandings into which all human individuals are born, in
which they pursue their separate careers, and which they leave persisting
behind them after they die. By "sources of information," I mean
only that-like genes-they provide a blueprint or template in terms of
which processes external to themselves can be given a definite form. As
the order of bases in a strand of DNA forms a coded program, a set of
instructions, or a recipe, for the synthesis of the structurally complex
proteins which shape organic functioning, so culture patterns provide
such programs for the institution of the social and psychological processes
which shape public behavior. Though the sort of information and
the mode of its transmission are vastly different in the two cases, this
comparison of gene and symbol is more than a strained analogy of the
familiar "social heredity" sort. It is actually a substantial relationship,
for it is precisely because of the fact that genetically programmed processes
are so highly generalized in men, as compared with lower ani-
6 K. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State
University Press, 1 94 1 ), p. 9.
7 The reverse mistake, especially common among neo-Kantians such as Cassirer,
of taking symbols to be identical with, or "constitutive of," their referents is
equally pernicious. [Cf. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New
Haven: 1 953- 1 957), 3 vols. ) "One can point to the moon with one's finger,"
some, probably well-invented, Zen Master is supposed to have said, "but to take
one's finger for the moon is to be a fool."
Religion As a Cultural System 93
rnals, that culturally programmed ones are so important; only because
human behavior is so loosely determined by intrinsic sources of information
that extrinsic sources are so vital. To build a dam a beaver
needs only an appropriate site and the proper materials-his mode of
procedure is shaped by his physiology. But man, whose genes are silent
on the building trades, needs also a conception of what it is to build a
dam, a conception he can get only from some symbolic source-a blueprint,
a textbook, or a string of speech by someone who already knows
how dams are built-or, of course, from manipulating graphic or linguistic
elements in such a way as to attain for himself a conception of
what dams are and how they are built.
This point is sometimes put in the form of an argument that cultural
patterns are "models," that they are sets of symbols whose relations to
one another "model" relations among entities, processes or what-haveyou
in physical, organic, social, or psychological systems by "paralleling,"
"imitating," or "simulating" them.s The term "model" has, however,
two senses-an "of" sense and a "for" sense-and though these
are but aspects of the same basic concept they are very much worth distinguishing
for analytic purposes. In the first, what is stressed is the manipulation
of symbol structures so as to bring them, more or less
closely, into parallel with the pre-established nonsymbolic system, as
when we grasp how dams work by developing a theory of hydraulics or
constructing a flow chart. The theory or chart models physical relationships
in such a way-that is, by expressing their structure in synoptic
form-as to render them apprehensible; it is a model of "reality." In
the second, what is stressed is the manipulation of the nonsymbolic systems
in terms of the relationships expressed in the symbolic, as when
we construct a dam according to the specifications implied in an hydraulic
theory or the conclusions drawn from a flow chart. Here, the
theory is a model under whose guidance physical relationships are organized:
it is a model for "reality." For psychological and social systems,
and for cultural models that we would not ordinarily refer to as "theories,"
but rather as "doctrines," "melodies," or "rites," the case is in no
way different. Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information
sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have
an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual
form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves
to it and by shaping it to themselves.
8 K. Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge, 1 952).
94 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
It is, in fact, this double aspect which sets true symbols off from
other sorts of significative forms. Models for are found, as the gene example
suggests, through the whole order of nature; for wherever there is
a communication of pattern, such programs are, in simple logic, required.
Among animals, imprint learning is perhaps the most striking
example, because what such learning involves is the automatic presentation
of an appropriate sequence of behavior by a model animal in the
presence of a learning animal which serves, equally automatically, to
call out and stabilize a certain set of responses genetically built into the
learning animaJ.9 The communicative dance of two bees, one of which
has found nectar and the other of which seeks it, is another, somewhat
different, more complexly coded, example.•o Craik has even suggested
that the thin trickle of water which first finds its way down from a
mountain spring to the sea and smooths a little channel for the greater
volume of water that follows after it plays a sort of model for function.u
But models of-linguistic, graphic, mechanical, natural, etc.,
processes which function not to provide sources of information in terms
of which other processes can be patterned, but to represent those patterned
processes as such, to express their structure in an alternative
medium-are much rarer and may perhaps be confined, among living
animals, to man. The perception of the structural congruence between
one set of processes, activities, relations, entities, and so on, and another
set for which it acts as a program, so that the program can be
taken as a representation, or conception-a symbol--of the programmed,
is the essence of human thought. The intertransposability of
I
models for and models of which symbolic formulation makes possible is
the distinctive characteristic of our mentality.
. . . to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods
and motivations in men by . . .
So far as religious symbols and symbol systems are concerned this intertransposability
is clear. The endurance, courage, independence, perseverance,
and passionate willfulness in which the vision quest practices
the Plains Indian are the same flamboyant virtues by which he attempts
9 K. Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring (London, 1952).
to K. von Frisch, "Dialects in the Language of the Bees," Scientific A merican,
August 1962.
1 1 Craik, Nature of Expianation.
Religion As a Cultural System 95
to Jive: while achieving a sense of revelation he stabilizes a sense of
direction. l2 The consciousness of defaulted obligation, secreted guilt,
and, when a confession is obtained, public shame in which Manus' seance
rehearses him are the same sentiments that underlie the sort of
duty ethic by which his property-conscious society is maintained: the
gaining of an absolution involves the forging of a conscience. 13 And the
same self-discipline which rewards a Javanese mystic staring fixedly
into the flame of a lamp with what he takes to be an intimation of divinity
drills him in that rigorous control of emotional expression which
is necessary to a man who would follow a quietistic style of life.l4
Whether one sees the conception of a personal guardian spirit, a family
tutelary, or an immanent God as synoptic formulations of the character
of reality or as templates for producing reality with such a character
seems largely arbitrary, a matter of which aspect, the model of or model
for, one wants for the moment to bring into focus. The concrete symbols
involved-one or another mythological figure materializing in the
wilderness, the skull of the deceased household head hanging censoriously
in the rafters, or a disembodied "voice in the stillness" soundlessly
chanting enigmatic classical poetry-point in either direction.
They both express the world's climate and shape it.
They shape it by inducing in the worshipper a certain distinctive set
of dispositions (tendencies, capacities, propensities, skills, habits, liabilities,
pronenesses) which lend a chronic character to the flow of his activity
and the quality of his experience. A disposition describes not an
activity or an occurrence but a probability of an activity being performed
or an occurrence occurring in certain circumstances: "When a
cow is said to be a ruminant, or a man is said to be a cigarette-smoker,
it is not being said that the cow is ruminating now or that the man is
smoking a cigarette now. To be a ruminant is to tend to ruminate from
time to time, and to be a cigarette-smoker is to be in the habit of smoking
cigarettes." 15 Similarly, to be pious is not to be performing something
we would call an act of piety, but to be liable to perform such
acts. So, too, with the Plains Indian's bravura, the Manus' compunctiousness,
or the Javanese's quietism, which, in their contexts, form the
substance of piety. The virtue of this sort of view of what are usually
12 R. H. Lowie, Primitive Religion (New York, 1 924).
13 R. F. Fortune, Manus Religion (Philadelphia, 1935).
14 C. Geertz, The Religion ofJava (Glencoe, Ill., 1960).
15 G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London and New York, 1 949).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
called "mental traits" or, if the Cartesianism is unavowed, "psychological
forces" (both unobjectionable enough terms in themselves) is that it
gets them out of any dim and inaccessible realm of private sensation
into that same well-lit world of observables in which reside the brittleness
of glass, the inflammability of paper, and, to return to the metaphor,
the dampness of England.
So far as religious activities are concerned (and learning a myth by
heart is as much a religious activity as detaching one's finger at the
knuckle), two somewhat different sorts of disposition are induced by
them: moods and motivations.
A motivation is a persisting tendency, a chronic inclination to perform
certain sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feeling in certain
sorts of situations, the "sorts" being commonly very heterogenous
and rather ill-defined classes in all three cases:
On hearing that a man is vain [i.e., motivated by vanity] we expect him to
behave in certain ways, namely to talk a lot about himself, to cleave to the
society of the eminent, to reject criticisms, to seek the footlights and to disengage
himself from conversations about the merits of others. We expect
him to indulge in roseate daydreams about his own successes, to avoid recalling
past failures and to plan for his own advancement. To be vain is to
tend to act in these and innumerable other kindred ways. Certainly we also
expect the vain man to feel certain pangs and flutters in certain situations;
we expect him to have an acute sinking feeling when an eminent person forgets
his name, and to feel buoyant of heart and light of toe on hearing of
the misfortunes of his rivals. But feelings of pique and buoyancy are not
more directly indicative of vanity than are public acts of boasting or private
acts of daydreaming.I&
Similarly for any motivations. As a motive, "flamboyant courage" consists
in such enduring propensities as to fast in the wilderness, to conduct
solitary raids on enemy camps, and to thrill to the thought of
counting coup. "Moral circumspection" consists in such ingrained tendencies
as to honor onerous promises, to confess secret sins in the face
of severe public disapproval, and to feel guilty when vague and generalized
accusations are made at seances. And "dispassionate tranquility"
consists in such persistent inclinations as to maintain one's poise come
hell or high water, to experience distaste in the presence of even moderate
emotional displays, and to indulge in contentless contemplations of
featureless objects. Motives are thus neither acts (that is, intentional beas
Ibid., p. 86. Quoted by permission of Barnes & Noble Books and Hutchinson
Publishing Group Ltd.
Religion As a Cultural System 97
haviors) nor feelings, but liabilities to perform particular classes of act
or have particular classes of feeling. And when we say that a man is religious,
that is, motivated by religion, this is at least part-though only
part--of what we mean.
Another part of what we mean is that he has, when properly stimulated,
a susceptibility to fall into certain moods, moods we sometimes
lump together under such covering terms as "reverential," "solemn," or
"worshipful." Such generalized rubrics actually conceal, however, the
enormous empirical variousness of the dispositions involved, and, in
fact, tend to assimilate them to the unusually grave tone of most of our
own religious life. The moods that sacred symbols induce, at different
times and in different places, range from exultation to melancholy, from
self-confidence to self-pity, from an incorrigible playfulness to a bland
listlessness-to say nothing of the erogenous power of so many of the
world's myths and rituals. No more than there is a single sort of motivation
one can call piety is there a single sort of mood one can call wor­
shipful.
The major difference between moods and motivations is that where
the latter are, so to speak, vectorial qualities, the former are merely scalar.
Motives have a directional cast, they describe a certain overall
course, gravitate toward certain, usually temporary, consummations. But
moods vary only as to intensity: they go nowhere. They spring from
certain circumstances but they are responsive to no ends. Like fogs,
they just settle and lift; like scents, suffuse and evaporate. When present
they are totalistic: if one is sad everything and everybody seems dreary;
if one is gay, everything and everybody seems splendid. Thus, though a
man can be vain, brave, willful, and independent at the same time, he
can't very well be playful and listless, or exultant and melancholy, at
the same timeY Further, where motives persist for more or less extended
periods of time, moods merely recur with greater or lesser frequency,
coming and going for what are often quite unfathomable reasons.
But perhaps the most important difference, so far as we are
concerned, between moods and motivations is that motivations are
"made meaningful" with reference to the ends toward which they are
conceived to conduce, whereas moods are "made meaningful" with reference
to the conditions from which they are conceived to spring. We
interpret motives in terms of their consummations, but we interpret
moods in terms of their sources. We say that a person is industrious be-
17 Ibid., p. 99.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
cause he wishes to succeed; we say that a person is worried because he
is conscious of the hanging threat of nuclear holocaust. And this is no
less the case when the interpretations are ultimate. Charity becomes
Christian charity when it is enclosed in a conception of God's purposes;
optimism is Christian optimism when it is grounded in a particular conception
of God's nature. The assiduity of the Navaho finds its rationale
in a belief that, since "reality" operates mechanically, it is coercible;
their chronic fearfulness finds its rationale in a conviction that, however
"reality" operates, it is both enormously powerful and terribly dangerous.
1ij
. . . byformulating conceptions ofa general order
ofexistence and . . .
That the symbols or symbol systems which induce and define dispositions
we set off as religious and those which place those dispositions in
a cosmic framework are the same symbols ought to occasion no surprise.
For what else do we mean by saying that a particular mood of
awe is religious and not secular, except that it springs from entertaining
a conception of all-pervading vitality like mana and not from a visit to
the Grand Canyon? Or that a particular case of asceticism is an example
of a religious motivation, except that it is directed toward the
achievement of an unconditioned end like nirvana and not a conditioned
one like weight-reduction? If sacred symbols did not at one and the
same time induce dispositions in human beings and formulate, however
obliquely, inarticulately, or unsystematically, general ideas of order,
then the empirical differentia of religious activity or religious experience
would not exist. A man can indeed be said to be "religious" about
golf, but not merely if he pursues it with passion and plays it on Sundays:
he must also see it as symbolic of some transcendent truths. And
the pubescent boy gazing soulfully into the eyes of the pubescent girl in
a William Steig cartoon and murmuring, "There is something about
you, Ethel, which gives me a sort of religious feeling," is, like most adolescents,
confused. What any particular religion affirms about the fundamental
nature of reality may be obscure, shallow, or, all too often,
perverse; but it must, if it is not to consist of the mere collection of re-
1 8 C. Kluckhohn, "The Philosophy of the Navaho Indians," in Ideological Differences
and World Order, ed. F. S. C. Northrop (New Haven, 1 949), pp.
3 56-384.
Religion As a Cultural System 99
ceived practices and conventional sentiments we usually refer to as moralism,
affirm something. If one were to essay a minimal definition of
religion today, it would perhaps not be Tylor's famous "belief in spiritual
beings," to which Goody, wearied of theoretical subtleties, has
lately urged us to return, but rather what Salvador de Madariaga has
called "the relatively modest dogma that God is not mad." 19
Usually, of course, religions affirm very much more than this: we believe,
as James remarked, all that we can and would believe everything
if we only could.2o The thing we seem least able to tolerate is a threat to
our powers of conception, a suggestion that our ability to create, grasp,
and use symbols may fail us, for were this to happen, we would be
more helpless, as I have already pointed out, than the beavers. The extreme
generality, diffuseness, and variability of man's innate (that is, genetically
programmed) response capacities means that without the assistance
of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete, not
merely a talented ape who had, like some underprivileged child, unfortunately
been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kind
of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of selfcontrol,
a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions. Man depends
upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as
to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sensitivity
to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with
one or another aspect of experience raises within him the gravest sort of
anxiety:
[Man ] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope
with; but he cannot deal with Chaos. Because his characteristic function and
highest asset is conception, his greatest fright is to meet what he cannot
construe-the "uncanny," as it is popularly called. It need not be a new object;
we do meet new things, and "understand" them promptly, if tentatively,
by the nearest analogy, when our minds are functioning freely; but
under mental stress even perfectly familiar things may become suddenly disorganized
and give us the horrors. Therefore our most important assets are
always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society,
and in what we are doing: the symbols of our Weltanschauung and
Lebensanschauung. Consequently, in a primitive society, a daily ritual is incorporated
in common activities, in eating, washing, fire-making, etc., as
Well as in pure ceremonial; because the need of reasserting the tribal morale
and recognizing its cosmic conditions is constantly felt. In Christian Europe
19 J. Goody, "Religion and Ritual : The Definition Problem," British Journal of
Psychology 1 2 ( 1 961): 143 - 1 64.
20 W. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York, 1 904).
100 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to their knees,
to enact if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts.2•
There are at least three points where chaos-a tumult of events
which lack not just interpretations but interpretability-threatens to
break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits
of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. Bafflement,
suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if
they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges
to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by
taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it-challenges with
which any religion, however "primitive," which hopes to persist must
attempt somehow to cope.
Of the three issues, it is the first which has been least investigated by
modern social anthropologists (though Evans-Pritchard's classic discussion
of why granaries fall on some Azande and not on others, is a notable
exception).22 Even to consider people's religious beliefs as attempts
to bring anomalous events or experiences-death, dreams, mental
fugues, volcanic eruptions, or marital infidelity-within the circle of the
at least potentially explicable seems to smack of Tyloreanism or worse.
But it does appear to be a fact that at least some men-in all probability,
most men-are unable to leave unclarified problems of analysis
merely unclarified, just to look at the stranger features of the world's
landscape in dumb astonishment or bland apathy without trying to develop,
however fantastic, inconsistent, or simple-minded, some notions
as to how such features might be reconciled with the more ordinary deliverances
of experience. Any chronic failure of one's explanatory apparatus,
the complex of received culture patterns (common sense, science,
philosophical speculation, myth) one has for mapping the empirical
world, to explain things which cry out for explanation tends to lead to a
deep disquiet-a tendency rather more widespread and a disquiet
rather deeper than we have sometimes supposed since the pseudoscience
view of religious belief was, quite rightfully, deposed. After all, even
that high priest of heroic atheism, Lord Russell, once remarked that although
the problem of the existence of God had never bothered him,
the ambiguity of certain mathematical axioms had threatened to unhinge
his mind. And Einstein's profound dissatisfaction with quantum me-
2 1 Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 287. Italics in original.
22 E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford,
1937).
Religion As a Cultural System 101
chanics was based on a-surely religious-inability to believe that, as
he put it, God plays dice with the universe.
But this quest for lucidity and the rush of metaphysical anxiety that
occurs when empirical phenomena threaten to remain intransigently
opaque is found on much humbler intellectual levels. Certainly, I was
struck in my own work, much more than I had at all expected to be, by
the degree to which my more animistically inclined informants behaved
like true Tyloreans. They seemed to be constantly using their beliefs to
"explain" phenomena: or, more accurately, to convince themselves that
the phenomena were explainable within the accepted scheme of things,
for they commonly had only a minimal attachment to the particular soul
possession, emotional disequilibrium, taboo infringement, or bewitchment
hypothesis they advanced and were all too ready to abandon it for
some other, in the same genre, which struck them as more plausible
given the facts of the case. What they were not ready to do was abandon
it for no other hypothesis at all; to leave events to themselves.
And what is more, they adopted this nervous cognitive stance with
respect to phenomena which had no immediate practical bearing on
their own lives, or for that matter on anyone's. When a peculiarly
shaped, rather large toadstool grew up in a carpenter's house in the
short space of a few days (or, some said, a few hours), people came
from miles around to see it, and everyone had some sort of explanation
-some animist, some animatist, some not quite either-for it. Yet it
would be hard to argue that the toadstool had any social value in Radcliffe-Brown's
sense, or was connected in any way with anything which
did and for which it could have been standing proxy, like the Andaman
cicada.2a Toadstools play about the same role in Javanese life as they do
in ours, and in the ordinary course of things Javanese have about as
much interest in them as we do. It was just that this one was "odd,"
"strange," "uncanny"-aneh. And the odd, strange, and uncanny simply
must be accounted for-or, again, the conviction that it could be
accounted for sustained. One does not shrug off a toadstool which
grows five times as fast as a toadstool has any right to grow. In the
broadest sense the "strange" toadstool did have implications, and critical
ones, for those who heard about it. It threatened their most general
ability to understand the world, raised the uncomfortable question of
Whether the beliefs which they held about nature were workable, the
standards of truth they used valid.
23 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe,
Ill., 1 952).
102 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Nor is this to argue that it is only, or even mainly, sudden eruptions
of extraordinary events which engender in man the disquieting sense
that his cognitive resources may prove unavailing or that this intuition
appears only in its acute form. More commonly it is a persistent, constantly
re-experienced difficulty in grasping certain aspects of nature,
self, and society, in bringing certain elusive phenomena within the
sphere of culturally formulatable fact, which renders man chronically
uneasy and toward which a more equable ftow of diagnostic symbols is
consequently directed. It is what lies beyond a relatively fixed frontier
of accredited knowledge that, looming as. a constant background to the
daily round of practical life, sets ordinary human experience in a permanent
context of metaphysical concern and raises the dim, back-ofthe-mind
suspicions that one may be adrift in an absurd world:
Another subject which is matter for this characteristic intellectual enquiry
[among the latmul ] is the nature of ripples and waves on the surface of
water. It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass-all the objects in the
world-are only patterns of waves. Indeed there seems to be some agreement
about this, although it perhaps conflicts with the theory of reincarnation,
according to which the ghost of the dead is blown as a mist by the
East Wind up the river and into the womb of the deceased's son's wife. Be
that as it may-there is still the question of how ripples and waves are
caused. The clan which claims the East Wind as a totem is clear enough
about this: the Wind with her mosquito fan causes the waves. But other
clans have personified the waves and say that they are a person (Kontummali)
independent of the wind. Other clans. again, have other theories. On
one occasion I took some latmul natives down to the coast and found one
of them sitting by himself gazing with rapt attention at the sea. It was a
windless day, but a slow swell was breaking on the beach. Among the totemic
ancestors of his clan he counted a personified slit gong who had
floated down the river to the sea and who was believed to cause the waves.
He was gazing at the waves which were heaving and breaking when no wind
was blowing, demonstrating the truth of his clan myth.24
24 G. Bateson, Naven, 2nd ed. (Stanford, 1 958). That the chronic and acute
forms of this sort of cognitive concern are closely interrelated, and that responses
to the more unusual occasions of it are patterned on responses established in coping
with the more usual is also clear from Bateson's description, however, as he
goes on to say: "On another occasion I invited one of my informants to witness
the development of photographic plates. I first desensitized the plates and then
developed them in an open dish in moderate light, so that my informant was able
to see the gradual appearance of the images. He was much interested, and some
days later made me promise never to show this process to members of other
clans. Kontum-mali was one of his ancestors, and he saw in the process of photographic
development the actual embodiment of ripples into images. and regarded
this as a demonstration of the clan's secret."
Religion As a Cultural System 103
The second experiential challenge in whose face the meaningfulness
of a particular pattern of life threatens to dissolve into a chaos of thingJess
names and nameless things-the problem of suffering-has been
rather more investigated, or at least described, mainly because of the
great amount of attention given in works on tribal religion to what are
perhaps its two main loci: illness and mourning. Yet for all the fascinated
intere:;t in the emotional aura that surrounds these extreme situations,
there has been, with a few exceptions such as Lienhardt's recent
discussion of Dinka divining, little conceptual advance over the sort of
crude confidence-type theory set forth by Malinowski: viz., that religion
helps one to endure "situations of emotional stress" by "open [ing] up
escapes from such situations and such impasses as offer no empirical
way out except by ritual and belief into the domain of the
supernatural." 25 The inadequacy of this "theology of optimism," as
Nadel rather dryly called it, is, of course, radicaJ.26 Over its career religion
has probably disturbed men as much as it has cheered them ; forced
them into a head-on, unblinking confrontation of the fact that they are
born to trouble as often as it has enabled them to avoid such a confrontation
by projecting them into sort of infantile fairy-tale worlds where
-Malinowski again-"hope cannot fail nor desire deceive." 27 With
the possible exception of Christian Science, there are few if any religious
traditions, "great" or "little," in which the proposition that life
hurts is not strenuously affirmed, and in some it is virtually glorified:
She was an old [Ba- lla] woman of a family with a long genealogy. Leza,
"the Besetting One", stretched out his hand against the family. He slew her
mother and father while she was yet a child, and in the course of years all
connected with her perished. She said to herself, "Surely I shall keep those
who sit on my thighs." But no, even they, the children of her children, were
taken from her. . . . Then came into her heart a desperate resolution to find
God and to ask the meaning of it all. . . . So she began to travel, going
through country after country, always with the thought in her mind: "I shall
come to where the earth ends and there I shall find a road to God and I
shall ask him: 'What have I done to thee that thou afflictest me in this
manner?' " She never found where the earth ends, but though disappointed
she did not give up her search, and as she passed through the different
countries they asked her, "What have you come for, old woman?" And the
2$ G. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience (Oxford, 1 96 1), p. IS Iff; B. Mali·
nowski, Magic, Science and Religion (Boston, 1 948), p. 67.
26 S. F. Nadel, "Malinowski on Magic and Religion," in Man and Culture, ed.
R. Firth (London, 1957), pp. 1 89-208.
27 Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion (Boston, 1 948), p. 67.
104 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
answer would be. "I am seeking Leza." "Seeking Leza! For what?" "My
brothers. you ask me! Here in the nations is there one who suffers as I have
suffered?" And they would ask again, "How have you suffered?" "In this
way. I am alone. As you see me, a solitary old woman; that is how I am !"
And they answered, "Yes, we see. That is how you are! Bereaved of friends
and husband? In what do you differ from others? The Besetting-One sits on
the back of every one of us and we cannot shake him off." She never obtained
her desire; she died of a broken heart.28
As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically,
not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical
pain, personal loss, wordly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others'
agony something bearable, supportable-something, as we say, sufferable.
It was in this effort that the Ba-lla woman-perhaps necessarily,
perhaps not-failed and, literally not knowing how to feel about
what had happened to her, how to suffer, perished in confusion and despair.
Where the more intellective aspects of what Weber called the
Problem of Meaning are a matter affirming the ultimate explicability of
experience, the more affective aspects are a matter of affirming its ultimate
sufferableness. As religion on one side anchors the power of our
symbolic resources for formulating analytic ideas in an authoritative
conception of the overall shape of reality, so on another side it anchors
the power of our, also symbolic, resources for expressing emotionsmoods,
sentiments, passions, affections, feelings-in a similar conception
of its pervasive tenor, its inherent tone and temper. For those able
to embrace them, and for so long as they are able to embrace them, religious
symbols provide a cosmic guarantee not only for their ability to
comprehend the world, but also, comprehending it, to give a precision
to their feeling, a definition to their emotions which enables them, morosely
or joyfully, grimly or cavalierly, to endure it.
Consider in this light the well-known Navaho curing rites usually referred
to as "sings." 29 A sing-the Navaho have about sixty different
ones for different purposes, but virtually all of them are dedicated to removing
some sort of physical or mental illness-is a kind of religious
psychodrama in which there are three main actors: the "singer" or
curer, the patient, and, as a kind of antiphonal chorus, the patient's
family and friends. The structure of all the sings, the drama's plot, is
28 C. W. Smith and A. M. Dale, The //a-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia
(London, 1 920), p. 1 97fT.; quoted in P. Radin, Primitive Man as a Philosopher
(New York, 1 957), pp. 100-101.
29 C. Kluckhohn and D. Leighton, The Navaho (Cambridge, Mass., 1946);
G. Reichard, Navaho Religion, 2 vols. (New York, 1 950).
Religion As a Cultural System 105
quite similar. There are three main acts: a purification of the patient
and audience; a statement, by means of repetitive chants and ritual manipulations,
of the wish to restore well-being ("harmony") in the patient;
an identification of the patient with the Holy People and his consequent
"cure." The purification rites involve forced sweating, induced
vomiting, and so on, to expel the sickness from the patient physically.
The chants, which are numberless, consist mainly of simple optative
phrases ("may the patient be well," "I am getting better all over," etc.).
And, finally, the identification of the patient with the Holy People, and
thus with cosmic order generally, is accomplished through the agency of
a sand painting depicting the Holy People in one or another appropriate
mythic setting. The singer places the patient on the painting, touching
the feet, hands, knees, shoulders, breast, back, and head of the divine
figures and then the corresponding parts of the patient, performing thus
what is essentially a bodily identification of the human and the divine.ao
This is the climax of the sing: the whole curing process may be likened,
Reichard says, to a spiritual osmosis in which the illness in man and the
power of the deity penetrate the ceremonial membrane in both directions,
the former being neutralized by the latter. Sickness seeps out in
the sweat, vomit, and other purification rites; health seeps in as the Navaho
patient touches, through the medium of the singer, the sacred sand
painting. Clearly, the symbolism of the sing focuses upon the problem
of human suffering and attempts to cope with it by placing it in a meaningful
context, providing a mode of action through which it can be expressed,
being expressed understood, and being understood, endured.
The sustaining effect of the sing (and since the commonest disease is
tuberculosis, it can in most cases be only sustaining), rests ultimately on
its ability to give the stricken person a vocabulary in terms of which to
grasp the nature of his distress and relate it to the wider world. Like a
calvary, a recitation of Buddha's emergence from his father's palace, or
a performance of Oedipus Tyrannos in other religious traditions, a sing
is mainly concerned with the presentation of a specific and concrete
image of truly human, and so endurable, suffering powerful enough to
resist the challenge of emotional meaninglessness raised by the existence
of intense and unremovable brute pain.
The problem of suffering passes easily into the problem of evil, for if
suffering is severe enough it usually, though not always, seems morally
undeserved as well, at least to the sufferer. But they are not, however,
exactly the same thing-a fact I think Weber, too influenced by the
ao Reichard, Navaho Religion.
lo6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
biases of a monotheistic tradition in which, as the various aspects of
human experience must be conceived to proceed from a single, voluntaristic
source, man's pain reflects directly on God's goodness, did not
fully recognize in his generalization of the dilemmas of Christian theodicy
Eastward. For where the problem of suffering is concerned with
threats to our ability to put our "undisciplined squads of emotion" into
some sort of soldierly order, the problem of evil is concerned with
threats to our ability to make sound moral judgments. What is involved
in the problem of evil is not the adequacy of our symbolic resources to
govern our affective life, but the adequacy of those resources to provide
a workable set of ethical criteria, normative guides to govern our action.
The vexation here is the gap between things as they are and as they
ought to be if our conceptions of right and wrong make sense, the gap
between what we deem various individuals deserve and what we see that
they get-a phenomenon summed up in that profound quatrain:
The rain falls on the just
And on the unjust fella;
But mainly upon the just,
Because the unjust has the just's umbrella.
Or if this seems too flippant an expression of an issue that, in somewhat
different form, animates the Book of Job and the Baghavad Gita,
the following classical Javanese poem, known, sung, and repeatedly
quoted in Java by virtually everyone over the age of six, puts the point
-the discrepancy between moral prescriptions and material rewards,
the seeming inconsistency of "is" and "ought"-rather more elegantly:
We have lived to see a time without order
In which everyone is confused in his mind.
One cannot bear tojoin in the madness,
But if he does not do so
He will not share in the spoils,
And will starve as a result.
Yes, God; wrong is wrong:
Happy are those who forget,
Happier yet those who remember and have deep insight.
Nor is it necessary to be theologically self-conscious to be religiously
sophisticated. The concern with intractable ethical paradox, the disquieting
sense that one's moral insight is inadequate to one's moral experience,
is as alive on the level of so-called primitive religion as it is
on that of the so-called civilized. The set of notions about "division in
the world" that Lienhardt describes for the Dinka is a useful case in
Religion As a Cultural System 107
point.31 Like so many peoples, the Dinka believe that the sky, where
"Divinity" is located, and earth, where man dwells, were at one time
contiguous, the sky lying just above the earth and being connected to it
by a rope, so that men could move at will between the two realms.
There was no death and the first man and woman were permitted but a
single grain of millet a day, which was all that they at that time required.
One day, the woman-of course-decided, out of greed, to
plant more than the permitted grain of millet, and in her avid haste and
industry accidentally struck Divinity with the handle of the hoe. Offended,
he severed the rope, withdrew into the distant sky of today, and
left man to labor for his food, to suffer sickness and death, and to experience
separation from the source of his being, his Creator. Yet the
meaning of this strangely familiar story to the Dinka is, as indeed is
Genesis to Jews and Christians, not homiletic but descriptive:
Those [Dinka] who have commented on these stories have sometimes made
it clear that their sympathies lie with Man in his plight, and draw attention
to the smallness of the fault for which Divinity withdrew the benefits of his
closeness. The image of striking Divinity with a hoe . . . often evokes a
certain amusement, almost as though the story were indulgently being
treated as too childish to explain the consequences attributed to the event.
But it is clear that the point of the story of Divinity's withdrawal from men
is not to suggest an improving moral judgment on human behaviour. It is to
represent a total situation known to the Dinka today. Men now are-as the
first man and woman then became-active, self-assertive, inquiring, acquisitive.
Yet they are also subject to suffering and death, ineffective, ignorant
and poor. Life is insecure; human calculations often prove erroneous, and
men must often learn by experience that the consequences of their acts are
quite other than they may have anticipated or consider equitable. Divinity's
withdrawal from Man as the result of a comparatively trifling offence, by
human standards, presents the contrast between equitable human judgments
and the action of the Power which are held ultimately to control what happens
in Dinka life. . . . To the Dinka, the moral order is ultimately constituted
according to principles which often elude men, which experience and
tradition in part reveal, and which human action cannot change. . . . The
myth of Divinity's withdrawal then reflects the facts of existence as they are
known. The Dinka are in a universe which is largely beyond their control,
and where events may contradict the most reasonable human expectations.32
Thus the problem of evil, or perhaps one should say the problem
about evil, is in essence the same sort of problem of or about bafflement
and the problem of or about suffering. The strange opacity of certain
3 1 Ibid., pp. 28-55.
32 Ibid.
108 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain,
and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the uncomfortable
suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man's life in the
world, has no genuine order at all-no empirical regularity, no emotional
form, no moral coherence. And the religious response to this suspicion
is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols,
of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account
for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes
in human experience. The effort is not to deny the undeniablethat
there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls upon
the just-but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life is
unendurable, and that justice is a mirage. The principles which constitute
the moral order may indeed often elude men, as Lienhardt puts it,
in the same way as fully satisfactory explanations of anomalous events
or effective forms for the expression of feeling often elude them. What
is important, to a religious man at least, is that this elusiveness be accounted
for, that it be not the result of the fact that there are no such
principles, explanations, or forms, that life is absurd and the attempt to
make moral, intellectual, or emotional sense out of experience is bootless.
The Dinka can admit, in fact insist upon, the moral ambiguities
and contradictions of life as they live it because these ambiguities and
contradictions are seen not as ultimate, but as the "rational," "natural,"
"logical" (one may choose one's own adjective here, for none of them is
truly adequate) outcome of the moral structure of reality which the
myth of the withdrawn "Divinity" depicts, or as Lienhardt says, "im­
ages."
The Problem of Meaning in each of its intergrading aspects (how
these aspects in fact intergrade in each particular case, what sort of interplay
there is between the sense of analytic, emotional, and moral impotence,
seems to me one of the outstanding, and except for Weber untouched,
problems for comparative research in this whole field) is a
matter of affirming, or at least recognizing, the inescapability of ignorance,
pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously
denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a
whole. And it is in terms of religious symbolism, a symbolism relating
man's sphere of existence tO a wider sphere within which it is conceived
to rest, that both the affirmation and the denial are made.33
33 This is not, however, to say that everyone in every society does this; for as
the immortal Don Marquis once remarked, you don't have to have a soul unless
Religion As a Cultural System
. . . and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of
factuality that . . .
109
There arises here, however, a more profound question: how is it that
this denial comes to be believed? How is it that the religious man
moves from a troubled perception of experienced disorder to a more or
less settled conviction of fundamental order? Just what does "belier•
mean in a religious context? Of all the problems surrounding attempts
to conduct anthropological analysis of religion this is the one that has
perhaps been most troublesome and therefore the most often avoided,
usually by relegating it to psychology, that raffish outcast discipline to
which social anthropologists are forever consigning phenomena they are
unable to deal with within the framework of a denatured Durkheimianism.
But the problem will not go away, it is not "merely" psychological
(nothing social is), and no anthropological theory of religion which fails
to attack it is worthy of the name. We have been trying to stage Hamlet
without the Prince quite long enough.
It seems to me that it is best to begin any approach to this issue with
frank recognition that religious belief involves not a Baconian induction
from everyday experience-for then we should all be agnostics-but
rather a prior acceptance of authority which transforms that experience.
The existence of bafflement, pain, and moral paradox-of The Problem
of Meaning-is one of the things that drives men toward belief in gods,
devils, spirits, totemic principles, or the spiritual efficacy of cannibalism
(an enfolding sense of beauty or a dazzling perception of power are
others), but it is not the basis upon which those beliefs rest, but rather
their most important field of application:
We point to the state of the world as illustrative of doctrine, but never as
evidence for it. So Belsen illustrates a world of original sin, but original sin
is not an hypothesis to account for happenings like Belsen. We justify a particular
religious belief by showing its place in the total religious conception;
we justify a religious belief as a whole by referring to authority. We accept
authority because we discover it at some point in the world at which we
you really want one. The oft-heard generalization that religion is a human universal
embodies a confusion between the probably true (though on present evidence
unprovable) proposition that there is no human society in which cultural
patterns that we can, under the present definition or one like it, call religious are
totally lacking, and the surely untrue proposition that all men in all societies are,
in any meaningful sense of the term, religious. But if the anthropological study of
religious commitment is underdeveloped, the anthropological study of religious
noncommitment is nonexistent. The anthropology of religion will have come of
age when some more subtle M alinowski writes a book called "Belief and Unbelief
(or even "Faith and Hypocrisy") in a Savage Society."
1 10 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
worship, at which we accept the lordship of something not ourselves. We do
not worship authority, but we accept authority as defining the worshipful.
So someone may discover the possibility of worship in the life of the Re.
formed Churches and accept the Bible as authoritative; or in the Roman
Church and accept papal authority.34
This is, of course, a Christian statement of the matter; but it is not to
be despised on that account. In tribal religions authority lies in the persuasive
power of traditional imagery; in mystical ones in the apodictic
force of supersensible experience ; in charismatic ones in the hypnotic
attraction of an extraordinary personality. But the priority of the acceptance
of an authoritative criterion in religious matters over the revelation
which is conceived to flow from that acceptance is not less complete
than in scriptural or hieratic ones. The basic axiom underlying
what we may perhaps call "the religious perspective" is everywhere the
same: he who would know must first believe.
But to speak of "the religious perspective" is, by implication, to
speak of one perspective among others. A perspective is a mode of
seeing, in that extended sense of "see" in which it means "discern,"
"apprehend," "understand," or "grasp." It is a particular way of looking
at life, a particular manner of construing the world, as when we
speak of an historical perspective, a scientific perspective, an aesthetic
perspective, a common-sense perspective, or even the bizarre perspective
embodied in dreams and in hallucinations.35 The question then
comes down to, first, what is "the religious perspective" generically considered,
as differentiated from other perspectives; and second, how do
men come to adopt it.
34 A. Macintyre, "The Logical Status of Religious Belief," in Metaphysical Beliefs,
ed. A. Macintyre (London, 1 957), pp. 1 67-2 1 1 .
35 The term "attitude" as i n "aesthetic attitude" o r "natural attitude" is another,
perhaps more common term for what I have here called "perspective."
[For the first, see C. Bell, Art, London, 1 9 1 4; for the second, though the phrase
is originally Husserl's, see A. Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, vol. I of
Collected Papers (The Hague, 1 962). ] But I have avoided it because of its strong
subjectivist connotations, its tendency to place the stress upon a supposed inner
state of an actor rather than on a certain sort of relation-a symbolically mediated
one-between an actor and a situation. This is not to say, of course, that
a phenomenological analysis of religious experience, if cast in intersubjective,
nontranscendental, genuinely scientific terms [e.g., W. Percy, "Symbol, Consciousness
and lntersubjectivity," Journal of Philosophy 15 ( 1 958):63 1 -64 1 1 is
not essential to a full understanding of religious belief, but merely that that is not
the focus of my concern here. "Outlook," "frame of reference," "frame of mind,"
"orientation," "stance," "mental set," and so on, are other terms sometimes employed,
depending upon whether the analyst wishes to stress the social, psychological,
or cultural aspects of the matter.
Religion As a Cultural System 1 1 1
If we place the religious perspective against the background of three
of the other major perspectives in terms of which men construe the
world-the common-sensical, the scientific, and the aesthetic-its special
character emerges more sharply. What distinguishes common sense
as a mode of "seeing" is, as Schutz has pointed out, a simple acceptance
of the world, its objects, and its processes as being just what they seem
to be-what is sometimes called naive realism-and the pragmatic motive,
the wish to act upon that world so as to bend it to one's practical
purposes, to master it, or so far as that proves impossible, to adjust to
it.36 The world of everyday life, itself, of course, a cultural product,
for it is framed in terms of the symbolic conceptions of "stubborn fact"
handed down from generation to generation, is the established scene
and given object of our actions. Like Mt. Everest it is just there, and
the thing to do with it, if one feels the need to do anything with it at all,
is to climb it. In the scientific perspective it is precisely this givenness
which disappears.37 Deliberate doubt and systematic inquiry, the suspension
of the pragmatic motive in favor of disinterested observation,
the attempt to analyze the world in terms of formal concepts whose relationship
to the informal conceptions of common sense become increasingly
problematic-there are the hallmarks of the attempt to grasp
the world scientifically. And as for the aesthetic perspective, which
under the rubric of "the aesthetic attitude" has been perhaps most exquisitely
examined, it involves a different sort of suspension of naive
realism and practical interest, in that instead of questioning the credentials
of everyday experience, one merely ignores that experience in
favor of an eager dwelling upon appearances, an engrossment in surfaces,
an absorption in things, as we say, "in themselves": "The function
of artistic illusion is not 'make-believe'. . . but the very opposite,
disengagement from belief-the contemplation of sensory qualities
without their usual meanings of 'here's that chair', 'that's my
telephone'. . . etc. The knowledge that what is before us has no practical
significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its
appearance as such." 38 And like the common sensical and the scientific
(or the historical, the philosophical, and the artistic), this perspective,
this "way of seeing" is not the product of some mysterious Cartesian
chemistry, but is induced, mediated, and in fact created by means
36 Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality.
37 Ibid.
38 S. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), p. 49.
1 1 2 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
of curious quasi objects-poems, dramas, sculptures, symphonieswhich,
dissociating themselves from the solid world of common sense,
take on the special sort of eloquence only sheer appearances can
achieve.
The religious perspective differs from the common-sensical in that, as
already pointed out, it moves beyond the realities of everyday life to
wider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining concern is
not action upon those wider realities but acceptance of them, faith in
them. It differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions the
realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized scepticism which
dissolves the world's givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses,
but in terms of what it takes to be wider, nonhypothetical truths. Rather
than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis,
encounter. And it differs from art in that instead of effecting a disengagement
from the whole question of factuality, deliberately manufacturing
an air of semblance and illusion, it deepens the concern with fact
and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the
"really real" upon which the religious perspective rests and which the
symbolic activities of religion as a cultural system are devoted to producing,
intensifying, and, so far as possible, rendering inviolable by the
discordant revelations of secular experience. It is, again, the imbuing of
a certain specific complex of symbols-of the metaphysic they formulate
and the style of life they recommend-with a persuasive authority
which, from an analytic point of view, is the essence of religious action.
Which brings us, at length, to ritual. For it is in ritual-that is, consecrated
behavior-that this conviction that religious conceptions are
veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated.
It is in some sort of ceremonial form-even if that
.
form be hardly
more than the recitation of a myth, the consultation of an oracle, or the
decoration of a grave-that the moods and motivations which sacred
symbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of existence
which they formulate for men meet and reinforce one another. In
a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the
agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world,
producing thus that idiosyncratic transformation in one's sense of reality
to which Santayana refers in my epigraph. Whatever role divine intervention
may or may not play in the creation of faith-and it is not the
business of the scientist to pronounce upon such matters one way or the
other-it is, primarily at least, out of the context of concrete acts of re-
Religion As a Cultural System
ligious observance that religious conviction emerges on the human
plane.
However, though any religious ritual, no matter how apparently automatic
or conventional (if it is truly automatic or merely conventional it
is not religious), involves this symbolic fusion of ethos and world view,
it is mainly certain more elaborate and usually more public ones, ones
in which a broad range of moods and motivations on the one hand and
of metaphysical conceptions on the other are caught up, which shape
the spiritual consciousness of a people. Employing a useful term introduced
by Singer, we may call these full-blown ceremonies "cultural
performances" and note that they represent not only the point at which
the dispositional and conceptual aspects of religious life converge for
the believer, but also the point at which the interaction between them
can be most readily examined by the detached observer:
Whenever Madrasi .Brahmans (and non-Brahmans, too, for that matter)
wished to exhibit to me some feature of Hinduism, they always referred to,
or invited me to see, a particular rite or ceremony in the life cycle, in a
temple festival, or in the general sphere of religious and cultural performances.
Reflecting on this in the course of my interviews and observations I
found that the more abstract generalizations about Hinduism (my own as
well as those I heard) could generally be checked, directly or indirectly,
against these observable performances.39
Of course, all cultural performances are not religious performances,
and the line between those that are and artistic, or even political, ones is
often not so easy to draw in practice, for, like social forms, symbolic
forms can serve multiple purposes. But the point is that, paraphrasing
slightly, Indians-"and perhaps all peoples"-seem to think of their
religion "as encapsulated in these discrete performances which they
[can ] exhibit to visitors and to themselves." 40 The mode of exhibition
is however radically different for the two sorts of witness, a fact
seemingly overlooked by those who would argue that "religion is a form
of human art." 41 Where for "visitors" religious performances can, in
the nature of the case, only be presentations of a particular religious
perspective, and thus aesthetically appreciated or scientifically dissected,
39 M. Singer, "The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization," Far Eastern Quarterly
1 5 ( 1 955):23-26.
40 M. Singer, "The Great Tradition in a Metropolitan Center: Madras," in
Traditional India, ed. M. Singer (Philadelphia, 1 958), pp. 140-182.
4 1 R. Firth, Elements of Social Organization (London and New York, 1 95 1 ), p.
250.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
for participants they are in addition enactments, materializations, realizations
of it-not only models of what they believe, but also models for
the believing of it. In these plastic dramas men attain their faith as they
portray it.
As a case in point, let me take a spectacularly theatrical cultural performance
from Bali-that in which a terrible witch called Rangda engages
in a ritual combat with an endearing monster called Sarong.42
Usually, but not inevitably presented on the occasion of a death temple
celebration, the drama consists of a masked dance in which the witch
-depicted as a wasted old widow, prostitute, and eater of infantscomes
to spread plague and death upon the land and is opposed by the
monster-depicted as a kind of cross between a clumsy bear, a silly
puppy, and a strutting Chinese dragon. Rangda, danced by a single
male, is a hideous figure. Her eyes bulge from her forehead like swollen
boils. Her teeth become tusks curving up over her cheeks and fangs
protruding down over her chin. Her yellowed hair falls down around
her in a matted tangle. Her breasts are dry and pendulous dugs edged
with hair, between which hang, like so many sausages, strings of colored
entrails. Her long red tongue is a stream of fire. And as she dances
she splays her dead-white hands, from which protrude ten-inch clawlike
fingernails, out in front of her and utters unnerving shrieks of metallic
laughter. Sarong, danced by two men fore-and-aft in vaudeville
horse fashion, is another matter. His shaggy sheepdog coat is hung with
gold and mica ornaments that glitter in the half-light. He is adorned
with flowers, sashes, feathers, mirrors, and a comical beard made from
human hair. And though a demon too, his eyes also pop and he snaps
his fanged jaws with seemly fierceness when faced with Rangda or other
affronts to his dignity; the cluster of tinkling bells which hang from his
absurdly arching tail somehow contrives to take most of the edge off his
fearfulness. If Rangda is a satanic image, Sarong is a farcical one, and
their clash is a clash (an inconclusive one) between the malignant and
the ludicrous.
42 The Rangda-Barong complex has been extensively described and analyzed
by a series of unusually gifted ethnographers and I shall make no attempt to present
it here in more than schematic form. [See, for example, J. Belo, Bali:
Rangda and Barong (New York, 1 949); J. Belo, Trance in Bali (New York,
1 960); B. DeZoete and W. Spies, Dance and Drama in Bali (London, 1938); G.
Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese Character (New York, 1942); M . Covarrubias,
The Island of Bali (New York, 1937). ] Much of my interpretation of the complex
rests on personal observations made in Bali during 1957- 1958.
Religion As a Cultural System
This odd counterpoint of implacable malice and low comedy pervades
the whole performance. Rangda, clutching her magical white
cloth, moves around in a slow stagger, now pausing immobile in
thought or uncertainty, now lurching suddenly forward. The moment of
her entry (one sees those terrible long-nailed hands first as she emerges
through the split gateway at the top of a short flight of stone stairs) is
one of terrific tension when it seems, to a "visitor" at least, that everyone
is about to break and run in panic. She herself seems insane with
fear and hatred as she screams deprecations at Barong amid the wild
clanging of the gamelan. She may in fact go amok. I have myself seen
Rangdas hurl themselves headlong into the gamelan or run frantically
about in total confusion, being subdued and reoriented only by the combined
force of a half-dozen spectators; and one hears many tales of
amok Rangdas holding a whole village in terror for hours and of impersonators
becoming permanently deranged by their experiences. But Barong,
though he is charged with the same mana-like sacred power (sakti
in Balinese) as Rangda, and his impersonators are also entranced, seems
to have very great difficulty in being serious. He frolics with his retinue
of demons (who add to the gaiety by indelicate pranks of their own),
lies down on a metallaphone while it is being played or beats on a drum
with his legs, moves in one direction in his front half and another in his
rear or bends his segmented body into foolish contortions, brushes flies
from his body or sniffs aromas in the air, and generally prances about
in paroxysms of narcissistic vanity. The contrast is not absolute, for
Rangda is sometimes momentarily comic as when she pretends to polish
the mirrors on Barong's coat, and Barong becomes rather more serious
after Rangda appears, nervously clacking his jaws at her and ultimately
attacking her directly. Nor are the humorous and the horrible always
kept rigidly separated, as in that strange scene in one section of the
cycle in which several minor witches (disciples of Rangda) toss the
corpse of a stillborn child around to the wild amusement of the audience;
or another, no less strange, in which the sight of a pregnant
woman alternating hysterically between tears and laughter while being
knocked about by a group of gravediggers, seems for some reason excruciatingly
funny. The twin themes of horror and hilarity find their
purest expression in the two protagonists and their endless, indecisive
struggle for dominance, but they are woven with deliberate intricacy
through the whole texture of the drama. They-or rather the relations
between them-are what it is about.
1 16 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
It is unnecessary to attempt a thoroughgoing description of a
Rangda-Barong performance here. Such performances vary widely in
detail, consist of several not too closely integrated parts, and in any case
are so complex in structure as to defy easy summary. For our purposes,
the main point to be stressed is that the drama is, for the Balinese, not
merely a spectacle to be watched but a ritual to be enacted. There is no
aesthetic distance here separating actors from audience and placing the
depicted events in an unenterable world of illusion, and by the time a
full-scale Rangda-Barong encounter has been concluded a majority,
often nearly all, of the members of the group sponsoring it will have become
caught up in it not just imaginatively but bodily. In one of Belo's
examples 1 count upwards of seventy-five people-men, women, and
children-taki ng part in the activity at some point or other, and thirty
to forty participants is in no way unusual. As a performance, the drama
is like a high mass, not like a presentation of Murder in the Cathedral:
it is a drawing near, not a standing back.
In part, this entry into the body of the ritual takes place through the
agency of the various supporting roles contained in it-minor witches,
demons, various sorts of legendary and mythical figures-which selected
villagers enact. But mostly it takes place through the agency of an
extraordinarily developed capacity for psychological dissociation on the
part of a very large segment of the population. A Rangda-Barong struggle
is inevitably marked by anywhere from three or four to several
dozen spectators becoming possessed by one or another demon, falling
into violent trances "like firecrackers going off one after the other," 43
and, snatching up krisses, rushing to join the fray. Mass trance, spreading
like a panic, projects the individual Balinese out of the commonplace
world in which he usually lives into that most uncommonplace
one in which Rangda and Barong live. To become entranced is, for the
Balinese, to cross a threshold into another order of existence-the word
for trance is nadi, from dadi, often translated "to become" but which
might be even more simply rendered as "to be." And even those who,
for whatever reasons, do not make this spiritual crossing are caught up
in the proceedings, for it is they who must keep the frenzied activities
of the entranced from getting out of hand by the application of physical
restraint if they are ordinary men, by the sprinkling of holy water and
the chanting of spells if they are priests. At its height a Rangda-Barong
rite hovers, or at least seems to hover, on the brink of mass amok with
43 Belo, Trance in Bali.
Religion A� a Cultural System 1 17
the diminishing band of the unentranced striving desperately (and, it
seems, almost always successfully) to control the growing band of the
entranced.
In its standard form-if it can be said to have a standard form-the
performance begins with an appearance of Barong, prancing and preening,
as a general prophylactic against what is to follow. Then may come
various mythic scenes relating the story-not always precisely the same
ones-upon which the performance is based, until finally Barong and
then Rangda appear. Their battle begins. Barong drives Rangda back
toward the gate of the death temple. But he has not the power to expel
her completely, and he is in turn driven back toward the village. At
length, when it seems as though Rangda will finally prevail, a number
of entranced men rise, krisses in hand, and rush to support Barong. But
as they approach Rangda (who has turned her back in meditation), she
wheels upon them and, waving her sakti white cloth, leaves them comatose
on the ground. Rangda then hastily retires (or is carried) to the
temple, where she herself collapses, hidden from the aroused crowd
which, my informants said, would kill her were it to see her in a helpless
state. The Barong moves among the kris dancers and wakens them
by snapping his jaws at them or nuzzling them with his beard. As they
return, still entranced, to "consciousness," they are enraged by the disappearance
of Rangda, and unable to attack her they turn their krisses
(harmlessly because they are entranced) against their own chests in frustration.
Usually sheer pandemonium breaks out at this point with members
of the crowd, of both sexes, falling into trance all around the courtyard
and rushing out to stab themselves, wrestle with one another,
devour live chicks or excrement, wallow convulsively in the mud, and
so on, while the nonentranced attempt to relieve them of their krisses
and keep them at least minimally in order. In time, the trancers sink,
one by one, into coma, from which they are aroused by the priests' holy
water and the great battle is over-once more a complete stand-off.
Rangda has not been conquered, but neither has she conquered.
One place to search for the meaning of this ritual is in the collection
of myths, tales, and explicit beliefs which it supposedly enacts. However,
not only are these various and variable-for some people Rangda
is an incarnation of Durga, Siva's malignant consort ; for others she is
Queen Mahendradatta, a figure from a court legend set in eleventh
century Java; for yet others, the spiritual leader of witches as the Brahmana
Priest is the spiritual leader of men. Notions of who (or "what")
1 18 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Sarong is are equally diverse and even vaguer-but they seem to play
only a secondary role in the Balinese' perception of the drama. It is
in the direct encounter with the two figures in the context of the actual
performance that the villager comes to know them as, so far as he
is concerned, genuine realities. They are, then, not representations of
anything, but presences. And when the villagers go into trance they
become-nadi-themselves part of the realm in which those presences
exist. To ask, as I once did, a man who has been Rangda whether he
thinks she is real is to leave oneself open to the suspicion of idiocy.
The acceptance of authority that underlies the religious perspective
that the ritual embodies thus flows from the enactment of the ritual itself.
By inducing a set of moods and motivations-an ethos-and defining
an image of cosmic order-a world view-by means of a single
set of symbols, the performance makes the model for and model of aspects
of religious belief mere transpositions of one another. Rangda
evokes fear (as well as hatred, disgust, cruelty, horror, and, though I
have not been able to treat the sexual aspects of the performance here,
lust) ; but she also depicts it:
The fascination which the figure of the Witch holds for the Balinese imagination
can only be explained when it is recognized that the Witch is not
only a fear inspiring figure, but that she is Fear. Her hands with their long
menacing finger-nails do not clutch and claw at her victims, although children
who play at being witches do curl their hands in such gestures. But the
Witch herself spreads her arms with palms out and her finger flexed backward,
in the gesture the Balinese call kapar, a term which they apply to the
sudden startled reaction of a man who falls from a tree. . . . Only when we
see the Witch as herself afraid, as well as frightening. is it possible to explain
her appeal, and the pathos which surrounds her as she dances, hairy,
forbidding, tusked and alone, giving her occasional high eerie laugh.44
And on his side Sarong not only induces laughter, he incarnates the Balinese
version of the comic spirit-a distinctive combination of playfulness,
exhibitionism, and extravagant love of elegance, which, along with
fear, is perhaps the dominant motive in their life. The constantly recurring
struggle of Rangda and Sarong to an inevitable draw is thus-for
the believing Balinese-both the formulation of a general religious conception
and the authoritative experience which justifies, even compels,
,
its acceptance.
44 G. Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese Character, p. 36.
Religion As a Cultural System 1 19
. . . that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic
But no one, not even a saint, lives in the world religious symbols formulate
all of the time, and the majority of men live in it only at moments.
The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts
is, as Schutz says, the paramount reality in human experienceparamount
in the sense that it is the world in which we are most solidly
rooted, whose inherent actuality we can hardly question (however much
we may question certain portions of it), and from whose pressures and
requirements we can least escape.45 A man, even large groups of men,
may be aesthetically insensitive, religiously unconcerned, and unequipped
to pursue formal scientific analysis, but he cannot be completely
lacking in common sense and survive. The dispositions which religious
rituals induce thus have their most important impact-from a
human point of view-outside the boundaries of the ritual itself as they
reflect back to color the individual's conception of the established world
of bare fact. The peculiar tone that marks the Plains vision quest, the
Manus confession, or the Javanese mystical exercise pervades areas of
the life of these peoples far beyond the immediately religious, impressing
upon them a distinctive style in the sense both of a dominant mood
and a characteristic movement. The interweaving of the malignant and
the comic, which the Rangda-Barong combat depicts, animates a very
wide range of everyday Balinese behavior, much of which, like the ritual
itself, has an air of candid fear narrowly contained by obsessive
playfulness. Religion is sociologically interesting not because, as vulgar
positivism would have it, it describes the social order (which, in so far
as it does, it does not only very obliquely but very incompletely), but
because, like environment, political power, wealth, jural obligation, personal
affection, and a sense of beauty, it shapes it.
The movement back and forth between the religious perspective and
the common-sense perspective is actually one of the more obvious empirical
occurrences on the social scene, though, again, one of the most
neglected by social anthropologists, virtually all of whom have seen it
happen countless times. Religious belief has usually been presented as a
homogeneous characteristic of an individual, like his place of residence,
his occupational role, his kinship position, and so on. But religious belief
in the midst of ritual, where it engulfs the total person, transporting
45 Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, p. 226ff.
12.0 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
him, so far as he is concerned, into another mode of existence, and religious
belief as the pale, remembered reflection of that experience in the
midst of everyday life are not precisely the same thing, and the failure
to realize this has led to some confusion, most especially in connection
with the so-called primitive-mentality problem. Much of the difficulty
between Levy-Bruhl and Malinowski on the nature of "native thought,"
for example, arises from a lack of full recognition of this distinction;
for where the French philosopher was concerned with the view of reality
savages adopted when taking a specifically religious perspective, the
Polish-English ethnographer was concerned with that which they
adopted when taking a strictly common-sense one.46 Both perhaps
vaguely sensed that they were not talking about exactly the same thing,
but where they went astray was in failing to give a specific accounting
of the way in which these two forms of "thought" -or, as I would
rather say, these two modes of symbolic formulations-interacted, so
that where Levy-Bruhl's savages tended to live, despite his postludial
disclaimers, in a world composed entirely of mystical encounters, Malinowski's
tended to live, despite his stress on the functional importance
of religion, in a world composed entirely of practical actions. They be�
came reductionists (an idealist is as much of a reductionist as a materi-'
alist) in spite of themselves because they failed to see man as movin1
more or less easily, and very frequently, between radically contrastinl
ways of looking at the world, ways which are not continuous with one
another but separated by cultural gaps across which KierkegaardiaO
leaps must be made in both directions:
There are as many innumerable kinds of different shock experiences as there'
are different finite provinces of meaning upon which I may bestow the a0:1
cent of reality. Some instances are: the shock of falling asleep as the leap
into the world of dreams; the inner transformation we endure if the curtai�
in the theatre rises as the transition to the world of the stageplay; the radicd
change in our attitude if, before a painting, we permit our visual field to �
limited by what is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial world�
our quandary relaxing into laughter, if, in listening to a joke, we are for I!
short time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a reality in rel&4
tion to which the world of our daily life takes on the character of foolish":
ness; the child's turning toward his toy as the transition into the play-world
and so on. But also the religious experiences in all their varieties-for i
stance, Kierkegaard's experience of the "instant" as the leap into the ref,'
gious sphere-are examples of such a shock, as well as the decision of t
46 Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion; L. Levy-Bruhl, How Nativ .
Think (New York, 1926).
Religion As a Cultural System 121
scientist to replace all passionate participation in the affairs of "this world"
by a disinterested [analytical ] attitude.47
The recognition and exploration of the qualitative difference-an
empirical, not a transcendental difference-between religion pure and
religion applied, between an encounter with the supposedly "really real"
and a viewing of ordinary experience in light of what that encounter
seems to reveal, will, therefore, take us further toward an understanding
of what a Bororo means when he says "I am a parakeet," or a Christian
when he says "I am a sinner," than either a theory of primitive mysticism
in which the commonplace world disappears into a cloud of curious
ideas or of a primitive pragmatism in which religion disintegrates
into a collection of useful fictions. The parakeet example, which I take
from Percy, is a good one. 48 For, as he points out, it is unsatisfactory to
say either that the Bororo thinks he is literally a parakeet (for he does
not try to mate with other parakeets), that his statement is false or nonsense
(for, clearly, he is not offering-or at least not only offeringthe
sort of class-membership argument which can be confirmed or refuted
as, say, "I am a Bororo" can be confirmed or refuted), or yet
again that it is false scientifically but true mythically (because that leads
immediately to the pragmatic fiction notion which, as it denies the accolade
of truth to "myth" in the very act of bestowing it, is internally
self-contradictory). More coherently it would seem to be necessary to
see the sentence as having a different sense in the context of the "finite
province of meaning" which makes up the religious perspective and of
that which makes up the common-sensical. In the religious, our Bororo
is "really" a "parakeet," and given the proper ritual context might well
"mate" with other "parakeets"-with metaphysical ones like himself,
not commonplace ones such as those which fly bodily about in ordinary
trees. In the common-sensical perspective he is a parakeet in the sense
-1 assume-that he belongs to a clan whose members regard the parakeet
as their totem, a membership from which, given the fundamental
nature of reality as the religious perspective reveals it, certain moral
and practical consequences flow. A man who says he is a parakeet is, if
he says it in normal conversation, saying that, as myth and ritual demonstrate,
he is shot through with parakeetness and that this religious
fact has some crucial social i mplications-we parakeets must stick to-
47 Schutz, The Problem ofSocial Reality, p. 23 1 .
48 W. Percy, "The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process," Psychiatry 24
U961): 39-52.
122 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
gether, not marry one another, not eat mundane parakeets, and so on,
for to do otherwise is to act against the grain of the whole universe. It
is this placing of proximate acts in ultimate contexts that makes religion,
frequently at least, socially so powerful. It alters, often radically,
the whole landscape presented to common sense, alters it in such a way
that the moods and motivations induced by religious practice seem
themselves supremely practical, the only sensible ones to adopt given
the way things "really" are.
Having ritually "lept" (the image is perhaps a bit too athletic for the
actual facts-"slipped" might be more accurate) into the framework of
meaning which religious conceptions define, and the ritual ended, re�
turned again to the common-sense world, a man is-unless, as some�
times happens, the experience fails to register--changed. And as he i�
changed, so also is the common-sense world, for it is now seen as but
the partial form of a wider reality which corrects and completes it.
But this correction and completion is not, as some students of "com·
parative religion" would have it, everywhere the same in content. Th�
nature of the bias religion gives to ordinary life varies with the religio�
involved, with the particular dispositions induced in the believer by th�
specific conceptions of cosmic order he has come to accept. On the leve�;
of the "great" religions, organic distinctiveness is usually recognized, ai
times insisted upon to the point of zealotry. But even at its simplest folk,
and tribal levels-where the individuality of religious traditions has 5Cl
often been dissolved into such desiccated types as "animism," "anima�
tism," "totemism," "shamanism," "ancestor worship," and all the oth�
insipid categories by means of which ethnographers of religion devital1
ize their data-the idiosyncratic character of how various groups �
men behave because of what they believe they have experienced �
clear. A tranquil Javanese would be no more at home in guilt-riddel;ii
Manus than an activist Crow would be in passionless Java. And for !ill,
the witches and ritual clowns in the world, Rangda and Sarong are n�
generalized but thoroughly singular figurations of fear and gaiety. What;
men believe is as various as what they are-a proposition that hoi�
with equal force when it is inverted. !
It is this particularity of the impact of religious systems upon soci�
systems (and upon personality systems) which renders general as §s
ments of the value of religion in either moral or functional terms im
,:
sible. The sorts of moods and motivations which characterize a m .
who has just come from an Aztec human sacrifice are rather differe .
Religion As a Cultt raJ System 123
from those of one who has just put off his Kachina mask. Even within
the same society, what one "learns" about the essential pattern of life
from a sorcery rite and from a commensal meal will have rather diverse
effects on social and psychological functioning. One of the main methodological
problems in writing about religion scientifically is to put aside
at once the tone of the village atheist and that of the village preacher, as
well as their more sophisticated equivalents, so that the social and psychological
implications of particular religious beliefs can emerge in a
clear and neutral light. And when that is done, overall questions about
whether religion is "good" or "bad," "functional" or "dysfunctional,"
"ego strengthening" or "anxiety producing," disappear like the chimeras
they are, and one is left with particular evaluations, assessments, and
diagnoses in particular cases. There remains, of course, the hardly unimportant
questions of whether this or that religious assertion is true,
this or that religious experience genuine, or whether true religious assertions
and genuine religious experiences are possible at all. But such
questions cannot even be asked, much less answered, within the self-imposed
limitations of the scientific perspective.
III
For an anthropologist, the i mportance of religion lies in its capacity to
serve, for an individual or for a group, as a source of general, yet distinctive,
conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between
them, on the one hand-its model of aspect-and of rooted, no less
distinctive "mental" dispositions-its model for aspect-on the other.
From these cultural functions flow, in turn, its social and psychological
ones.
Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts
to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide
range of experience-intellectual, emotional, moral--can be given
meaningful form. The Christian sees the Nazi movement against the
background of The Fall which, though it does not, in a causal sense, explain
it, places it in a moral, a cognitive, even an affective sense. An
Azande sees the collapse of a granary upon a friend or relative against
the background of a concrete and rather special notion of witchcraft and
12.4 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
thus avoids the philosophical dilemmas as well as the psychological
stress of indeterminism. A Javanese finds in the borrowed and reworked
concept of rasa ("sense-taste-feeling-meaning") a means by which to
"see" choreographic, gustatory, emotional, and political phenomena in a
new light. A synopsis of cosmic order, a set of religious beliefs, is also
a gloss upon the mundane world of social relationships and psychological
events. It renders .them graspable.
But more than gloss, such beliefs are also a template. They do not
merely interpret social and psychological processes in cosmic terms-in
which case they would be philosophical, not religious-but they shape
them. In the doctrine of original sin is embedded also a recommended
attitude toward life, a recurring mood, and a persisting set of motivations.
The Azande learns from witchcraft conceptions not just to understand
apparent "accidents" as not accidents at all, but to react to these
spurious accidents with hatred for the agent who caused them and to
proceed against him with appropriate resolution. Rasa, in addition to
being a concept of truth, beauty, and goodness, is also a preferred mode
of experiencing, a kind of affectless detachment, a variety of bland
aloofness, an unshakable calm. The moods and motivations a religious
orientation produces cast a derivative, lunar light over the solid features
of a people's secular life.
The tracing of the social and psychological role of religion is thus not
so much a matter of finding correlations between specific ritual acts and
specific secular social ties-though these correlations do, of course,
exist and are very worth continued investigation, especially if we can .
contrive something novel to say about them. More, it is a matter of understanding
how it is that men's notions, however implicit, of the
"really real" and the dispositions these notions induce in them, color :
their sense of the reasonable, the practical, the humane, and the moral. :
How far they do so (for in many societies religion's effects seem quite ·
circumscribed, in others completely pervasive), how deeply they do so
(for some men, and groups of men, seem to wear their religion lightly :
so far as the secular world goes, while others seem to apply their faith:
to each occasion, no matter how trivial), and how effectively they do SO·
(for the width of the gap between what religion recommends and wha(
people actually do is most variable cross-culturally)-all these are cru·j
cial issues in the comparative sociology and psychology of religion.
:
Even the degree to which religious systems themselves are developed;
seems to vary extremely widely, and not merely on a simple evolution•'
Religion As a Cultural System 125
ary basis. In one society, the level of elaboration of symbolic formulations
of ultimate actuality may reach extraordinary degrees of complexity
and systematic articulation; in another, no less developed socially,
such formulations may remain primitive in the true sense, hardly more
than congeries of fragmentary by-beliefs and isolated images, of sacred
reflexes and spiritual pictographs. One need only think of the Australians
and the Bushmen, the Toradja and the Alorese, the Hopi and the
Apache, the Hindus and the Romans, or even the Italians and the
Poles, to see that degree of religious articulateness is not a constant even
as between societies of similar complexity.
The anthropological study of religion is therefore a two-stage operation:
first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols
which make up the religion proper, and, second, the relating of
these systems to social-structural and psychological processes. My dissatisfaction
with so much of contemporary social anthropological work
in religion is not that it concerns itself with the second stage, but that it
neglects the first, and in so doing takes for granted what most needs to
be elucidated. To discuss the role of ancestor worship in regulating political
succession, of sacrificial feasts in defining kinship obligations, of
spirit worship in scheduling agricultural practices, of divination in reinforcing
social control, or of initiation rites in propelling personality
maturation, are in no sense unimportant endeavors, and I am not recommending
they be abandoned for the kind ofjejune cabalism into which
symbolic analysis of exotic faiths can so easily fall. But to attempt them
with but the most general, common-sense view of what ancestor worship,
animal sacrifice, spirit worship, divination, or initiation rites are
as religious patterns seems to me not particularly promising. Only when
we have a theoretical analysis of symbolic action comparable in sophistication
to that we now have for social and psychological action, will we
be able to cope effectively with those aspects of social and psychological
life in which religion (or art, or science, or ideology) plays a determinant
role.
Chapter �jEthos,
World View, and the
Analysis of Sacred Symbols
I
Religion is never merely metaphysics. For all peoples the forms, vehicles,
and objects of worship are suffused with an aura of deep moral seriousness.
The holy bears within it everywhere a sense of intrinsic obligation:
it not only encourages devotion, it demands it; it not only
induces intellectual assent, it enforces emotional commitment. Whether
it be formulated as mana, as Brahma, or as the Holy Trinity, that
which is set apart as more than mundane is inevitably considered to
have far-reaching implications for the direction of human conduct.
Never merely metaphysics, religion is never merely ethics either. The
source of its moral vitality is conceived to lie in the fidelity with which
it expresses the fundamental nature of reality. The powerfully coercive
"ought" is felt to grow out of a comprehensive factual "is," and in such
a way religion grounds the most specific requirements of human action
in the most general contexts of human existence.
In recent anthropological discussion, the moral (and aesthetic) aspects
of a given culture, the evaluative elements, have commonly been
summed up in the term "ethos," while the cognitive, existential aspects
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols 127
have been designated by the term "world view." A people's ethos is the
tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style
and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their
world that life reflects. Their world view is their picture of the way
things in sheer actuality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society.
It contains their most comprehensive ideas of order. Religious belief
and ritual confront and mutually confirm one another; the ethos is made
intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life implied
by the actual state of affairs which the world view describes, and
the world view is made emotionally acceptable by being presented as an
image of an actual state of affairs of which such a way of life is an authentic
expression. This demonstration of a meaningful relation between
the values a people holds and the general order of existence within
which it finds itself is an essential element in all religions, however
those values or that order be conceived. Whatever else religion may be,
it is in part an attempt (of an implicit and directly felt rather than explicit
and consciously thought-about sort) to conserve the fund of general
meanings in terms of ·which each individual interprets his experience
and organizes his conduct.
But meanings can only be "stored" in symbols: a cross, a crescent, or
a feathered serpent. Such religious symbols, dramatized in rituals or
related in myths, are felt somehow to sum up, for those for whom they
are resonant, what is known about the way the world is, the quality of
the emotional life it supports, and the way one ought to behave while in
it. Sacred symbols thus relate an ontology and a cosmology to an aesthetics
and a morality: their peculiar power comes from their presumed
ability to identify fact with value at the most fundamental level, to give
to what is otherwise merely actual, a comprehensive normative import.
The number of such synthesizing symbols is limited in any culture, and
though in theory we might think that a people could construct a wholly
autonomous value system independent of any metaphysical referent, an
ethics without ontology, we do not in fact seem to have found such a
people. The tendency to synthesize world view and ethos at some level,
if not logically necessary, is at least empirically coercive; if it is not
philosophically justified, it is at least pragmatically universal.
Let me give as an example of this fusion of the existential and the
normative a quotation from one of James Walker's Oglala (Sioux) informants,
which I find in Paul Radin's neglected classic, Primitive Man
as a Philosopher:
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
The Oglala believe the circle to be sacred because the great spirit caused
everything in nature to be round except stone. Stone is the implement of destruction.
The sun and the sky, the earth and the moon are round like a
shield, though the sky is deep like a bowl. Everything that breathes is round
like the stem of a plant. Since the great spirit has caused everything to be
round mankind should look upon the circle as sacred, for it is the symbol of
all things in nature except stone. It is also the symbol of the circle that
makes the edge of the world and therefore of the four winds that travel
there. Consequently it is also the symbol of the year. The day, the night,
and the moon go in a circle above the sky. Therefore the circle is a symbol
of these divisions of time and hence the symbol of all time.
For these reasons the Oglala make their tipis circular, their camp-circle
circular, and sit in a circle at all ceremonies. The circle is also the symbol
of the tipi and of shelter. If one makes a circle for an ornament and it is not
divided in any way, it should be understood as the symbol of the world and
of time. 1
Here is a subtle formulation of the relation between good and evil,
and of their grounding in the very nature of reality. Circle and eccentric
form, sun and stone, shelter and war are segregated into pairs of disjunct
classes whose significance is aesthetic, moral, and ontological. The
reasoned articulateness of this statement is atypical: for most Oglala the
circle, whether found in nature, painted on a buffalo skin, or enacted in·
a sun dance, is but an unexamined luminous symbol whose meaning is
intuitively sensed, not consciously interpreted. But the power of the
symbol, analyzed or not, clearly rests on its comprehensiveness, on its
fruitfulness in ordering experience. Again and again the idea of a sacred
circle, a natural form with a moral import, yields, when applied to
the world within which the Oglala lives, new meanings; continually it·
connects together elements within their experience which would other-.
wise seem wholly disparate and, wholly disparate, incomprehensible.
The common roundness of a human body and plant stem, of a moon'
and a shield, of a tipi and a camp-circle, give them a vaguely conceived
but intensely felt significance. And this meaningful common element,.
once abstracted, can then be employed for ritual purposes-as when ini
a peace ceremony the pipe, the symbol of social solidarity, moves deli�j
erately in a perfect circle from one smoker to the next, the purity of thei
form evoking the beneficence of the spirits-or to construe mythologi�
cally the peculiar paradoxes and anomalies of moral experience, �
when one sees in a round stone the shaping power of good over evilj
I P. Radin, Primitive Man as a Philosopher (New York, 1 957), p. 227. .
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols 129
II
It is a cluster of sacred symbols, woven into some sort of ordered
whole, which makes up a religious system. For those who are committed
to it, such a religious system seems to mediate genuine knowledge,
knowledge of the essential conditions in terms of which life must, of necessity,
be lived. Particularly where these symbols are uncriticized, historically
or philosophically, as they are in most of the world's cultures,
individuals who ignore the moral-aesthetic norms the symbols formulate,
who follow a discordant style of life, are regarded not so much as
evil as stupid, insensitive, unlearned, or in the case of extreme dereliction,
mad. In Java, where I have done field work, small children, simpletons,
boors, the insane, and the flagrantly immoral are all said to be
"not yet Javanese," and, not yet Javanese, not yet human. Unethical behavior
is referred to as "uncustomary," the more serious crimes (incest,
sorcery, murder) are commonly accounted for by an assumed lapse of
reason, the less serious ones by a comment that the culprit "does not
know order," and the word for "religion" and that for "science" are the
same. Morality has thus the air of simple realism, of practical wisdom;
religion supports proper conduct by picturing a world in which such
conduct is only common sense.
It is only common sense because between ethos and world view, between
the approved style of life and the assumed structure of reality,
there is conceived to be a simple and fundamental congruence such that
they complete one another and lend one another meaning. In Java, for
example, this view is summed up in a concept one hears continually invoked,
that of tjotjog. Tjotjog means to fit, as a key does in a lock, as an
efficacious medicine does to a disease, as a solution does to an arithmetic
problem, as a man does with the woman he marries (if he does not,
they will divorce). If your opinion agrees with mine we tjotjog; if the
meaning of my name fits my character (and if it brings me luck), it is
said to be tjotjog. Tasty food, correct theories, good manners, comfortable
surroundings, gratifying outcomes are all tjotjog. In the broadest
and most abstract sense, two items tjotjog when their coincidence forms
a coherent pattern which gives to each a significance and a value it does
not in itself have. There is implied here a contrapuntal view of the uniVerse
in which that which is important is what natural relationship the
130 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
separate elements have to one another, how they must be arranged to
strike a chord and to avoid a dissonance. And, as in harmony, the ultimately
correct relationships are fixed, determinate, and knowable, so religion,
like harmony, is ultimately a kind of practical science,
.
producing
value out of fact as music is produced out of sound. In its
specificity, tjotjog is a peculiarly Javanese idea, but the notion that life
takes on its true import when human actions are tuned to cosmic conditions
is widespread.
The sort of counterpoint between style of life and fundamental reality
which the sacred symbols formulate varies from culture to culture. For
the Navaho, an ethic prizing calm deliberateness, untiring persistence,
and dignified caution complements an image of nature as tremendously
powerful, mechanically regular, and highly dangerous. For the French,
a logical legalism is a response to the notion that reality is rationally
structured, that first principles are clear, precise, and unalterable and so
need only be discerned, memorized, and deductively applied to concrete
cases. For the Hindus, a transcendental moral determinism in which
one's social and spiritual status in a future incarnation is an automaticoutcome
of the nature of one's action in the present, is completed by a
ritualistic duty-ethic bound to caste. In itself, either side, the normative
or the metaphysical, is arbitrary, but taken together they form a gestalt
with a peculiar kind of inevitability; a French ethic in a Navaho world,
or a Hindu one in a French world would seem only quixotic, for it
would lack the air of naturalness and simple factuality which it has in
its own context. It is this air of the factual, of describing, after all, the
genuinely reasonable way to live which, given the facts of life, is the
primary source of such an ethic's authoritativeness. What all sacred
symbols assert is that the good for man is to live realistically; where
they differ is in the vision of reality they construct.
However, it is not only positive values that sacred symbols dramatize,
but negative ones as well. They point not only toward the existence of
good but also of evil, and toward the conflict between them. The socalled
problem of evil is a matter of formulating in world-view terms
the actual nature of the destructive forces within the self and outside of
it, of interpreting murder, crop failure, sickness, earthquakes, poverty,
and oppression in such a way that it is possible to come to some sort of
terms with them. Declaring evil fundamentally unreal-as in Indian religions
and some versions of Christianity-is but one, rather uncommon,
solution to the problem; more often, the reality of evil is accepted
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols 131
and characterized positively, and an attitude toward it-resignation, active
opposition, hedonistic escape, self-recrimination and repentance, or
a humble plea for mercy-is enjoined as reasonable and proper, given
its nature. Among the African Azande, where all natural misfortune
(death, illness, crop failure) is seen as caused by the hatred of one man
for another acting mechanically through witchcraft, the attitude toward
evil is a straightforward and practical one: it is to be dealt with by
means of reliably established divination in order to discover the witch,
and proven methods of social pressure to force him to abandon his attack,
or failing this, by effective vengeance-magic to kill him. Among
the Melanesian Manus, the conception that illness, death, or financial
failure are the result of a secret sin (adultery, stealing, lying) which has
offended the moral sensibilities of the household spirit is coupled with
an emphasis on public confession and repentance as the rational way to
cope with evil. For the Javanese, evil results from unregulated passion
and is resisted by detachment and self-control. Thus, both what a people
prizes and what it fears and hates are depicted in its world view,
symbolized in its religion, and in turn expressed in the whole quality of
its life. Its ethos is distinctive not merely in terms of the sort of nobility
it celebrates, but also in terms of the sort of baseness it condemns; its
vices are as stylized as its virtues.
The force of a religion in supporting social values rests, then, on the
ability of its symbols to formulate a world in which those values, as
well as the forces opposing their realization, are fundamental ingredients.
It represents the power of the human imagination to construct an
image of reality in which, to quote Max Weber, "events are not just
there and happen, but they have a meaning and happen because of that
meaning." The need for such a metaphysical grounding for values seems
to vary quite widely in intensity from culture to culture and from individual
to individual, but the tendency to desire some sort of factual
basis for one's commitments seems practically universal; mere conventionalism
satisfies few people in any culture. However its role may differ
at various times, for various individuals, and in various cultures, religion,
by fusing ethos and world view, gives to a set of social values
what they perhaps most need to be coercive: an appearance of objectivity.
In sacred rituals and myths values are portrayed not as subjective
human preferences but as the imposed conditions for life implicit in a
world with a particular structure.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
III
The sort of symbols (or symbol complexes) regarded by a people as sacred
varies very widely. Elaborate initiation rites, as among the Australians;
complex philosophical tales, as among the Maori ; dramatic shamanistic
exhibitions, as among the Eskimo; cruel human sacrifice rites,
as among the Aztecs; obsessive curing ceremonies, as among the Navaho;
large communal feasts, as among various Polynesian groups-all
these patterns and many more seem to one people or another to sum up
most powerfully what it knows about living. Nor is there commonly but
one such complex: Malinowski's famous Trobrianders seem equally
concerned with the rituals of gardening and those of trade. In a complex
civilization such as that of the Javanese-in which Hinduistic, Islamic,
and pagan influences all remain very strong-one could choose any
of several symbol complexes as revealing one or another aspect of the
integration of ethos and world view. But perhaps the clearest and
most direct insight into the relation between Javanese values and Javanese
metaphysics can be gained through a brief analysis of one of the
most deeply rooted and highly developed of their art forms which is at
the same time a religious rite: the shadow-puppet play, or wajang.
The shadow play is called so because the puppets, which are flat cutouts
of leather, painted in golds, reds, blues, and blacks, are made to
cast large shadows on a. white screen. The dalang, as the puppeteer is
called, sits on a mat in front of the screen, with a game/an percussion
orchestra behind him, an oil lamp hanging over his head. A banana tree
trunk lies horizontally in front of him into which the puppets, each of
them fastened to a tortoiseshell handle, are stuck. A performance lasts a
whole night. As the play progresses, the dalang takes and replaces characters
from the tree trunk as he needs them, holding them up in either
hand over his head and interposing them between the light and the
screen. From the dalang's side of the screen-where traditionally only
the men were permitted to sit--one sees the puppets themselves, their
shadows rising up dominant on the screen behind them ; from the r�
verse side of the screen-where the women and children sit-one seeS
their shadows only.
The stories dramatized are mostly episodes taken from the IndiaJI!
epic Mahabarata, somewhat adapted and placed in a Javanese settin�
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols 133
(Stories from the Ramayana are sometimes dramatized, but they are less
popular.) In this cycle there are three major groups of characters. First,
there are the gods and goddesses, headed by Siva and his wife Durga.
As in the Greek epics, the gods are far from uniformly righteous, are
marked by human frailties and human passions, and seem peculiarly interested
in the things of this world. Second, there are the kings and nobles,
who are, in theory, the ancestors of the present-day Javanese. The
two most important groups of these nobles are the Pendawas and the
Korawas. The Pendawas are the famous five hero brothers-Yudistira,
Bima, Arjuna, and the identical twins, Nakula and Sad�wa-who are
usually accompanied, as a general advisor and protector, by Krisna, an
incarnation of Visnu. The Korawas, of whom there are a hundred, are
cousins of the Pendawas. They have usurped the kingdom of Ngastina
from them, and it is the struggle over this disputed country which provides
the major theme of the wajang; a struggle which culminates in the
great Bratajuda war of kinsmen, as related in the Bhagavad Gita, in
which the Korawas are defeated by the Pendawas. And, third, there are
those Javanese additions to the original Hindu cast of characters, the
great low clowns-Semar, Petruk, and Gar�ng, constant companions
of the Pendawas, at once their servants and their protectors. Semar, the
father of the other two, is actually a god in all-too-human form, a
brother to Siva, king of the gods. The guardian spirit of all Javanese
from their first appearance until the end of time, this gross and clumsy
fool is perhaps the most important figure in the whole wajang mytho­
logy.
The types of action characteristic of the wajang also are three: there
are the "talking" episodes in which two groups of opposed nobles confront
one another and discuss (the dalang imitates all the voices) the issues
between them; there are the fighting episodes, in which diplomacy
having failed, the two groups of nobles fight (the dalang knocks
the puppets together and kicks a clapper with his foot to symbolize the
sounds of war) ; and there are the slapstick comic scenes, in which the
clowns mock the nobles, each other, and, if the dalang is clever, members
of the audience or the local powers-that-be. Generally, the three
sorts of episodes are differentially distributed over the course of the
evening. The declamatory scenes are mostly toward the beginning, the
COmic ones toward the middle, and the war toward the end. From nine
until midnight, the political leaders of the various kingdoms confront
one another and state the framework of the story-a wajang hero
134 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
wishes to marry the daughter of a neighboring king, a subjugated country
wants its freedom, or whatever. From midnight until three o'clock or
so difficulties of some sort set in-someone else is bidding for the
daughter's hand, the imperialist country refuses freedom to its colony.
And, finally, these difficulties are resolved in the last section, ending at
dawn, inevitably, by a war in which the heroes triumph-an action followed
by a brief celebration of the accomplished marriage or the
achieved freedom. Western-educated Javanese intellectuals often compare
the wajang to a sonata; it opens with an exposition of a theme, follows
with a development and complication of it, and ends with its resolution
and recapitulation.
Another comparison which, oftband, strikes the Western observer is
with Shakespeare's chronicle plays. The long formal scenes in the courts
with the messengers coming and going, interspersed with short, breathless
transitional scenes in the woods or along the road, the double plot,
the clowns speaking a rough common language full of worldly-wise ethics,
caricaturing the forms of action of the great nobles, who speak an
elevated language full of apostrophes to honor, justice, and duty, the
final war, which, like those at Shrewsbury and Agincourt, leaves the.
vanquished beaten but still noble-all these suggest Shakespeare's historical
dramas. But the world view the wajang expresses, despite the
surface similarities in the two feudal codes, is hardly Elizabethan at
base. It is not the external world of principalities and powers which
provides the main setting for human action, but the internal one of sentiments
and desires. Reality is looked for not outside the self, but within
it; consequently what the wajang dramatizes is not a philosophical politics
but a metaphysical psychology.
For the Javanese (or at least for those of them in whose thought the
influence of Java's Hindu-Buddhist period from the second to the fifteenth
centuries still is dominant), the flow of subjective experience,
taken in all its phenomenological immediacy, presents a microcosm of
the universe generally; in the depths of the fluid interior world of
thought-and-emotion they see reflected ultimate reality itself. This inward-looking
sort of world view is best expressed in a concept the Javanese
have also borrowed from India and also peculiarly reinterpreted:
rasa. Rasa has two primary meanings: "feeling" and "meaning." As
"feeling" it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses-seeing, hear-;
,
ing, talking, smelling, and feeling, and it includes within itself three as�
pects of "feeling" that our view of the five senses separates: taste on tbe·
tongue, touch on the body, and emotional "feeling" within the "heart
"
.i
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols 135
like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is
a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is a passion. As "meaning," rasa is applied
to the words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to
indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion
that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse.
And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate
the implicit import, the connotative "feeling" of dance movements,
polite gestures, and so forth. But in this second, semantic sense,
it also means "ultimate significance"-the deepest meaning at which
one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all
the ambiguities of mundane existence. Rasa, said one of my most articulate
informants, is the same as life; whatever lives has rasa and whatever
has rasa lives. To translate such a sentence one could only render
it twice: whatever lives feels and whatever feels lives; or: whatever lives
has meaning and whatever has meaning lives.
By taking rasa to mean both "feeling" and "meaning," the more speculatively
inclined among the Javanese have been able to develop a
highly sophisticated phenomenological analysis of subjective experience
to which everything else can be tied. Because fundamentally "feeling"
and "meaning" are one, and therefore the ultimate religious experience
taken subjectively is also the ultimate religious truth taken objectively,
an empirical analysis of inward perception yields at the same time a
metaphysical analysis of outward reality. This being granted- and the
actual discriminations, categorizations, and connections made are often
both subtle and detailed-then the characteristic way in which human
action comes to be considered, from either a moral or an aesthetic point
of view, is in terms of the emotional life of the individual who experiences
it. This is true whether this action is seen from within as one's
own behavior or from without as that of someone else: the more refined
one's feelings, then the more profound one's understanding, the more elevated
one's moral character, and the more beautiful one's external aspect,
in clothes, movements, speech, and so on. The management of the
individual's emotional economy becomes, therefore, his primary concern,
in terms of which all else is ultimately rationalized. The spiritually
enlightened man guards well his psychological equilibrium and makes a
constant effort to maintain its placid stability. His inner life must be, in
a simile repeatedly employed, like a still pool of clear water to the bottom
of which one can easily see. The individual's proximate aim is,
thus, emotional quiescence, for passion is crude feeling, fit for children,
animals, madmen, primitives, and foreigners. But his ultimate aim,
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
which this quiescence makes possible, is gnosis-the direct comprehension
of the ultimate rasa.
Javanese religion (or at least this variant of it) is consequently mystical:
God is found by means of spiritual discipline, in the depths of the
self as pure rasa. And Javanese ethics (and aesthetics) are, correspondingly,
affect-centered without being hedonistic: emotional equanimity, a
certain flatness of affect, a strange inner stillness, is the prized psychological
state, the mark of a truly noble character. One must attempt to
get beyond the emotions of everyday life to the genuine feeling-meaning
which lies within us all. Happiness and unhappiness are, after all, just
the same. You shed tears when you laugh and also when you cry. And,
besides, they imply one another: happy now, unhappy later; unhappy
now, happy later. The reasonable, prudent, "wise" man strives not for
happiness, but for a tranquil detachment which frees him from his endless
oscillation between gratification and frustration. Similarly, Javanese
etiquette, which comprises almost the whole of this morality, focuses
around the injunction not to disturb the equilibrium of another by sudden
gestures, loud speech, or startling, erratic actions of any sort,
mainly because so doing will cause the other in turn to act erratically
and so upset one's own balance. On the world-view side, there are yogalike
mystical techniques (meditation, staring at candles, repeating set
words or phrases) and highly involved speculative theories of the emotions
and their relations to sickness, natural objects, social institutions,
and so on. On the ethos side, there is a moral stress on subdued dress,
speech, and gesture, on refined sensitivity to small changes in the emotional
state both of oneself and of others, and on a stable, highly regularized
predictability of behavior. "If you start off north, go north," a
Javanese proverb says, "don't turn east, west, or south." Both religion
and ethics, both mysticism and politesse, thus point to the same end: a
detached tranquility which is proof against disturbance from either
within or without.
But, unlike India, this tranquillity is not to be gained by a retreat
from the world and from society, but must be achieved while in it. It is
�
a this-worldly, even practical, mysticism, as expressed in the following
composite quotation from two Javanese petty traders who are members
of a mystical society:
He said that the society was concerned with teaching you not to pay too
much attention to worldly things, not to care too much about the things of
everyday life. He said this is very difficult to do. His wife, he said, was not
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols 137
yet able to do it much, and she agreed with him, e.g., she still likes to ride
in motorcars while he doesn't care; he can take them or leave them alone. It
takes much long study and meditation. For example, you have to get so that
if someone comes to buy cloth you don't care if he buys it or not . . . and
you don't get your emotions really involved in the problems of commerce,
but just think of God. The society wants to turn people toward God and
avoids any strong attachments to everyday life.
. . . Why did he meditate? He said it was only to make the heart peaceful,
to make you calm inside, so you will not be easily upset. For example,
if you're selling cloth and are upset you may sell a piece of cloth for forty
rupiah when it cost you sixty. If a person comes here and my mind is not
calm, well then I can't sell him anything. . . . I said, well, why do you have
a meeting, why not meditate at home? And he said, well, in the first place
you are not supposed to achieve peace by withdrawing from society; you are
supposed to stay in society and mix with people, only with peace in your
heart.
This fusion between a mystical-phenomenological world view and an
etiquette-centered ethos is expressed in the wajang in various ways.
First, it appears most directly in terms of an explicit iconography. The
five Pendawas are commonly interpreted as standing for the five senses
which the individual must unite into one undivided psychological force
in order to achieve gnosis. Meditation demands a "cooperation" among
the senses as close as that among the hero brothers, who act as one in
all they do. Or the shadows of the puppets are identified with the outward
behavior of man, the puppets themselves with his ·inward self, so
that in him as in them the visible pattern of conduct is a direct outcome
of an underlying psychological reality. The very design of the puppets
has explicit symbolic significance: in Bima's red, white, and black sarong,
the red is usually taken to indicate courage, the white purity, the
black fixity of will. The various tunes played on the accompanying game/an
orchestra each symbolize a certain emotion; similarly with the
poems the dalang sings at various points in the play, and so on. Second,
the fusion often appears as parable, as in the story of Bima's quest for
the "clear water." After slaying many monsters in his wanderings in
search of this water which he has been told will make him invulnerable,
he meets a god as big as his little finger who is an exact replica of himself.
Entering through the mouth of this mirror-image midget, he sees
inside the god's body the whole world, complete in every detail, and
upon emerging he is told by the god that there is no "clear water" as
such, that the source of his own strength is within himself, after which
he goes off to meditate. And third, the moral content of the play is
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
sometimes interpreted analogically: the dalang's absolute control over
the puppets is said to parallel God's over men ; or the alternation of polite
speeches and violent wars is said to parallel modern international
relationships, where so long as diplomats continue talking, peace prevails,
but when talks break down, war follows.
But neither icons, parables, nor moral analogies are the main means
by which the Javanese synthesis is expressed in the wajang; for the play
as a whole is commonly perceived to be but a dramatization of individual
subjective experience in terms at once moral and factual :
He [an elementary schoolteacher] said that the main purpose of the wajang
was to draw a picture of inner thought and feeling, to give an external form
to internal feeling. He said that more specifically it pictured the eternal conflict
in the individual between what he wanted to do and what he felt he
ought to do. Suppose you want to steal something. Well, at the same time
something inside you tells you not to do it, restrains you, controls you. That
which wants to do it is called the will; that which restrains is called the ego.
All such tendencies threaten every day to ruin the individual, to destroy his
thought and upset his behavior. These tendencies are called goda, which
means something which plagues or teases someone or something. For example,
you go to a coffee-shop where people are eating. They invite you to join
them, and so you have a struggle within-should I eat with them . . . no,
I've already eaten and I will be over full . . . but the food looks good . . .
etc. . . . etc.
Well, in the wajang the various plagues, wishes, etc.-the godas-are
represented by the hundred Korawas, and the ability to control oneself is
represented by their cousins, the five Pendawas and by Krisna. The stories
are ostensibly about a struggle over land. The reason for this is so the stories
will seem real to the onlookers, so the abstract elements in the rasa can .
be represented in concrete external elements which will attract the audience
and seem real to them and still communicate its inner message. For example,
the wajang is full of war and this war, which occurs and reoccurs, is
really supposed to represent the inner war which goes on continually in
every person's subjective life between his base and his refined impulses.
Once again, this formulation is more self-conscious than most; the
average man "enjoys" the wajang without explicitly interpreting its
meaning. Yet, in the same way as the circle organizes Oglala experience,
whether the individual Sioux is able to explicate its significance,
or indeed has any interest in doing so, so the sacred symbols of the
wajang-the music, characters, the action itself-give form to the ordinary
Javanese experience.
For example, each of the three older Pendawas are commonly held to
display a different sort of emotional-moral dilemma, centering around '
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols 139
one or another of the central Javanese virtues. Yudistira, the eldest, is
too compassionate. He is unable to rule his country effectively because
when someone asks him for his land, his wealth, his food, he simply
gives it out of pity, leaving himself powerless, poor, or starving. His enemies
continually take advantage of his mercifulness to deceive him and
to escape his justice. Bima, on the other hand, is single-minded, steadfast.
Once he forms an intention, he follows it out straight to its conclusion;
he doesn't look aside, doesn't turn off or idle along the way-he
"goes north." As a result, he is often rash, and blunders into difficulties
he could as well have avoided. Arjuna, the third brother, is perfectly
just. His goodness comes from the fact that he opposes evil, that he
shelters people from injustice, that he is coolly courageous in fighting
for the right. But he lacks a sense of mercy, of sympathy for wrongdoers.
He applies a divine moral code to human activity, and so he is
often cold, cruel, or brutal in the name of justice. The resolution of
these three dilemmas of virtue is the same: mystical insight. With a genuine
comprehension of the realities of the human situation, a true perception
of the ultimate rasa, comes the ability to combine Yudistira's
comp;lSsion, Bima's will to action, and Arjuna's sense of justice into a
truly moral outlook, an outlook which brings an emotional detachment
and an inner peace in the midst of the world of flux, yet permits and demands
a struggle for order and justice within such a world. And it is
such a unification that the unshakable solidarity among the Pendawas in
the play, continually rescuing one another from the defects of their virtues,
clearly demonstrates.
But what, finally, of Semar, in whom so many oppositions seem to
meet-the figure who is both god and clown, man's guardian spirit and
his servant, the most spiritually refined inwardly and the most roughlooking
outwardly? Again one thinks of the chronicle plays and of, in
this case, Falstaff. Like Falstaff, Semar is a symbolic father to the
play's heroes. Like Falstaff, he is fat, funny, and worldly-wise; and, like
Falstaff, he seems to provide in his vigorous amoralism a general criticism
of the very values the drama affirms. Both figures, perhaps, provide
a reminder that, despite overproud assertions to the contrary by religious
fanatics and moral absolutists, no completely adequate and
comprehensive human world view is possible, and behind all the pretense
to absolute and ultimate knowledge, the sense for the irrationality
of human life, for the fact that it is unlimitable, remains. Semar reminds
the noble and refined Pendawas of their own humble, animal origins.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
He resists any attempt to turn human beings into gods and to end the
world of natural contingency by a flight to the divine world of absolute
order, a final stilling of the eternal psychological-metaphysical struggle.
In one wajang story, Siva comes down to earth incarnated as a mystical
teacher in an attempt to bring the Pendawas and Korawas together,
to arrange a negotiated peace between them. He is succeeding quite
well, opposed only by Semar. Arjuna is therefore instructed by Siva to
kill Semar so that the Pendawas and Korawas will be able to get together
and end their eternal struggle. Arjuna does not want to kill
Semar, whom he loves, but he wishes a just solution to the differences
between the two groups of cousins and so goes to Semar to murder him.
Semar says: so this is how you treat me after I have followed you everywhere,
served you loyally, and loved you. This is the most poignant
point in the play and Arjuna is deeply ashamed; but true to his idea of
justice, he persists in his duty. Semar says: all right, I will burn myself.
He builds a bonfire and stands in it. But instead of dying, he is transformed
into his godly form and defeats Siva in combat. Then the war
between the Korawas and the Pendawas begins again.
Not all people have, perhaps, so well developed a sense for the necessary
note of irrationality in any world view, and thus for the essential
insolubility of the problem of evil. But whether in the form of a trickster,
a clown, a belief in witchcraft, or a concept of original sin, the
presence of such a symbolic reminder of the hollowness of human pretensions
to religious or moral infallibility is perhaps the surest sign of
spiritual maturity.
IV
The view of man as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking
animal, which has become increasingly popular both in the social sciences
and in philosophy over the past several years, opens up a whole
new approach not only to the analysis of religion as such, but to the understanding
of the relations between religion and values. The drive to
make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as
real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs. And, this
being so, it seems unnecessary to continue to interpret symbolic
activities-religion, art, ideology-as nothing but thinly disguised expressions
of something other than what they seem to be: attempts to
Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols
provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is
unable to understand. If symbols, to adapt a phrase of Kenneth Burke's,
are strategies for encompassing situations, then we need to give more
attention to how people define situations and how they go about coming
to terms with them. Such a stress does not imply a removal of beliefs
and values from their psychobiological and social contexts into a realm
of "pure meaning," but it does imply a greater emphasis on the analysis
of such beliefs and values in terms of concepts explicitly designed to
deal with symbolic material.
The concepts used here, ethos and world view, are vague and imprecise;
they are a kind of prototheory, forerunners, it is to be hoped, of a
more adequate analytical framework. But even with them, anthropologists
are beginning to develop an approach to the study of values which
can clarify rather than obscure the essential processes involved in the
normative regulation of behavior. One almost certain result of such an
empirically oriented, theoretically sophisticated, symbol-stressing approach
to the study of values is the decline of analyses which attempt to
describe moral, aesthetic, and other normative activities in terms of
theories based not on the observation of such activities but on logical considerations
alone. Like bees who fty despite theories of aeronautics
which deny them the right to do so, probably the overwhelming majority
of mankind are continually drawing normative conclusions from factual
premises (and factual conclusions from normative premises, for the
relation between ethos and world view is circular) despite refined, and in
their own terms impeccable, reflections by professional philosophers on
the "naturalistic fallacy." An approach to a theory of value which looks
toward the behavior of actual people in actual societies living in terms
of actual cultures for both its stimulus and its validation will turn us
away from abstract and rather scholastic arguments in which a limited
number of classical positions are stated again and again with little that
is new to recommend them, to a process of ever-increasing insight into
both what values are and how they work. Once this enterprise in the
scientific analysis of values is well launched, the philosophical discussions
of ethics are likely to take on more point. The process is not that
of replacing moral philosophy by descriptive ethics, but of providing
moral philosophy with an empirical base and a conceptual framework
Which is somewhat advanced over that available to Aristotle, Spinoza,
or G. E. Moore. The role of such a special science as anthropology in
the analysis of values is not to replace philosophical investigation, but
to make it relevant.
Chapter 6jRitual
and Social Change:
A Javanese Example
As i n so many areas of anthropological concern, functionalism, either
of the sociological sort associated with the name of Radcliffe-Brown or
of the social-psychological sort associated with Malinowski, has tended
to dominate recent theoretical discussions of the role of religion in society.
Stemming originally from Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life and Robertson-Smith's Lectures on the Religion of
the Semites, the sociological approach (or, as the British anthropologists
prefer to call it, the social anthropological approach) emphasizes the
manner in which belief and particularly ritual reinforce the traditional
social ties between individuals; it stresses the way in which the social
structure of a group is strengthened and perpetuated through the ritualistic
or mythic symbolization of the underlying social values upon
which it rests. 1 The social-psychological approach, of which Frazer and
Tylor were perhaps the pioneers but which found its clearest statement
in Malinowski's classic Magic, Science and Religion, emphasizes what
religion does for the individual-how it satisfies both his cognitive and
1 E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Ufe (Glencoe, 01.,
1947); W. Robertson-Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Edinburah,
1 894).
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 143
affective demands for a stable, comprehensible, and coercible world,
and how it enables him to maintain an inner security in the face of natural
contingency.2 Together, the two approaches have given us an increasingly
detailed understanding of the social and psychological "functions"
of religion in a wide range of societies.
Where the functional approach has been least impressive, however, is
in dealing with social change. As has been noted by several writers, the
emphasis on systems in balance, on social homeostasis, and on timeless
structural pictures, leads to a bias in favor of "well-integrated" societies
in a stable equilibrium and to a tendency to emphasize the functional
aspects of a people's social usages and customs rather than their dysfunctional
implications.3 In analyses of religion this static, ahistorical
approach has led to a somewhat overconservative view of the role of
ritual and belief in social life. Despite cautionary comments by
Kluckhohn4 and others on the "gain and cost" of various religious
practices such as witchcraft, the tendency has been consistently to stress
the harmonizing, integrating, and psychologically supportive aspects of
religious patterns rather than the disruptive, disintegrative, and
psychologically disturbing aspects; to demonstrate the manner in which
religion preserves social and psychological structure rather than the
manner in which it destroys or transforms it. Where change has been
treated, as in Redfield's work on Yucatan, it has largely been in terms
of progressive disintegration: "The changes in culture that in Yucatan
appear to 'go along with' lessening isolation and homogeneity are seen
to be chiefly three: disorganization of the culture, secularization and
individualization." s Yet even a passing knowledge of our own religious
history makes us hesitate to affirm such a simply "positive" role for religion
generally.
It is the thesis of this chapter that one of the major reasons for the
inability of functional theory to cope with change lies in its failure to
treat sociological and cultural processes on equal terms; almost inevitably
one of the two either is ignored or is sacrificed to become but a simple
reflex, a "mirror image," of the other. Either culture is regarded as
2 B. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion (Boston, 1948).
3 See, for example, E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (Cambridge,
Mass., 1954); and R. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe,
Ill., 1949).
4 See C. Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, Peabody Museum Papers, No. 22
(Cambridge, Mass., 1944).
5 R. Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago, 194 1), p. 339.
144 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
wholly derivative from the forms of social organization-the approach
characteristic of the British structuralists as well as many American sociologists
; or the forms of social organization are regarded as behavioral
embodiments of cultural patterns-the approach of Malinowski and
many American anthropologists. In either case, the lesser term tends to
drop out as a dynamic factor, and we are left either with an omnibus
concept of culture ("that complex whole . . .") or else with a completely
comprehensive concept of social structure ("social structure is
not an aspect of culture but the entire culture of a given people handled
in a special frame of theory").6 In such a situation, the dynamic elements
in social change that arise from the failure of cultural patterns to
be perfectly congruent with the forms of social organization are largely
incapable of formulation. "We functionalists," E. R. Leach has recently
remarked, "are not really 'antihistorical' by principle ; it is simply that
we do not know how to fit historical materials into our framework of
concepts." 7
A revision of the concepts of functional theory so as to make them
capable of dealing more effectively with "historical materials" might
well begin with an attempt to distinguish analytically between the cultural
and social aspects of human life, and to treat them as independently
variable yet mutually interdependent factors. Though separable
only conceptually, culture and social structure will then be seen to be
capable of a wide range of modes of integration with one another, of
which the simple isomorphic mode is but a limiting case-a case common
only in societies which have been stable over such an extended
time as to make possible a close adjustment between social and cultural
aspects. In most societies, where change is a characteristic rather
than an abnormal occurrence, we shall expect to find more or less radical
discontinuities between the two. I would argue that it is in these
very discontinuities that we shall find some of the primary driving
forces in change.
One of the more useful ways-but far from the only one--of
distinguishing between culture and social system is to see the former as
an ordered system of meaning and of symbols, in terms of which social
interaction takes place; and to see the latter as the pattern of social interaction
itself.8 On the one level there is the framework of beliefs, exe
M. Fortes, "The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups," American Anthr�
pologist, 55 ( 1 953): 1 7-4 1 .
7 Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, p. 282.
8 T. Parsons and E. Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge,
Mass., 195 1 ).
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 145
pressive symbols, and values in terms of which individuals define their
world, express their feelings, and make their judgments; on the other
level there is the ongoing process of interactive behavior, whose persistent
form we call social structure. Culture is the fabric of meaning in
terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their
action ; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing
network of social relations. Culture and social structure are then but
different abstractions from the same phenomena. The one considers social
action in respect to its meaning for those who carry it out, the other
considers it in terms of its contribution to the functioning of some social
system.
The nature of the distinction between culture and social system is
brought out more clearly when one considers the contrasting sorts of integration
characteristic of each of them. This contrast is between what
Sorokin has called "logico-meaningful integration" and what he has
called "causal-functional integration." & By logico-meaningful integration,
characteristic of culture, is meant the sort of integration one finds
in a Bach fugue, in Catholic dogma, or in the general theory of relativity
; it is a unity of style, of logical implication, of meaning and value.
By causal-functional integration, characteristic of the social system, is
meant the kind of integration one finds in an organism, where all the
parts are united in a single causal web; each part is an element in a reverberating
causal ring which "keeps the system going." And because
these two types of integration are not identical, because the particular
form one of them takes does not directly imply the form the other will
take, there is an inherent incongruity and tension between the two and
between both of them and a third element, the pattern of motivational
integration within the individual which we usually call personality struc­
ture:
Thus conceived, a social system is only one of three aspects of the structuring
of a completely concrete system of social action. The other two are the
personality systems of the individual actors and the cultural system which is
built into their action. Each of the three must be considered to be an independent
focus of the organization of the elements of the action system in
the sense that no one of them is theoretically reducible to terms of one or a
combination of the other two. Each is indispensable to the other two in the
sense that without personalities and culture there would be no social system
and so on around the roster of logical possibilities. But this interdependence
and interpenetration is a very different matter from reducibility, which
would mean that the important properties and processes of one class of sys-
9 P. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 3 vols. (New York, 1937).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tern could be theoretically derived from our theoretical knowledge of one or
both of the other two. The action frame of reference is common to all three
and this fact makes certain "transformations" between them possible. But on
the level of theory here attempted they do not constitute a single system,
however this might turn out to be on some other theoretical leveJ.IO
I shall attempt to demonstrate the utility of this more dynamic functionalist
approach by applying it to a particular case of a ritual which
failed to function properly. I shall try to show how an approach which
does not distinguish the "logico-meaningful" cultural aspects of the ritual
pattern from the "causal-functional" social structural aspects is unable
to account adequately for this ritual failure, and how an approach
which does so distinguish them is able to analyze more explicitly the
cause of the trouble. It will further be argued that such an approach is
able to avoid the simplistic view of the functional role of religion in society
which sees that role merely as structure-conserving, and to substitute
for it a more complex conception of the relations between religious
belief and practice and secular social life. Historical materials can be
fitted into such a conception, and the functional analysis of religion can
therefore be widened to deal more adequately with processes of change.
The Setting
The case to be described is that of a funeral held in Modjokuto, a small
town in eastern Central Java. A young boy, about ten years of age, who
was living with his uncle and aunt, died very suddenly. His death, instead
of being followed by the usual hurried, subdued, yet methodically
efficient Javanese funeral ceremony and burial routine, brought on an
extended period of pronounced social strain and severe psychological
tension. The complex of beliefs and rituals which had for generations
brought countless Javanese safely through the difficult postmortem period
suddenly failed to work with its accustomed effectiveness. To understand
why it failed demands knowledge and understanding of a
whole range of social and cultural changes which have taken place in
Java since the first decades of this century. This disrupted funeral was
in fact but a microscopic example of the broader conflicts, structural
10 T. Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 195 1), p. 6.
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 147
dissolutions, and attempted reintegrations which, in one form or another,
are characteristic of contemporary Indonesian society.
The religious tradition of Java, particularly of the peasantry, is a
composite of Indian, Islamic, and indigenous Southeast Asian elements.
The rise of large, militaristic kingdoms in the inland rice basins in the
early centuries of the Christian era was associated with the diffusion of
Hinduist and Buddhist culture patterns to the island; the expansion of
international maritime trade in the port cities of the northern coast in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was associated with the diffusion of
Islamic patterns. Working their way into the peasant mass, these two
world religions became fused with the underlying animistic traditions
characteristic of the whole Malaysian culture area. The result was a balanced
syncretism of myth and ritual in which Hindu gods and goddesses,
Moslem prophets and saints, and local spirits and demons all
found a proper place.
The central ritual form in this syncretism is a communal feast, called
the slametan. Slametans, which are given with only slight variations in
form and content on almost all occasions of religious significance-at
passage points in the life cycle, on calendrical holidays, at certain stages
of the crop cycle, on changing one's residence, and so on-are intended
to be both offerings to the spirits and commensal mechanisms of social
integration for the living. The meal, which consists of specially prepared
dishes, each symbolic of a particular religious concept, is cooked
by the female members of one nuclear family household and set out on
mats in the middle of the living room. The male head of the household
invites the male heads of the eight or ten contiguous households to attend;
no closer neighbor is ignored in favor of one farther away. After a
speech by the host explaining the spiritual purpose of the feast and a
short Arabic chant, each man takes a few hurried, almost furtive, gulps
of food, wraps the remainder of the meal in a banana-leaf basket, and
returns home to share it with his family. It is said that the spirits draw
their sustenance from the odor of the food, the incense which is burned,
and the Moslem prayer; the human participants draw theirs from the
material substance of the food and from their social interaction. The result
of this quiet, undramatic little ritual is twofold: the spirits are appeased
and neighborhood solidarity is strengthened.
The ordinary canons of functional theory are quite adequate for the
analysis of such a pattern. It can rather easily be shown that the slametan
is well designed both to "tune up the ultimate value attitudes" nee-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
essary to the effective integration of a territorially based social structure,
and to fulfill the psychological needs for intellectual coherence and
emotional stability characteristic of a peasant population. The Javanese
village (once or twice a year, villagewide slametans are held) is essentially
a set of geographically contiguous, but rather self-consciously autonomous,
nuclear-family households whose economic and political interdependence
is of roughly the same circumscribed and explicitly
defined sort as that demonstrated in the slametan. The demands of the
labor-intensive rice and dry-crop agricultural process require the perpetuation
of specific modes of technical cooperation and enforce a sense
of community on the otherwise rather self-contained families-a sense
of community which the slametan clearly reinforces. And when we consider
the manner in which various conceptual and behavioral elements
from Hindu-Buddhism, Islam, and "animism" are reinterpreted and balanced
to form a distinctive and nearly homogeneous religious style, the
close functional adjustment between the communal feast pattern and the
conditions of Javanese rural life is even more readily apparent.
But the fact is that in all but the most isolated parts of Java, both the
simple territorial basis of village social integration and the syncretic
basis of its cultural homogeneity have been progressively undermined
over the past fifty years. Population growth, urbanization, monetization,
occupational differentiation, and the like, have combined to weaken the
traditional ties of peasant social structure; and the winds of doctrine
which have accompanied the appearance of these structural changes
have disturbed the simple uniformity of religious belief and practice
characteristic of an earlier period. The rise of nationalism, Marxism,
and Islamic reform as ideologies, which resulted in part from the increasing
complexity of Javanese society, has affected not only the large
cities where these creeds first appeared and have always had their greatest
strength, but has had a heavy impact on the smaller towns and villages
as well. In fact, much of recent Javanese social change is perhaps
most aptly characterized as a shift from a situation in which the primary
integrative ties between individuals (or between families) are
phrased in terms of geographical proximity to one in which they are
phrased in terms of ideological like-mindedness.
In the villages and small towns these major ideological changes appeared
largely in the guise of a widening split between those who emphasized
the Islamic aspects of the indigenous religious syncretism and
those who emphasized the Hinduist and animistic elements. It is true
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 149
that some difference between these variant subtraditions has been present
since the arrival of Islam; some individuals have always been particularly
skilled in Arabic chanting or particularly learned in Moslem
taw, while others have been adept at more Hinduistic mystical practices
or specialists in local curing techniques. But these contrasts were softened
by the easy tolerance of the Javanese for a wide range of religious
concepts, so long as basic ritual patterns-that is, slametans-were
faithfully supported; whatever social divisiveness they stimulated was
largely obscured by the overriding commonalities of rural and smalltown
life.
However, the appearance after 1 9 1 0 of Islamic modernism (as well
as vigorous conservative reactions against it) and religious nationalism
among the economically and pol itically sophisticated trading classes of
the larger cities strengthened the feeling for Islam as an exclusivist,
antisyncretic creed among the more orthodox element of the mass of
the population. Similarly, secular nationalism and Marxism, appearing
among the civil servants and the expanding proletariat of these cities,
strengthened the pre-Islamic (that is, Hinduist-animist) elements of the
syncretic pattern, which these groups tended to prize as a counterweight
to puristic Islam and which some of them adopted as a general religious
framework in which to set their more specifically political ideas. On the
one hand, there arose a more self-conscious Moslem, basing his religious
beliefs and practices more explicitly on the international and
universalistic doctrines of Mohammed; on the other hand there arose a
more self-conscious "nativist," attempting to evolve a generalized religious
system out of the material-muting the more Islamic elementsof
his inherited religious tradition. And the contrast between the first
kind of man, called a santri, and the second, called an abangan, grew
steadily more acute, until today it forms the major cultural distinction
in the whole of the Modjokuto area.
It is especially in the town that this contrast has come to play a crucial
role. The absence of pressures toward interfamilial cooperation exerted
by the technical requirements of wet-rice growing, as well as lessened
effectiveness of the traditional forms of village government in the
face of the complexities of urban living, severely weaken the social supports
of the syncretic village pattern. When each man makes his living
-as chauffeur, trader, clerk, or laborer-more or less independently of
how his neighbors make theirs, his sense of the importance of the neighborhood
community naturally diminishes. A more differentiated class
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
system, more bureaucratic and impersonal forms of government, greater
heterogeneity of social background, all tend to lead to the same result:
the de-emphasis of strictly geographical ties in favor of diffusely ideological
ones. For the townsman, the distinction between santri and
abangan becomes even sharper, for it emerges as his primary point of
social reference; it becomes a symbol of his social identity, rather than
a mere contrast in belief. The sort of friends he will have, the sort of
organizations he will join, the sort of political leadership he will follow,
the sort of person he or his son will marry, will all be strongly influenced
by the side of this ideological bifurcation which he adopts as his
own.
There is thus emerging in the town-though not only in the town-a
new pattern of social living organized in terms of an altered framework
of cultural classification. Among the elite this new pattern has already
become rather highly developed, but among the mass of the townspeople
it is still in the process of formation. Particularly in the kampongs,
the off-the-street neighborhoods in which the common Javanese townsmen
live crowded together in a helter-skelter profusion of little bamboo
houses, one finds a transitional society in which the traditional forms of
rural living are being steadily dissolved and new forms steadily reconstructed.
In these enclaves of peasants-come-to-town (or of sons and
grandsons of peasants-come-to-town), Redfield's folk culture is being
constantly converted into his urban culture, though this latter is not
accurately characterized by such negative and residual terms as "secular,"
"individualized," and "culturally disorganized." What is occurring
in the kampongs is not so much a destruction of traditional ways of life,
as a construction of a new one; the sharp social conflict characteristic of
these lower-class neighborhoods is not simply indicative of a loss of cultural
consensus, but rather is indicative of a search, not yet entirely successful,
for new, more generalized, and flexible patterns of belief and
value.
In Modjokuto, as in most of Indonesia, this search is taking place
largely within the social context of the mass political parties, as well as
in the women's clubs, youth organizations, labor unions, and other sodalities
formally or informally linked with them. There are several of
these parties (though the recent [ 1 955) general election severely reduced
their number), each led by educated urban elites-civil servants.
teachers, traders, students, and the like-and each competing with the
others for the political allegiance of both the half-rural, half-urban kam·�
Jijtual and Social Change: A Javanese Example
pong dwellers and of the mass of the peasantry. And almost without exception,
they appeal to one or another side of the santri-abangan split.
Of this complex of political parties and sodalities, only two are of immediate
concern to us here: Masjumi, a huge, Islam-based political
party; and Permai, a vigorously anti-Moslem politico-religious cult.
Masjumi is the more or less direct descendant of the prewar Islamic
reform movement. Led, at least in Modjokuto, by modernist santri intellectuals,
it stands for a socially conscious, antischolastic, and somewhat
puritanical version of back-to-the-Koran Islam. In company with the
other Moslem parties, it also supports the institution of an "Islamic
State" in Indonesia in place of the present secular republic. However,
the meaning of this ideal is not entirely clear. Masjumi's enemies accuse
it of pressing for an intolerant, medievalist theocracy in which abangans
and non-Moslems will be persecuted and forced to follow exactly the
prescripts of the Moslem law, while Masjumi's leaders claim that Islam
is intrinsically tolerant and that they only desire a government explicitly
based on the Moslem creed, one whose laws will be in consonance with
the teachings of the Koran and Hadith. In any case, Masjumi, the country's
largest Moslem party, is one of the major spokesmen on both the
national and the local levels for the values and aspirations of the santri
community.
Permai is not so impressive on a national scale. Though it is a nationwide
party, it is a fairly small one, having strength only in a few
fairly circumscribed regions. In the Modjokuto area, however, it happened
to be of some importance, and what it lacked in national scope it
made up in local intensity. Essentially, Permai is a fusion of Marxist
politics with abangan religious patterns. It combines a fairly explicit
anti-Westernism, anticapitalism, and anti-imperialism with an attempt
to formalize and generalize some of the more characteristic diffuse
themes of the peasant religious syncretism. Permai meetings follow both
the slametan pattern, complete with incense and symbolic food (but
Without Islamic chants), and modern parliamentary procedure; Permai
pamphlets contain calendrical and numerological divinatory systems and
mystical teachings as well as analyses of class conflict; and Permai
speeches are concerned with elaborating both religious and political
concepts. In Modjokuto, Permai is also a curing cult, with its own special
medical practices and spells, a secret password, and cabalistic interpretations
of passages in the leaders' social and political writings.
But Permai's most notable characteristic is its strong anti-Moslem
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
stand. Charging that Islam is a foreign import, unsuited to the needs
and values of the Javanese, the cult urges a return to "pure" and "original"
Javanese beliefs, by which they seem to mean to the indigenous
syncretism with the more Islamic elements removed. In line with this,
the cult-party has initiated a drive, on both national and local levels, for
secular (that is, non-Islamic) marriage and funeral rites. As the situation
stands now, all but Christians and Balinese Hindus must have their
marriages legitimatized by means of the Moslem ritual. 1 1 Funeral rites
are an individual concern but, because of the long history of syncretism,
they are so deeply involved with Islamic customs that a genuinely nonIslamic
funeral tends to be a practical impossibility.
Permai's action on the local level in pursuit of non-Islamic marriage
and funeral ceremonies took two forms. One was heavy pressure on
local government officials to permit such practices, and the other was
heavy pressure on its own members to follow, voluntarily, rituals purified
of Islamic elements. In the case of marriage, success was more or
less precluded because the local officials' hands were tied by Central
Government ordinances, and even highly ideologized members of the
cult would not dare an openly "illegitimate" marriage. Without a
change in the law, Permai had little chance to alter marriage forms,
though a few abortive attempts were made to conduct civil ceremonies
under the aegis of abangan-minded village chiefs.
The case of funerals was somewhat different, for a matter of custom
rather than law was involved. During the period I was in the field
( 1 952- 1 954), the tension between Permai and Masjumi increased very
sharply. This was due in part to the imminence of Indonesia's first general
elections, and in part to the effects of the cold war. It was also influenced
by various s�cial occurrences-such as a report that the national
head of Permai had publicly called Mohammed a false prophet; a
speech in the nearby regional capital by a Masjumi leader in which he
accused Permai of intending to raise a generation of bastards in Indonesia;
and a bitter village-chief election largely fought out on santri vs.
abangan grounds. As a result, the local subdistrict officer, a worried bureaucrat
trapped in the middle, called a meeting of all the village
u Actually, there are two parts to Javanese marriage rites. One, which is part
of the general syncretism, is held at the bride's home and involves a slametali
and an elaborate ceremonial "meeting" between bride and groom. The otbel't
which is the official ceremony in the eyes of the Government, follows the M�
lem law and takes place at the office of the subdistrict religious officer, or Naa"'
See C. Geertz, The Religion ofJava (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), pp. S 1-6 1 , 203. l
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 1 53
religious officials, or Modins. Among many other duties, a Modin is
traditionally responsible for conducting funerals. He directs the whole
ritual, instructs the mourners in the technical details of burial, leads the
Koran chanting, and reads a set speech to the deceased at the graveside.
The subdistrict officer instructed the Modins-the majority of whom
were village Masjumi leaders-that in the case of the death of a member
of Permai, they were merely to note the name and age of the deceased
and return home; they were not to participate in the ritual. He
warned that if they did not do as he advised, they would be responsible
if trouble started and he would not come to their support.
This was the situation on July 1 7, 1954, when Paidjan, nephew of
Karman, an active and ardent member of Permai, died suddenly in the
Modjokuto kampong in which I was living.
The Funeral
The mood of a Javanese funeral is not one of hysterical bereavement,
unrestrained sobbing, or even of formalized cries of grief for the deceased's
departure. Rather, it is a calm, undemonstrative, almost languid
letting go, a brief ritualized relinquishment of a relationship no
longer possible. Tears are not approved of and certainly not encouraged;
the effort is to get the job done, not to linger over the pleasures of
grief. The detailed busy-work of the funeral, the politely formal social
intercourse with the neighbors pressing in from all sides, the series of
commemorative slametans stretched out at intervals for almost three
years-the whole momentum of the Javanese ritual system is supposed
to carry one through grief without severe emotional disturbance. For
the mourner, the funeral and postfuneral ritual is said to produce a feeling
of iklas, a kind of willed affectlessness, a detached and static state
of "not caring"; for the neighborhood group it is said to produce rukun,
"communal harmony."
The actual service is in essence simply another version of the slametan,
adapted to the special requirements of interment. When the news of
a death is broadcast through the area, everyone in the neighborhood
must drop what he is doing and go immediately to the home of the survivors.
The women bring bowls of rice, which is cooked up into a sla-
154 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
metan; the men begin to cut wooden grave markers and to dig a grave.
Soon the Modin arrives and begins to direct activities. The corpse is
washed in ceremonially prepared water by the relatives (who unflinchingly
hold the body on their laps to demonstrate their affection for the
deceased as well as their self-control) ; then it is wrapped in muslin.
About a dozen santris, under the leadership of the Modin, chant Arabic
prayers over the body for five or ten minutes; after this it is carried,
amid various ritual acts, in a ceremonial procession to the graveyard,
where it is interred in prescribed ways. The Modin reads a graveside
speech to the deceased, reminding him of his duties as a believing Moslem;
and the funeral is over, usually only two or three hours after death.
The funeral proper is followed by commemorative slametans in the
home of the survivors at three, seven, forty, and one hundred days after
death; on the first and second anniversary of death; and, finally, on the
thousandth day, when the corpse is considered to have turned to dust
and the gap between the living and the dead to have become absolute.
This was the ritual pattern which was called into play when Paidjan
died. As soon as dawn broke (death occurred in the early hours of the
morning), Karman, the uncle, dispatched a telegram to the boy's parents
in a nearby city, telling them in characteristic Javanese fashion that
their son was ill. This evasion was intended to soften the impact of
death by allowing them to become aware of it more gradually. Javanese
feel that emotional damage results not from the severity of a frustration
but from the suddenness with which it comes, the degree to which it
"surprises" one unprepared for it. It is "shock," not suffering itself,
which is feared. Next, in the expectation that the parents would arrive
within a few hours, Karman sent for the Modin to begin the ceremony.
This was done on the theory that by the time the parents had come little
would be left to do but inter the body, and they would thus once more
be spared unnecessary stress. By ten o'clock at the very latest it should
all be over; a saddening incident, but a ritually muted one.
But when the Modin, as he later told me, arrived at Karman's house
and saw the poster displaying Permai's political symbol, he told Karman
that he could not perform the ritual. After all, Karman belonged to
"another religion," and he, the Modin, did not know the correct burial
rituals for it; all he knew was Islam. "I don't want to insult your religion,"
he said piously. "On the contrary, I hold it in the utmost regard,
for there is no intolerance in Islam. But I don't know your ritual. The
Christians have their own ritual and their own specialist (the local
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 155
preacher), but what does Permai do? Do they burn the corpse or what?"
(This is a sly allusion to Hindu burial practices; evidently the Modin
enjoyed himself hugely in this interchange.) Karman was, the Modin
told me, rather upset at all this and evidently surprised, for although he
was an active member of Permai, he was a fairly unsophisticated one. It
had evidently never occurred to him that the anti-Moslem-funeral agitation
of the party would ever appear as a concrete problem, or that the
Modin would actually refuse to officiate. Karman was actually not a bad
fellow, the Modin concluded; he was but a dupe of his leaders.
After leaving the now highly agitated Karman, the Modin went directly
to the subdistrict officer to ask if he had acted properly. The officer
was morally bound to say that he had, and thus fortified the Modin
returned home to find Karman and the village policeman, to whom Karman
had gone in desperation, waiting for him. The policeman, a personal
friend of Karman's, told the Modin that according to time-honored
custom he was supposed to bury everyone with impartiality, never
mind whether he happened to agree with their politics. But the Modin,
having now been personally supported by the subdistrict officer, insisted
that it was no longer his responsibility. However, he suggested, if Karman
wished, he could go to the village chief's office and sign a public
statement, sealed with the Government stamp and countersigned by the
village chief in the presence of two witnesses, declaring that he, Karman,
was a true believing Moslem and that he wished the Modin to
bury the boy according to Islamic custom. At this suggestion that he officially
abandon his religious beliefs, Karman exploded into a rage and
stormed from the house, rather uncharacteristic behavior for a Javanese.
By the time he arrived home again, at his wit's end about what to do
next, he found to his dismay that the news of the boy's death had been
broadcast and the entire neighborhood was already gathering for the
ceremony.
Like most of the kampongs in the town of Modjokuto, the one in
which I lived consisted both of pious santris and ardent abangans (as
well as a number of less intense adherents of either side), mixed together
in a more or less random manner. In the town, people are forced
to live where they can and take whomever they find for neighbors, in
contrast to the rural areas where whole neighborhoods, even whole villages,
still tend to be made up almost entirely of either abangans or santris.
The majority of the santris in the kampong were members of Masjumi,
and most of the abangans were followers of Permai, and in daily
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
life, social interaction between the two groups was minimal. The abangans,
most of whom were either petty artisans or manual laborers, gathered
each late afternoon at Karman's roadside coffee shop for the idle
twilight conversations which are typical of small-town and village life in
Java; the santris-tailors, traders, and storekeepers for the most part
-usually gathered in one or another of the santri-run shops for the
same purpose. But despite this lack of close social ties, the demonstration
of territorial unity at a funeral was still felt by both groups to be an
unavoidable duty; of all the Javanese rituals, the funeral probably carries
the greatest obligation on attendance. Everyone who lives within a
certain roughly defined radius of the survivors' home is expected to
come to the ceremony; and on this occasion everyone did.
With this as background, it is not surprising that when I arrived at
Karman's house about eight o'clock, I found two separate clusters of
sullen men squatting disconsolately on either side of the yard, a nervous
group of whispering women sitting idly inside the house near the stillclothed
body, and a general air of doubt and uneasiness in place of the
usual quiet busyness of slametan preparing, body washing, and guest
greeting. The abangans were grouped near the house, where Karman
was crouched, staring blankly off into space, and where Sudjoko and
Sastro, the town Chairman and Secretary of Permai (the only nonresidents
of the kampong present) sat on chairs, looking vaguely out of
place. The santris were crowded together under the narrow shadow of a
coconut palm about thirty yards away, chatting quietly to one another
about everything but the problem at hand. The almost motionless scene
suggested an unlooked-for intermission in a familiar drama, as when a
motion picture stops in mid-action.
After a half hour or so, a few of the abangans began to chip halfheartedly
away at pieces of wood to make grave markers and a few
women began to construct small flower offerings for want of anything
better to do; but it was clear that the ritual was arrested and that no one
quite knew what to do next. Tension slowly rose. People nervously
watched the sun rise higher and higher in the sky, or glanced at the impassive
Karman. Mutterings about the sorry state of affairs began to appear
("everything these days is a political problem," an old, traditionalistic
man of about eighty grumbled to me, "you can't even die any more
but what it becomes a political problem"). Finally, about 9: 30, a young
santri tailor named Abu decided to try to do something about the situation
before it deteriorated entirely: he stood up and gestured to Kar-
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 157
man, the first serious instrumental act which had occurred all morning.
And Karman, roused from his meditation, crossed the no man's land to
talk to him.
As a matter of fact, Abu occupied a rather special position in the
kampong. Although he was a pious santri and a loyal Masjumi member,
he had more contact with the Permai group because his tailor shop was
located directly behind Karman's coffee shop. Though Abu, who stuck
to his sewing machine night and day, was not properly a member of this
group, he would often exchange comments with them from his work
bench about twenty feet away. True, a certain amount of tension existed
between him and the Permai people over religious issues. Once, when I
was inquiring about their eschatological beliefs, they referred me sarcastically
to Abu, saying he was an expert, and they teased him quite
openly about what they considered the wholly ridiculous Islamic theories
of the afterlife. Nevertheless, he had something of a social bond
with them, and it was perhaps reasonable that he should be the one to
try to break the deadlock.
"It is already nearly noon," Abu said. "Things can't go straight on
like this." He suggested that he send Umar, another of the santris, to
see if the Modin could now be induced to come; perhaps things were
cooler with him now. Meanwhile, he could get the washing and wrapping
of the corpse started himself. Karman replied that he would think
about it, and returned to the other side of the yard for a discussion with
the two Permai leaders. After a few minutes of vigorous gesturing and
nodding, Karman returned and said simply, "All right, that way." " I
know how you feel," Abu said; "I'll just do what is absolutely necessary
and keep the Islam out as much as possible." He gathered the santris
together and they entered the house.
The first requisite was stripping the corpse (which was still lying on
the floor, because no one could bring himself to move it). But by now
the body was rigid, making it necessary to cut the clothes off with a
knife, an unusual procedure which deeply disturbed everyone, especially
the women clustered around. The santris finally managed to get the
body outside and set up the bathing enclosure. Abu asked for volunteers
for the washing; he reminded them that God would consider such
an act a good work. But the relatives, who normally would be expected
to undertake this task, were by now so deeply shaken and confused that
they were unable to bring themselves to hold the boy on their laps in
the customary fashion. There was another wait while people looked
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
hopelessly at each other. Finally, Pak Sura, a member of Karman's
group but no relative, took the boy on his lap, although he was clearly
frightened and kept whispering a protective spell. One reason the Javanese
give for their custom of rapid burial is that it is dangerous to
have the spirit of the deceased hovering around the house.
Before the washing could begin, however, someone raised the question
as to whether one person was enough-wasn't it usually three? No
one was quite sure, including Abu; some thought that although it was
customary to have three people it was not obligatory, and some thought
three a necessary number. After about ten minutes of anxious discussion,
a male cousin of the boy and a carpenter, unrelated to him, managed
to work up the courage to join Pak Sura. Abu, attempting to act
the Modin's role as best he could, sprinkled a few drops of water on the
corpse and then it was washed, rather haphazardly and in unsacralized
water. When this was finished, however, the procedure was again
stalled, for no one knew exactly how to arrange the small cotton pads
which, under Moslem law, should plug the body orifices. Karman's wife,
sister of the deceased's mother, could evidently take no more, for she
broke into a loud, unrestrained wailing, the only demonstration of this
sort I witnessed among the dozen or so Javanese funerals I attended.
Everyone was further upset by this development, and most of the kampong
women made a frantic but unavailing effort to comfort her. Most
of the men remained seated in the yard, outwardly calm and inexpressive,
but the embarrassed uneasiness which had been present since the
beginning seemed to be turning toward -fearful desperation. "It is not
nice for her to cry that way," several men said to me, "it isn't proper."
At this point, the Modin arrived.
However, he was still adamant. Further, he warned Abu that he was
courting eternal damnation by his actions. "You will have to answer to
God on Judgment Day," he said, "if you make mistakes in the ritual. It
will be your responsibility. For a Moslem, burial is a serious matter and
must be carried out according to the Law by someone who knows what
the Law is, not according to the will of the individual." He then suggested
to Sudjoko and Sastro, the Permai leaders, that they take charge
of the funeral, for as party "intellectuals" they must certainly know
what kind of funeral customs Permai followed. The two leaders, who
had not moved from their chairs, considered this as everyone watched
expectantly, but they finally refused, with some chagrin, saying they
really did not know how to go about it. The Modin shrugged and turned
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 159
away. One of the bystanders, a friend of Karman's, then suggested that
they just take the body out and bury it and forget about the whole ritual;
it was extremely dangerous to leave things as they were much
longer. I don't know whether this remarkable suggestion would have
been followed, for at this juncture the mother and father of the dead
child entered the kampong.
They seemed quite composed. They were not unaware of the death,
for the father later told me he had suspected as much when he got the
telegram; he and his wife had prepared themselves for the worst and
were more or less resigned by the time they arrived. When they approached
the kampong and saw the whole neighborhood gathered,
they knew that their fears were well founded. When Karman's wife,
whose weeping had subsided slightly, saw the dead boy's mother come
into the yard, she burst free of those who were comforting her and with
a shriek rushed to embrace her sister. In what seemed a split second,
both women had dissolved into wild hysterics and the crowd had rushed
in and pulled them apart, dragging them to houses at opposite sides of
the kampong. Their wailing continued in undiminished volume, and
nervous comments arose to the effect that they ought to get on with the
burial in one fashion or another, before the boy's spirit possessed some­
one.
But the mother now insisted on seeing the body of her child before it
was wrapped. The father at first forbade it, angrily ordering her to stop
crying-didn't she know that such behavior would darken the boy's
pathway to the other world? But she persisted and so they brought her,
stumbling, to where he lay in Karman's house. The women tried to keep
her from drawing too close, but she broke loose and began to kiss the
boy about the genitals. She was snatched away almost immediately by
her husband and the women, though she screamed that she had not yet
finished; and they pulled her into the back room where she subsided
into a daze. After a while-the body was finally being wrapped, the
Modin having unbent enough to point out where the cotton pads went
-she seemed to lose her bearings entirely and began to move about the
yard shaking hands with everyone, all strangers to her, and saying,
"Forgive me my faults, forgive me my faults." Again she was forcibly
restrained; people said, "Calm yourself; think of your other childrendo
you want to follow your son to the grave?"
The corpse was now wrapped, and new suggestions were made that it
be taken off immediately to the graveyard. At this point, Abu ap-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
proached the father, who, he evidently felt, had now displaced Karman
as the man legally responsible for the proceedings. Abu explained that
the Modin, being a Government official, did not feel free to approach
the father himself, but he would like to know: how did he wish the boy
to be buried-the Islamic way or what? The father, somewhat bewildered,
said, "Of course, the Islamic way. I don't have much of any religion,
but I'm not a Christian, and when it comes to death the burial
should be the Islamic way. Completely Islamic." Abu explained again
that the Modin could not approach the father directly, but that he, being
"free," could do as he pleased. He said that he had tried to help as best
he could but that he had been careful to do nothing Islamic before the
father came. It was too bad, he apologized, about all the tension that
was in the air, that political differences had to make so much trouble.
But after all, everything had to be "clear" and "legal" about the funeral.
It was important for the boy's soul. The santris, somewhat gleefully,
now chanted their prayers over the corpse, and it was carried to the
grave and buried in the usual manner. The Modin gave the usual graveyard
speech, as amended for children, and the funeral was finally completed.
None of the relatives or the women went to the graveyard; but
when we returned to the house-it was now well after noon-the slametan
was finally served, and Paidjan's spirit presumably left the kampong
to begin its journey to the other world.
Three days later, in the evening, the first of the commemorative slametans
was held, but it turned out that not only were no santris present
but that it was as much a Permai political and religious cult meeting as
a mourning ritual. Karman started off in the traditional fashion by announcing
in high Javanese that this was a slametan in remembrance of
the death of Paidjan. Sudjoko, the Permai leader, immediately burst in
saying, "No, no, that is wrong. At a third day slametan you just eat and
give a long Islamic chant for the dead, and we are certainly not going to
do that." He then launched into a long, rambling speech. Everyone, he
said, must know the philosophical-religious basis of the country. "Suppose
this American [he pointed to me; he was not at all pleased by my
presence] came up and asked you: what is the spiritual basis of the
country? and you didn't know-wouldn't you be ashamed?"
He went on in this vein, building up a whole rationale for the present
national political structure on the basis of a mystical interpretation of
President Sukarno's "Five Points" (Monotheism, Social Justice, Humanitarianism,
Democracy, and Nationalism) which are the official ideologi-
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example
cal foundation of the new republic. Aided by Karman and others, he
worked out a micro-macrocosm correspondence theory in which the individual
is seen to be but a small replica of the state, and the state but
an enlarged image of the individual. If the state is to be ordered, then
the individual must also be ordered; each implies the other. As the
President's Five Points are at the basis of the state, so the five senses
are at the basis of an individual. The process of harmonizing both are
the same, and it is this we must be sure we know. The discussion continued
for nearly half an hour, ranging widely through religious, philosophical,
and political issues (including, evidently for my benefit, a discussion
of the Rosenbergs' execution).
We paused for coffee and as Sudjoko was about to begin again,
Paidjan's father, who had been sitting quietly and expressionless, began
suddenly to talk, softly and with a curiously mechanical tonelessness, almost
as if he were reasoning with himself, but without much hope of
success. "I am sorry for my rough city accent," he said, "but I very
much want to say something." He hoped they would forgive him; they
could continue their discussion in a moment. "I have been trying to be
iklas ['detached,' 'resigned' ] about Paidjan's death. I'm convinced that
everything that could have been done for him was done and that his
death was just an event which simply happened." He said he was still in
Modjokuto because he could not yet face the people where he lived,
couldn't face having to tell each one of them what had occurred. His
wife, he said, was a little more iklas now too. It was hard, though. He
kept telling himself it was just the will of God, but it was so hard, for
nowadays people didn't agree on things any more; one person tells you
one thing and others tell you another. It's hard to know which is right,
to know what to believe. He said he appreciated all the Modjokuto people
coming to the funeral, and he was sorry it had been all mixed up.
"I'm not very religious myself. I'm not Masjumi and I'm not Permai.
But I wanted the boy to be buried in the old way. I hope no one's feelings
were hurt." He said again he was trying to be iklas, to tell himself
it was just the will of God, but it was hard, for things were so confused
these days. It was hard to see why the boy should have died.
This sort of public expression of one's feelings is extremely unusual
-in my experience unique-among Javanese, and in the formalized
traditional slametan pattern there is simply no place for it (nor for philosophical
or political discussion). Everyone present was rather shaken
by the father's talk, and there was a painful silence. Sudjoko finally
162 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
began to talk again, but this time he described in detail the boy's death.
How Paidjan had first gotten a fever and Karman had called him, Sudjoko,
to come and say a Permai spell. But the boy did not respond.
They finally took him to a male nurse in tbe hospital, where he was
given an injection. But still he worsened. He vomited blood and went
into convulsions, which Sudjoko described rather graphically, and then
he died. "I don't know why the Permai spell didn't work," he said; "it
has worked before. This time it didn't. I don't know why; that sort of
thing can't be explained no matter how much you think about it. Sometimes
it just works and sometimes it just doesn't." There was another
silence and then, after about ten minutes more of political discussion,
we disbanded. The father returned the next day to his home and I was
not invited to any of the later slametans. When I left the field about
four months later, Karman's wife had still not entirely recovered from
the experience, the tension between the santris and the abangans in the
kampong had increased, and everyone wondered what would happen the
next time a death occurred in a Permai family.
Analysis
"Of all the sources of religion," wrote Malinowski, "the supreme and
final crisis of life-death-is of the greatest importance." 12 Death, he
argued, provokes in the survivors a dual response of love and loathing,
a deep-going emotional ambivalence of fascination and fear which
threatens both the psychological and social foundations of human existence.
The survivors are drawn toward the deceased by their affection
for him, repelled from him by the dreadful transformation wrought by
death. Funeral rites, and the mourning practices which follow them,
focus around this paradoxical desire both to maintain the tie in the face
of death and to break the bond immediately and utterly, and to insure
the domination of the will to live over the tendency to despair. Mortuary
rituals maintain the continuity of human life by preventing the
survivors from yielding either to the impulse to flee panic-stricken from
the scene or to the contrary impulse to follow the deceased into the
grave:
12 Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, p. 29.
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example
And here into this play of emotional forces. into this supreme dilemma of
life and final death. religion steps in. selecting the positive creed. the comforting
view. the culturally valuable belief in immortality. in the spirit independent
of the body, and in the continuance of life after death. In the various
ceremonies at death. in commemoration and communion with the
departed, and worship of ancestral ghosts. religion gives body and form to
the saving beliefs. . . . Exactly the same function it fulfills also with regard
to the whole group. The ceremonial of death, which ties the survivors to the
body and rivets them to the place of death, the beliefs in the existence of
the spirit, in its beneficent influences or malevolent intentions, in the duties
of a series of commemorative or sacrificial ceremonies-in all this religion
counteracts the centrifugal forces of fear, dismay. demoralization. and provides
the most powerful means of reintegration of the group's shaken solidarity
and of the re-establishment of its morale. In short. religion here assures
the victory of tradition over the mere negative response of thwarted in­
stinct.13
To this sort of theory, a case such as that described above clearly
poses some difficult problems. Not only was the victory of tradition and
culture over "thwarted instinct" a narrow one at best, but it seemed as
if the ritual were tearing the society apart rather than integrating it,
were disorganizing personalities rather than healing them. To this the
functionalist has a ready answer, which takes one of two forms depending
upon whether he follows the Durkheim or the Malinowski tradition:
social disintegration or cultural demoralization. Rapid social change has
disrupted Javanese society and this is reflected in a disintegrated culture;
as the unified state of traditional village society was mirrored in
the unified slametan, so the broken society of the kampong is mirrored
in the broken slametan of the funeral ritual we have just witnessed. Or,
in the alternate phraseology, cultural decay has led to social fragmentation;
loss of a vigorous folk tradition has weakened the moral ties between
individuals.
It seems to me that there are two things wrong with this argument, no
matter in which of the two vocabularies it is stated: it identifies social
(or cultural) conflict with social (or cultural) disintegration; it denies independent
roles to both culture and social structure, regarding one of
the two as a mere epiphenomenon of the other.
In the first place, kampong life is not simply anomie. Though it is
marked by vigorous social conflicts, as is our own society, it nevertheless
proceeds fairly effectively in most areas. If governmental, economic,
familial, stratificatory, and social control institutions functioned
13 Ibid., pp. 33-35.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
as poorly as did Paidjan's funeral, a kampong would indeed be an uncomfortable
place in which to live. But though some of the typical
symptoms of urban upheaval-such as increased gambling, petty thievery,
and prostitution-are to some degree present, kampong social fife
is clearly not on the verge of collapse; everyday social interaction does
not limp along with t�e suppressed bitterness and deep uncertainty we
have seen focused around burial. For most of its members most of the
time, a semiurban neighborhood in Modjokuto offers a viable way of
life, despite its material disadvantages and its transitional character; and
for all the sentimentality which has been lavished on descriptions of
rural life in Java, this is probably as much as one could say for the village.
As a matter of fact, it is around religious beliefs and practicesslametans,
holidays, curing, sorcery, cult groups, and so on-that the
most seriously disruptive events seem to cluster. Religion here is somehow
the center and source of stress, not merely the reflection of stress
elsewhere in the society.
Yet it is not a source of stress because commitment to the inherited
patterns of belief and ritual has been weakened. The conflict around
Paidjan's death took place simply because all the kampong residents did
share a common, highly integrated, cultural tradition concerning funerals.
There was no argument over whether the slametan pattern was the
correct ritual, whether the neighbors were obligated to attend, or
whether the supernatural concepts upon which the ritual is based were
valid ones. For both santris and abangans in the kampongs, the slametan
maintains its force as a genuine sacred symbol; it still provides a
meaningful framework for facing death-for most people the only
meaningful framework. We cannot attribute the failure of the ritual to
secularization, to a growth in skepticism, or to a disinterest in the traditional
"saving beliefs," any more than we can attribute it to anomie.
We must rather, I think, ascribe it to a discontinuity between the
form of integration existing in the social structural ("causal-functional'')
dimension and the form of integration existing in the cultural ("logicomeaningful")
dimension-a discontinuity which leads not to social and
cultural disintegration, but to social and cultural conflict. In more con-·
crete, if somewhat aphoristic terms, the difficulty lies in the fact that socially
kampong people are urbanites, while culturally they are still foJk.:.
I have already pointed out that the Javanese kampong represents •:
transitional sort of society, that its members stand "in between" �:
more or less fully urbanized elite and the more or less traditionally or··:
ganized peasantry. The social structural forms in which they participa�j
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example
are for the most part urban ones. The emergence of a highly differentiated
occupational structure in place of the almost entirely agricultural
one of the countryside; the virtual disappearance of the semihereditary,
traditional village government as a personalistic buffer between the individual
and the rationalized central government bureaucracy, and its
replacement by the more flexible forms of modern parliamentary democracy;
the evolution of a multiclass society in which the kampong,
unlike the village, is not even a potentially self-sufficient entity, but is
only one dependent subpart-all this means that the kampong man lives
in a very urban world. Socially, his is a Gesellschaft existence.
But on the cultural level-the level of meaning-there is much less
of a contrast between the kampong dweller and the villager; much more
between him and a member of the urban elite. The patterns of belief,
expression, and value to which the kampong man is committed-his
world view, ethos, ethic, or whatever-differ only slightly from those
followed by the villager. Amid a radically more complex social environment,
he clings noticeably to the symbols which guided him or his parents
through life in rural society. And it is this fact which gave rise to
the psychological and social tension surrounding Paidjan's funeral.
The disorganization of the ritual resulted from a basic ambiguity in
the meaning of the rite for those who participated in it. Most simply
stated, this ambiguity lay in the fact that the symbols which compose
the slametan had both religious and political significance, were charged
with both sacred and profane import. The people who came into Karman's
yard, including Karman himself, were not sure whether they were
engaged in a sacralized consideration of first and last things or in a secular
struggle for power. This is why the old man (he was a graveyard
keeper, as a matter of fact) complained to me that dying was nowadays
a political problem; why the village policeman accused the Modin not
of religious but of political bias for refusing to bury Paidjan; why the
unsophisticated Karman was astonished when his ideological commitments
suddenly loomed as obstacles to his religious practices; why Abu
was torn between his willingness to submerge political differences in the
interest of a harmonious funeral and his unwillingness to trifle with his
religious beliefs in the interest of his own salvation; why the commemorative
rite oscillated between political diatribe and a poignant search for
an adequate explanation of what had happened-why, in sum, the slametan
religious pattern stumbled when it attempted to "step in" with
the "positive creed" and "the culturally valuable belief."
As emphasized earlier, the present severity of the contrast between
166 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
santri and abangan is in great part due to the rise of nationalist social
movements in twentieth century Indonesia. In the larger cities where
these movements were born, they were originally of various sorts:
tradesmen's societies to fight Chinese competition; unions of workers to
resist plantation exploitation; religious groups trying to redefine ultimate
concepts; philosophical discussion clubs attempting to clarify Indonesian
metaphysical and moral notions; school associations striving to
revivify Indonesian education; cooperative societies trying to work out
new forms of economic organization ; cultural groups moving toward a
renaissance of Indonesian artistic life; and, of course, political parties
working to build up effective opposition to Dutch rule. As time wore
on, however, the struggle for independence absorbed more and more the
energies of all these essentially elite groups. Whatever the distinctive
aim of each of them-economic reconstruction, religious reform, artistic
renaissance-it became submerged in a diffuse political ideology; all
the groups were increasingly concerned with one end as the prerequisite
of all further social and cultural progress-freedom. By the time the
revolution began in 1 945, reformulation of ideas outside the political
sphere had noticeably slackened and most aspects of life had become intensely
ideologized, a tendency which has continued into the postwar
period.
In the villages and small-town kampongs, the early, specific phase of
nationalism had only a minor effect. But as the movement unified and
moved toward eventual triumph, the masses too began to be affected
and, as I have pointed out, mainly through the medium of religious
symbols. The highly urbanized elite forged their bonds to the peasantry
not in terms of complex political and economic theory, which would
have had little meaning in a rural context, but in terms of concepts and
values already present there. As the major line of demarcation among
the elite was between those who took Islamic doctrine as the overall
basis of their mass appeal and those who took a generalized philosophical
refi·nement of the indigenous syncretic tradition as such a basis, so in
the countryside santri and abangan soon became not simply religious
but political categories, denoting the followers of these two diffuse approaches
to the organization of the emerging independent society. When
the achievement of political freedom strengthened the importance of
factional politics in parliamentary government, the santri-abangan dis·
tinction became, on the local level at least, one of the primary ideologi·
cal axes around which the process of party maneuvering took place.
The effect of this development has been to cause political debate and
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example
religious propitiation to be carried out in the same vocabulary. A koranic
chant becomes an affirmation of political allegiance as well as a
paean to God; a burning of incense expresses one's secular ideology as
well as one's sacred beliefs. Slametans now tend to be marked by anxious
discussions of the various elements in the ritual, of what their
"real" significance is; by arguments as to whether a particular practice
is essential or optional; by abangan uneasiness when santris lift their
eyes to pray and santri uneasiness when abangans recite a protective
spell. At death, as we have seen, the traditional symbols tend both to
solidify individuals in the face of social loss and to remind them of their
differences; to emphasize the broadly human themes of mortality and
undeserved suffering and the narrowly social ones of factional opposition
and party struggle; to strengthen the values the participants hold in
common and to "tune up" their animosities and suspicions. The rituals
themselves become matters of political conflict; forms for the sacralization
of marriage and death are transformed into important party issues.
In such an equivocal cultural setting, the average kampong Javanese
finds it increasingly difficult to determine the proper attitude toward a
particular event, to choose the meaning of a given symbol appropriate
to a given social context.
The corollary of this interference of political meanings with religious
meanings also occurs: the interference of religious meanings with political
ones. Because the same symbols are used in both political and religious
contexts, people often regard party struggle as involving not
merely the usual ebb and flow of parliamentary maneuver, the necessary
factional give-and-take of democratic government, but involving as well
decisions on basic values and ultimates. Kampong people in particular
tend to see the open struggle for power explicitly institutionalized in the
new republican forms of government as a struggle for the right to establish
different brands of essentially religious principles as official: "If the
abangans get in, the koranic teachers will be forbidc;len to hold classes";
"If the santris get in, we shall all have to pray five times a day." The
normal conflict involved in electoral striving for office is heightened by
the idea that literally everything is at stake: the "If we win, it is our
country" idea that the group which gains power has a right, as one man
said, "to put his own foundation under the state." Politics thus takes on
a kind of sacralized bitterness; and one village election in a suburban
Modjokuto village actually had to be held twice because of the intense
pressures generated in this way.
The kampong man is, so to speak, caught between his ultimate and
168 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
his proximate concepts. Because he is forced to formulate his essentially
metaphysical ideas, his response to such basic "problems" as fate, suffering,
and evil, in the same terms as when he states his claims to secular
power, his political rights and aspirations, he experiences difficulty
in enacting either a socially and psychologically efficient funeral or a
smoothly running election.
But a ritual is not just a pattern of meaning; it is also a form of social
interaction. Thus, in addition to creating cultural ambiguity, the attempt
to bring a religious pattern from a relatively less differentiated
rural background into an urban context also gives rise to social conftict,
simply because the kind of social integration demonstrated by the pattern
is not congruent with the major patterns of integration in the society
generally. The way kampong people go about maintaining solidarity
in everyday life is quite different from the way the slametan insists
that they should go about maintaining it.
As emphasized earlier, the slametan is essentially a territorially based
ritual; it assumes the primary tie between families to be that of residential
propinquity. One set of neighbors is considered a significant social
unit (politically, religiously, economically) as against another set of
neighbors; one village as against another village; one village-cluster as
against another village-cluster. In the town, this pattern has in large
part changed. Significant social groups are defined by a plurality of
factors-class, political commitment, occupation, ethnicity, regional origins,
religious preference, age, and sex, as well as residence. The new
urban form of organization consists of a careful balance of conflicting
forces arising out of diverse contexts: class differences are softened by
ideological similarities; ethic confticts by common economic interests;
political opposition, as we have been, by residential intimacy. But in the
midst of all this pluralistic checking and balancing, the slametan remains
unchanged, blind to the major lines of social and cultural demarcation
in urban life. For it, the primary classifying characteristic of an
individual is where he lives.
Thus when an occasion arises demanding sacralization-a life-cycle
transition, a holiday, a serious illness-the religious form which must
be employed acts not with but against the grain of social equilibrium.
The slametan ignores those recently devised mechanisms of social insulation
which in daily life keep group conftict within fixed bounds, as it
also ignores the newly evolved patterns of social integration among opposed
groups which balance contradictory tensions in a reasonably
Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example 169
effective fashion. People are pressed into an intimacy they would as
soon avoid; where the incongruity between the social assumptions of the
ritual ("we are all culturally homogeneous peasants together") and what
is in fact the case ("we are several different kinds of people who must
perforce live together despite our serious value disagreements") leads to
a deep uneasiness of which Paidjan's funeral was but an extreme example.
In the kampong, the holding of a slametan increasingly serves to remind
people that the neighborhood bonds they are strengthening
through a dramatic enactment are no longer the bonds which most emphatically
hold them together. These latter are ideological, class, occupation,
and political bonds, divergent ties which are no longer adequately
summed up in territorial relationships.
In sum, the disruption of Paidjan's funeral may be traced to a single
source: an incongruity between the cultural framework of meaning and
the patterning of social interaction, an incongruity due to the persistence
in an urban environment of a religious symbol system adjusted to
peasant social structure. Static functionalism, of either the sociological
or social psychological sort, is unable to isolate this kind of incongruity
because it fails to discriminate between logico-meaningful integration
and causal-functional integration; because it fails to realize that cultural
structure and social structure are not mere reflexes of one another but
independent, yet interdependent, variables. The driving forces in social
change can be clearly formulated only by a more dynamic form of functionalist
theory, one which takes into account the fact that man's need
to live in a world to which he can attribute some significance, whose essential
import he feels he can grasp, often diverges from his concurrent
need to maintain a functioning social organism. A diffuse concept of
culture as "learned behavior," a static view of social structure as an
equilibrated pattern of interaction, and a stated or unstated assumption
that the two must somehow (save in "disorganized" situations) be simple
mirror images of one another, is rather too primitive a conceptual
apparatus with which to attack such problems as those raised by Paidjan's
unfortunate but instructive funeral.
Chapter 7j
''Internal Conversion''
in Contemporary Bali
Every race has its lumber-room of magical beliefs and
practices, and many such survivals are gracious and
beautiful and maintain the continuity of a civilization. It
is to be hoped that modern materialist ideas will not obliterate
them entirely and leave Malay culture jejune.
RICHARD WINSTEDT, The Malay Magician
We hear much these days about political and economic modernization
in the new states of Asia and Africa, but little about religious modernization.
When not ignored entirely, religion tends to be viewed either as
a rigidly archaic obstacle to needed progress or a beleaguered conservator
of precious cultural values threatened by the corrosive powers of
rapid change. Little attention is paid to religious development in and of
itself, to regularities of transformation which occur in the ritual and be-;
lief systems of societies undergoing comprehensive social revolutions.
At best, we get studies of the role that established religious commitments
and identifications play in political or economic processes. But
our view of Asian and African religions as such is oddly static. We expect
them to prosper or decline; we do not expect them to change.
With respect to Bali, perhaps the most richly stocked lumber-room of
gracious and beautiful magical beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia.
such an approach is virtually universal, and the dilemma of choosing
between a quixotic cultural antiquarianism and a barren cultural materi-
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali 171
alism seems, therefore, to be an especially cruel one. In this essay, I
want to suggest that this dilemma is, in all likelihood, a false one, that
the continuity of Balinese civilization can be maintained though the fundamental
nature of its religious life be totally transformed. And further,
1 want to point to a few faint, uncertain signs that such a transformation
is in fact already under way.
The Concept of Religious Rationalization
In his great work on comparative religion, the German sociologist Max
Weber set forth a distinction between two idealized polar types of religions
in world history, the "traditional" and the "rationalized," which,
if it is overgeneralized and incompletely formulated, is yet a useful
starting point for a discussion of the process of genuinely religious
change. 1
The axis of this contrast turns upon a difference in the relationship
between religious concepts and social forms. Traditional religious concepts
(Weber also calls them magical) rigidly stereotype established social
practices. Inextricably bound up with secular custom in an almost
point-for-point manner, they draw "all branches of human activity . . .
into the circle of symbolic magic" and so insure that the stream of
everyday existence continues to flow steadily within a fixed and firmly
outlined course.z Rationalized concepts, however, are not so thoroughly
intertwined with the concrete details of ordinary life. They are "apart,"
"above," or "outside" of them, and the relations of the systems of ritual
and belief in which they are embodied to secular society are not intimate
and unexamined but distant and problematic. A rationalized religion
is, to the degree that it is rationalized, self-conscious and worldlywise.
Its attitude to secular life may be various, from the resigned
1 Weber's main theoretical discussion of religion is contained in a still untranslated
section of his Wirtschaft and Gese/lschaft (Tiibingen, 1 925), pp. 225-356, but
application of his approach can be found in the translations of his Religionssoziologie
issued as The Religion of China (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), Ancient Judaism (Glencoe, Ill.,
1 952), The Religion of India (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), and The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 1958). The best discussions of Weber's work in English
are T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Ill., 1 949), and R. Bendix,
Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York, 1 960).
2 Quoted in Parsons, Social Action, p. 566.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
acceptance of genteel Confucianism to the active mastery of ascetic
Protestantism; but it is never naive.a
With this difference in relationship between the religious realm and
the secular goes a difference also in the structure of the religious realm
itself. Traditional religions consist of a multitude of very concretely defined
and only loosely ordered sacred entities, an untidy collection of
fussy ritual acts and vivid animistic images which are able to involve
themselves in an independent, segmental, and immediate manner with
almost any sort of actual event. Such systems (for, despite their lack of
formal regularity, they are systems) meet the perennial concerns of religion,
what Weber called the "problems of meaning"-evil, suffering,
frustration, bafflement, and so on-piecemeal. They attack them opportunistically
as they arise in each particular instance-each death, each
crop failure, each untoward natural or social occurrence-employing
one or another weapon chosen, on grounds of symbolic appropriateness,
from their cluttered arsenal of myth and magic. (With respect to the less
defensive activities of religion-the celebration of human continuity,
prosperity, and solidarity-the same strategy is employed.) As the approach
to fundamental spiritual issues which traditional religions take is
discrete and irregular, so also is their characteristic form.
Rationalized religions, on the other hand, are more abstract, more
logically coherent, and more generally phrased. The problems of meaning,
which in traditional systems are expressed only implicitly and fragmentarily,
here get inclusive formulations and evoke comprehensive attitudes.
They become conceptualized as universal and inherent qualities
of human existence as such, rather than being seen as inseparable aspects
of this or that specific event. The question is no longer put merely
in such terms as, to use a classic example from the British anthropologist
Evans-Pritchard, "Why has the granary fallen on my brother and
not on someone else's brother?" but rather, "Why do the good die
young and the evil flourish as the green bay tree?" 4 Or, to escape from
the conventions of Christian theodicy, not, "By what means can I discover
who practiced witchcraft against my brother, thereby causing the
granary to fall on him?" but, "How can one know the truth?" Not,
"What specific actions must I perform in order to wreak vengeance
upon the witch?" but, "What are the bases upon which punishment of
3 Weber, Religion of China, pp. 226-249.
4 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azand�
(Oxford, 1932).
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali 173
evildoers can be justified?" The narrower, concrete questions, of course,
remain; but they are subsumed under the broader ones, whose more
radically disquieting suggestions they therefore bring forward. And with
this raising of the broader ones in a stark and general form arises also
the need to answer them in an equally sweeping, universal, and conclusive
manner.
The so-called world religions developed, Weber argued, as responses
to the appearance in an acute form of just this sort of need. Judaism,
Confucianism, Philosophical Brahmanism, and, though on the surface it
might not seem to be a religion at all, Greek Rationalism, each emerged
out of a myriad of parochial cults, folk mythologies, and ad hoc by-beliefs
whose power had begun to fail for certain crucial groups in the societies
concerned.� This sense, on the part, largely, of religious intellectuals,
that the traditional conglomerate of rituals and beliefs was no
longer adequate, and the rise to consciousness of the problems of meaning
in an explicit form, seems to have been part, in each case, of a
much wider dislocation in the pattern of traditional life. The details of
such dislocations (or of those amidst which later world religions, descended
from these first four, appeared) need not detain us. What is important
is that the process of religious rationalization seems everywhere
to have been provoked by a thorough shaking of the foundations of social
order.
Provoked, but not determined. For, aside from the fact that profound
social crisis has not always produced profound religious creativity (or
any creativity at all), the lines along which such creativity has moved
when it has appeared have been most varied. Weber's whole grand comparison
of the religions of China, India, Israel, and the West rested on
the notion that they represented variant directions of rationalization,
contrastive choices among a finite set of possible developments away
from magical realism. What these diverse systems had in common was
not the specific content of their message, which deepened in its particularity
as it expanded in its scope, but the formal pattern, the generic
mode, in which it was cast. In all of them, the sense of sacredness was
gathered up, like so many scattered rays of light brought to focus in a
lens, from the countless tree spirits and garden spells through which it
5 For a discussion of Weber's analysis of the role of status groups in religious
change, see Bendix, Max Weber, 103- 1 1 1 . My formulation here and elsewhere in
!his discussion owes much to an unpublished paper by Robert Bellah, "Religion
m the Process of Cultural Differentiation"; see also his Tokugawa Religion
(Glencoe, Ill., 1 957).
174 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
was vaguely diffused, and was concentrated in a nucleate (though not
necessarily monotheistic) concept of the divine. The world was, in We.
ber's famous phrase, disenchanted: the locus of sacredness was removed
from the rooftrees, graveyards, and road-crossings of everyday life and
put, in some sense, into another realm where dwelt Jahweh, Logos,
Tao, or Brahman.6
With this tremendous increase in ..distance," so to speak, between
man and the sacred goes the necessity of sustaining the ties between
them in a much more deliberate and critical manner. As the divine can
no longer be apprehended en passant through numberless concrete, almost
reflexive ritual gestures strategically interspersed throughout the
general round of life, the establishment of a more general and comprehensive
relationship to it becomes, unless one is to abandon concern
with it altogether, imperative. Weber saw two main ways in which this
can be brought about. One is through the construction of a consciously
systematized, formal, legal-moral code consisting of ethical commands
conceived to have been given to man by the divine, through prophets,
holy writings, miraculous indications, and so on. The other is through
direct, individual experiential contact with the divine via mysticism, insight,
aesthetic intuition, etc., often with the assistance of various sorts
of highly organized spiritual and intellectual disciplines, such as yoga.
The first approach is, of course, typically, though not exclusively, midEastern;
the second typically, though also not exclusively, East Asian.
But whether, as seems unlikely, these are the only two possibilities, or
not, they both do bridge the enormously widened gap, or attempt to
bridge it, between the profane and the sacred in a self-conscious, methodical,
explicitly coherent manner. They maintain, for those who are
committed to them, a sense of a meaningful tie between man and the removed
divine.
As with all Weber's polar contrasts, however, that between traditional
and rational (the opposite of which is not irrational, but unrationalized)
is as thoroughly blurred in fact as it is sharply drawn in theory.
In particular, it must not be assumed that the religions of nonliterate
peoples are wholly lacking in rationalized elements and those of literate
ones rationalized through and through. Not only do many so-called
primitive religions show the results of significant amounts of self-conscious
criticism, but a popular religiosity of a traditional sort persists
with great strength in societies where religious thought has attained its
s Bellah, "Differentiation."
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali 175
highest reaches of philosophical sophistication.7 Yet, in relative terms,
it is hardly to be doubted that the world religions show greater conceptual
generalization, tighter formal integration, and a more explicit sense
of doctrine than do the "little" ones of clan, tribe, village, or folk. Religious
rationalization is not an ali-or-none, an irreversible, or an inevitable
process. But, empirically, it is a real one.
Traditional Balinese Religion
As the Balinese are, in a broad sense, Hindus, one might expect that a
significant part, at least, of their religious life would be relatively well
rationalized, that over and above the usual torrent of popular religiosity
there would exist a developed system of either ethical or mystical theology.
Yet this is not the case. A number of overintellectualized descriptions
of it to the cont�ary notwithstanding, Balinese religion, even
among the priests, is concrete, action-centered, thoroughly interwoven
with the details of everyday life, and touched with little, if any, of the
philosophical sophistication or generalized concern of classical Brahmanism
or its Buddhist offshoot.8 Its approach to the problems of
meaning remains implicit, circumscribed and segmental. The world is
still enchanted and (some recent stirrings aside for the moment) the tangled
net of magical realism is almost completely intact, broken only
here and there by individual qualms and reflections.
How far this absence of a developed body of doctrine is a result of
the persistence of the indigenous (that is, pre-Hindu) element, of the
relative isolation of Bali from the outside world after the fifteenth century
or so and the consequent parochialization of its culture, or of the
rather unusual degree to which Balinese social structure has been able
to maintain a solidly traditional form, is a moot question. In Java,
where the pressure of external influences has been relentless, and where
7 On rationalized elements in "primitive" religions see P. Radin, Primitive
Man as a Philosopher (New York, 1 957). On popular religion in developed civilizations,
Bendix, Weber, 1 1 2- 1 1 6.
8 The very partial nature of the one slight exception to this can be seen from
the brief description of a priest's intellectual training in V. E. Korn, "The Consecration
of a Priest," in J. L. Swellengrebel et al., Bali: Studies in Life, Thought
and Ritual (The Hague and Bandung, 1 960), pp. 1 3 3 - 1 53.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
traditional social structure has lost much of its resilience, not just one
but several relatively well-rationalized systems of belief and worship
have developed, giving a conscious sense of religious diversity, conflict,
and perplexity still quite foreign to Bali.9 Thus, if one comes, as I did,
to Bali after having worked in Java, it is the near total absence of either
doubt or dogmatism, the metaphysical nonchalance, that almost immediately
strikes one. That, and the astounding proliferation of ceremonial
activity. The Balinese, perpetually weaving intricate palm-leaf offerings,
preparing elaborate ritual meals, decorating all sorts of temples, marching
in massive processions, and falling into sudden trances, seem much
too busy practicing their religion to think (or worry) very much about
it.
Yet, again, to say that Balinese religion is not methodically ordered
is not to say that it is not ordered at all. Not only is it pervaded with a
consistent, highly distinctive tone (a kind of sedulous theatricalism
which only extended description could evoke), but the elements which
comprise it cluster into a number of relatively well-defined ritual complexes
which exhibit, in turn, a definite approach to properly religious
issues no Jess reasonable for being implicit. Of these, three are of perhaps
greatest importance: (I) the temple system; (2) the sanctification
of social inequality; and (3) the cult of death and witches. As the relevant
ethnographic details are readily available in the literature, my description
of these complexes can be cursory. 10
I . The temple system is a type example of the wholesale fashion in
which the diverse strands of a traditional religion twine themselves
through the social structure within which they are set. Though all the
temples, of which there are literaHy thousands, are built on a generally
similar open-court plan, each is entirely focused on one or another of a
number of quite specifically defined concerns: death, neighborhood patriotism,
kin-group solidarity, agricultural fertility, caste pride, political
loyalty, and so on. Every Balinese belongs to from two or three to a
dozen such temples; and, as the congregation of each is composed of
those families who happen to use the same graveyard, live in the same
neighborhood, farm the same fields, or have other links, such memberships
and the heavy ritual obligations they involve buttress rather directly
the sort of social relationships out of which Balinese daily life is
built.
9 On Java, see C. Geertz, The Religion ofJava (Glencoe, Ill., 1960).
JO For a general survey, see M. Covarrubias, Island ofBali (New York, 1 956).
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali
The religious forms associated with the various temples, like the architecture
broadly similar from temple to temple, are almost wholly ceremonial
in nature. Beyond a minimal level, there is almost no interest
in doctrine, or generalized interpretation of what is going on, at all. The
stress is on orthopraxy, not orthodoxy-what is crucial is that each ritual
detail should be correct and in place. If one is not, a member of the
congregation will fall, involuntarily, into a trance, becoming thereby the
chosen messenger of the gods, and will refuse to revive until the error,
announced in his ravings, has been corrected. But the conceptual side is
of much less moment: the worshippers usually don't even know who the
gods in the temples are, are uninterested in the meaning of the rich
symbolism, and are indifferent to what others may or may not believe.
You can believe virtually anything you want to actually, including that
the whole thing is rather a bore, and even say so. But if you do not perform
the ritual duties for which you are responsible you will be totally
ostracized, not just from the temple congregation, but from the community
as a whole.
Even the execution of ceremonies has an oddly externalized air about
it. The main such ceremony occurs on each temple's "birthday," every
2 1 0 days, at which time the gods descend from their homes atop the
great volcano in the center of the island, enter iconic figurines placed on
an altar in the temple, remain three days, and then return. On the day
of their arrival the congregation forms a gay parade, advancing to meet
them at the edge of the village, welcoming them with music and dance,
and escorting them to the temple where they are further entertained; on
the day of their departure they are sent off with a similar, though sadder,
more restrained procession. But most of the ritual between the first
and the last day is performed by the temple priest alone, the congregation's
main obligation being to construct tremendously complex offerings
and bring them to the temple. There is, on the first day, an important
collective ritual at which holy water is sprinkled on members of the
congregation as, palms to forehead, they make the classic Hindu
obeisance gesture to the gods. But even in this seemingly sacramental
ceremony only one member of the household need participate, and it is
usually a woman or an adolescent who is so delegated, the men being
generally unconcerned so long as a few drops of the charmed water falls
protectively upon some representative of their family.
2. The sanctification of social inequality centers on the one hand
around the Brahmana priesthood and on the other around the enormous
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ceremonies which the dozens of kings, princes, and lordlings of Bali
give to express and reinforce their ascendency. In Bali, the symbolization
of social inequality, of rank, has always been the linchpin of supravillage
political organization. From the very earliest stages, the primary
moving forces in the process of state formation have been more
stratificatory than political, have been concerned more with status than
with statecraft. It was not a drive toward higher levels of administrative,
fiscal, or even military efficiency that acted as the fundamental dynamic
element in the shaping of the Balinese polity, but rather an intense emphasis
on the ceremonial expression of delicately graduated distinctions
in social standing. Governmental authority was made to rest, secondarily
and quite precariously, on more highly valued prestige differences
between social strata; and the actual mechanisms of political control
through which an authoritarian oligarchy exercises its power were much
less elaborately developed than were those through which a traditional
cultural elite demonstrates its spiritual superiority- that is, state ritual,
court art, and patrician etiquette.
Thus, where the temples are primarily associated with egalitarian village
groups-perhaps the fundamental structural principle around
which they are organized is that within the temple context all differences
in social rank between members of the congregation are irrelevant
-the priesthood and the spectacular ceremonies of the upper caste tie
gentry and peasantry together into relationships that are frankly asym­
metrical.
While any male member of the Brahmana caste is eligible to become
a priest, only a minority undertake the extended period of training and
purification that is prerequisite to actual practice in the role. 1 1 Though
it has no organization as such, each priest operating independently, the
priesthood as a whole is very closely identified with the nobility. The
ruler and the priest are said to stand side by side as "full brothers."
Each without the other would fall, the first for lack of charismatic potency,
the second for lack of armed protection. Even today, each noble
house has a symbiotic tie with a particular priestly house which is considered
to be its spiritual counterpart, and in the precolonial period not
only were the royal courts largely manned by priests, but no priest
could be consecrated without permission of the local ruler and no ruler
legitimately installed except by a priest.
I I A priest usually must have a Brahmana wife in order to be consecrated, and
his wife may fill his role after his death as a full-fledged priest.
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali 179
On the commoner or lower-caste side each priest "owns" a number
of followers, allotted to his house at one point or another by this or that
noble house and subsequently inherited from generation to generation.
These followers are scattered, if not altogether randomly, at least very
widely-say three in one village, four in the next, several more in a
third, and so on-the reason for this practice evidently being a wish on
the part of the nobility to keep the priesthood politically weak. Thus, in
any one village a man and his neighbor will ordinarily be dependent
upon different priests for their religious needs, the most important of
which is the obtaining of holy water, an element essential not just for
temple ceremonies but for virtually all important rituals. Only a Brahmana
priest can address the gods directly in order to sanctify water, as
only he has, as the result of his ascetic regimen and his caste purity, the
spiritual strength to traffic safely with the tremendous magical power involved.
The priests are thus more professional magicians than true
priests: they do not serve the divine nor elucidate it, but, through the
agency of ill-understood sanskritic chants and beautifully stylized sacred
gestures, they utilize it.
A priest's followers refer to him as their siwa, after the god by whom
he is possessed during the entranced portions of his rite, and he refers to
them as his sisija, roughly "clients"; and in such a way the hierarchical
social differentiation into upper and lower castes is symbolically assimilated
to the spiritual contrast between priests and ordinary men. The
other means through which rank is given religious expression and support,
the prodigious ceremonies of the nobility, employs an institution
of political rather than ritual clientage--corvee-to underscore the legitimacy
of radical social inequality. Here, it is not the content of the
ceremonial activity which is important, but the fact that one is in a position
to mobilize the human resources to produce such an extravaganza
at all.
Usually focused around life-cycle events (tooth-filing, cremation),
these ceremonies involve the collective efforts of great masses of subjects,
dependents, etc., over a considerable stretch of time, and form,
therefore, not just the symbol but the very substance of political loyalty
and integration. In precolonial times the preparation and performance
of such grand spectacles seem to have consumed more time and energy
than all other state activities, including warfare, put together, and so, in
a sense, the political system can be said to have existed to support the
ritual system, rather than the other way round. And, despite colonial-
180 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ism, occupation, war, and independence, the pattern in great pan
persists-the gentry is still, in Cora Du Bois's fine phrase, "the symbolic
expression of the peasantry's greatness," and the peasantry, still
the lifeblood of the gentry's pretensions.•2
3 . The cult of death and witches is the "dark" side of Balinese religion,
and, though it penetrates into virtually every corner of daily life,
adding an anxious note to the otherwise equable tenor of existence, it
finds its most direct and vivid expression in the ecstatic ritual combat of
those two strange mythological figures: Rangda and Sarong. In Rangda,
monstrous queen of the witches, ancient widow, used-up prostitute,
child-murdering incarnation of the goddess of death, and, if Margaret
Mead is correct, symbolic projection of the rejecting mother, the Balinese
have fashioned a powerful image of unqualified eviJ. •a In Sarong,
a vaguely benign and slightly ludicrous deity, who looks and acts
like a cross between a clumsy bear, a foolish puppy, and a strutting
Chinese dragon, they have constructed an almost parodic representation
of human strength and weakness. That in their headlong encounters
these two demons, each saturated with that mana-like power the Balinese
call sakti, arrive inevitably at an exact stand-off is therefore not
without a certain ultimate significance for all its magical concreteness.
The actual enactments of the battle between Rangda and Barong
usually, though not inevitably, take place during a death temple's·
"birthday" ceremony. One villager (a man) dances Rangda, donning the
fierce mask and repulsive costume; two others, arranged fore and aft as
in a vaudeville horse, dance the elegant Barong. Both entranced, the hag
and dragon advance warily from opposite sides of the temple yard amid
curses, threats, and growing tension. At first Sarong fights alone, but
soon members of the audience begin falling involuntarily into trance,
seizing krisses, and rushing to his aid. Rangda advances toward Sarong
and his helpers, waving her magical cloth. She is hideous and terrifying,
and, although they hate her with a terrible rage and want to destroy her,
they fall back. When she, held at bay by Sarong's sakti, then turns
away, she suddenly becomes irresistibly attractive (at least so my informants
reported) and they advance on her eagerly from the rear,
sometimes even trying to mount her from behind; but, with a turn of
1 2 C. Du Bois, Social Forces in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 1 959), P·
3 1 .
13 G. Bateson and M . Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis
(New York, 1 942).
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali
her head and a touch of her cloth, they fall helpless into a coma. Finally
she withdraws from the scene, undefeated, but at least checked, and
Sarong's desperately frustrated assistants burst into wild self-destructive
rages, turning their krisses (ineffectively, because they are in trance)
against their chests, desperately hurling themselves about, devouring
live chicks, and so on. From the long moment of tremulous expectancy
which precedes the initial appearance of Rangda to this final dissolution
into an orgy of futile violence and degradation, the whole performance
has a most uncomfortable air of being about to descend at any moment
into sheer panic and wild destruction. Evidently it never does, but the
alarming sense of touch-and-go, with the diminishing band of the entranced
desperately attempting to keep the situation minimally in hand,
is altogether overwhelming, even for a mere observer. The razor-thin
dimensions of the line dividing reason from unreason, eros from thanatos,
or the divine from the demonic, could hardly be more effectively dra­
matized.
The Rationalization of Balinese Religion
Except for a few odd sports of limited consequence such as Bahai or
Mormonism (and leaving aside, as equivocal cases, the so-called political
religions such as Communism and Fascism), no new rationalized
world religions have arisen since Mohammed. Consequently, almost all
of the tribal and peasant peoples of the world who have shed, to whatever
degree, the husk of their traditional faiths since that time, have
done so through conversion to one or another of the great missionary
religions-Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. For Bali, however, such a
course seems precluded. Christian missionaries have never made much
progress on the island and, connected as they are with the discredited
colonial regime, their chances would now seem poorer than ever. Nor
are the Balinese likely to become Muslims in large numbers, despite the
general Islamism of Indonesia. They are, as a people, intensely conscious
and painfully proud of being a Hindu island in a Muslim sea,
and their attitude toward Islam is that of the duchess to the bug. To become
either Christian or Muslim would be tantamount, in their eyes, to
ceasing to be Balinese, and, indeed, an occasional individual who is
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
converted is still considered, even by the most tolerant and sophisticated,
to have abandoned not just Balinese religion but Bali, and perhaps
reason, itself. Both Christianity and Islam may influence further
religious developments on the island; but they have virtually no chance
of controlling them. 14
Yet, that a comprehensive shaking of the foundations of the Balinese
social order is, if not already begun, in the very immediate offing, is apparent
on all sides. The emergence of the unitary Republic and the enclosure
of Bali as a component within it has brought modern education,
modern governmental forms, and modern political consciousness to the
island. Radically improved communications have brought increased
awareness of, and contact with, the outside world, and provided novel
criteria against which to measure the worth both of their own culture
and that of others. And inexorable internal changes-increased urbanization,
growing population pressure, and so on-have made maintenance
of traditional systems of social organization in unchanged form
progressively more difficult. What happened in Greece or China after
the fifth century s.c.-the disenchantment of the world-seems about
to happen, in an altogether different historical context and with an altogether
different historical meaning, in mid-twentieth century Bali.
Unless, as is of course a real possibility, events move too fast for
them to maintain their cultural heritage at all, the Balinese seem likely
to rationalize their religious system through a process of "internal conversion."
Following, generally and not uncritically, the guidelines of
the Indian religions to which they have been so long nominally affiliated,
but from whose doctrinal spirit they have been almost wholly cut
off, they seem on the verge of producing a self-conscious "Bali-ism"
which, in its philosophical dimensions, will approach the world religions
both in the generality of the questions it asks and in the comprehensiveness
of the answers it gives.
The questions, at least, are already being asked; particularly by the
youth. Among the educated or semieducated young men of eighteen to
thirty who formed the ideological vanguard of the Revolution, there
have appeared scattered but distinct signs of a conscious interest in
14 For a similar judgment by a missionary linguist, see J. L. Swellengrebel,
Introduction, in Swellengrebel et al., Bali, pp. 68-76. As the present paper was
drafted in the field before Swellengrebel's appeared, the convergence of some of
the material he presents with mine serves as something of an independent support
for the reality of the process outlined here.
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali
spiritual issues of a sort which still seem largely meaningless to their
elders or their less engages contemporaries.
For example, one night, at a funeral in the village where I was living,
a full-scale philosophical discussion of such issues broke out among
eight or ten young men squatted around the courtyard "guarding" the
corpse. As the other aspects of traditional Balinese religion which I
have described, funeral ceremonies consist largely of a host of detailed
little busy-work routines, and whatever concern with first and last things
death may stimulate is well submerged in a bustling ritualism. But these
young men, who involved themselves but minimally in all this, the necessary
observances being mostly performed by their elders, fell spontaneously
into a searching discussion of the nature of religion as such.
At first they addressed themselves to a problem which has haunted
the religious and the students of religion alike: how can you tell where
secular custom leaves off and religion, the truly sacred, begins? Are all
the items in the detailed funeral rite really necessary homage to the
gods, genuinely sacred matters? Or are many simply human customs
performed out of blind habit and tradition? And, if so, how can you
differentiate the one from the other?
One man offered the notion that practices which were clearly connected
with grouping people together, strengthening their bonds with
one another-for example, the communal construction of the corpse litter
by the village as a whole, or the kin-group's preparation of the body
-were custom, and so not sacred, while those connected directly with
the gods-the family obeisance to the spirit of the deceased, the purification
of the body with holy water, and so on-were properly religious.
Another argued that those elements which appeared generally in ritual
observances, which you find virtually everywhere, from birth to death,
in the temples and at the Rangda plays (again, holy water is a good example),
were religious, but those which occurred only here and there, or
were limited to one or two rites, were not.
Then the discussion veered, as such discussions will, to the grounds
of validity for religion as such. One man, somewhat Marxist-influenced,
propounded social relativism: when in Rome do as the Romans do, a
phrase he quoted in its Indonesian form. Religion is a human product.
Man thought up God and then named him. Religion is useful and valuable,
but it has no supernatural validity. One man's faith is another
man's superstition. At bottom, everything comes down to mere custom.
This was greeted with universal disagreement, disapproval, and dis-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
may. In response, the son of the village head offered a simple, nonrational
belief position. Intellectual arguments are totally irrelevant. He
knows in his heart that the gods exist. Faith is first, thought secondary.
The truly religious person, such as himself, just knows that the gods
truly come into the temples-he can feel their presence. Another man,
more intellectually inclined, erected, more or less on the spot, a complex
allegorical symbology to solve the problem. Tooth-filing symbolizes
man becoming more like the gods and less like the animals, who have
fangs. This rite means this, that that; this color stands for justice, that
for courage, etc. What seems meaningless is full of hidden meaning, if
only you have the key. A Balinese cabalist. Yet another man, more agnostic,
though not a disbeliever, produced the golden mean for us. You
can't really think about these things because they don't lie within human
comprehension. We just don't know. The best policy is a conservative
one-believe just about half of everything you hear. That way you
won't go overboard.
And so it went through a good part of the night. Clearly these young
men, all of whom (save the village chiefs son who was a government
clerk in a nearby town) were peasants and smiths, were better Weberians
than they knew. They were concerned on the one hand with segregating
religion from social life in general, and on the other with trying
to close the gap between this world and the other, between secular and
sacred, which was thus opened up, by means of some sort of deliberately
systematic attitude, some general commitment. Here is the crisis
of faith, the breaking of the myths, the shaking of the foundations in a
pretty unvarnished form.
The same sort of new seriousness is beginning to appear, here and
there, in liturgical contexts as well. In a number of the temple
ceremonies-particularly those at which, as is increasingly the case, a
Brahmana priest officiates directly rather than, as has been customary,
merely providing holy water for the use of the low-caste temple priest
-there is appearing an almost pietistic fervor on the part of some of
the young male (and a few of the young female) members of the congregation.
Rather than permitting but one member of their family to participate
for all in the genuftexion to the gods, they all join in, crowding
toward the priest so as to have more holy water sprinkled on them.
Rather than the context of screaming children and idly chatting adults
within which this sacrament usually takes place, they demand, and get,
a hushed and reverent atmosphere. They talk, afterward, about the holy
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali 185
water not in magical but emotionalist terms, saying that their inward
unease and uncertainty is "cooled" by the water as it falls upon them,
and they too speak of feeling the gods' presence directly and immediately.
Of all this, the older and the more traditional can make little;
they look on it, as they themselves say, like a cow looking at a gamelan
orchestra-with an uncomprehending, bemused (but in no way hostile)
astonishment.
Such rationalizing developments on the more personal level demand,
however, a comparable sort of rationalization at the level of dogma and
creed if they are to be sustained. And this is in fact occurring, to a limited
extent, through the agency of several recently established publishing
firms which are attempting to put scholarly order into the classical
palm-leaf literature upon which the Brahmana priesthoods' claim to
learning rests, to translate it into modern Balinese or Indonesian, to interpret
it in moral-symbolic terms, and to issue it in cheap editions for
the increasingly literate masses. These firms are also publishing translations
of Indian works, both Hindu and Buddhist, are importing theosophical
books from Java, and have even issued several original works
by Balinese writers on the history and significance of their religion. •5
It is, again, the young educated men who for the most part buy these
books, but they often read them aloud at home to their families. The interest
in them, especially in the old Balinese manuscripts, is very great,
even on the part of quite traditional people. When I bought some books
of this sort and left them around our house in the village, our front
porch became a literary center where groups of villagers would come
and sit for hours on end and read them to one another, commenting
now and then on their meaning, and almost invariably remarking that it
was only since the Revolution that they had been permitted to see such
writings, that in the colonial period the upper castes prevented their dissemination
altogether. This whole process represents, thus, a spreading
of religious literacy beyond the traditional priestly castes-for whom
the writings were in any case more magical ewterica than canonical
scriptures-to the masses, a vulgarization, in the root sense, of religious
knowledge and theory. For the first time, at least a few ordinary Balinese
are coming to feel that they can get some understanding of what
their religion is all about; and more important, that they have a need
for and a right to such understanding.
15 See Swellengrebel, Bali, Introduction, pp. 70-7 1 , for descriptions of some of
this literature.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Against such a background, it might seem paradoxical that the main
force behind this religious literacy and philosophical-moral interpretation
movement is the nobility, or part of it, that it is certain, again generally
younger, members of the aristocracy who are collating and translating
the manuscripts and founding the firms to publish and distribute
them.
But the paradox is only an apparent one. As I have noted, much of
the nobility's traditional status rested on ceremonial grounds; a great
part of the traditional ceremonial activity was designed so as to produce
an almost reflexive acceptance of their eminence and right to rule. But
today this simple assumption of eminence is becoming increasingly difficult.
It is being undermined by the economic and political changes of
Republican Indonesia and by the radically populist ideology which has
accompanied these changes. Though a good deal of large-scale ceremonialism
still persists on Bali, and though the ruling class continues to
express its claim to superiority, in terms of ritual extravagance, the day
of the colossal cremation and the titanic tooth-filing seems to be drawing
to a close.
To the more perceptive of the aristocracy the handwriting on the wall
is thus quite clear: if they persist in basing their right to rule on wholly
traditional grounds they will soon lose it. Authority now demands more
than court ceremonialism to justify it; it demands "reasoos"-that is,
doctrine. And it is doctrine that they are attempting to provide through
reinterpreting classical Balinese literature and re-establishing intellectual
contact with India. What used to rest on ritual habit is now to rest
on rationalized dogmatic belief. The main concerns upon which the
content of the "new" literature focuses-the reconciliation of polytheism
and monotheism, the weighing of the relative importance of
"Hindu" and "Balinese" elements in "Hindu-Balinese" religion, the relation
of outward form to inward content in worship, the tracing of the
historico-mythological origins of caste rankings, and so on-all serve to
set the traditional hierarchical social system in an explicitly intellectual
context. The aristocracy (or part of it) have cast themselves in the role
of the leaders of the new Bali-ism so as to maintain their more general
position of social dominance.
To �ee in all this a mere Machiavellianism, however, would be to
give the young nobles both too much credit and too little. Not only are
they at best partially conscious of what they are doing, but, like my village
theologians, they too are at least in part religiously rather than politically
motivated. The transformations which the ..new Indonesia" haS
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali
brought have hit the old �lite as hard as any other group in Balinese
society by questioning the foundations of their belief in their own vocation
and thus their view of the very nature of reality in which they conceive
that vocation to be rooted. Their threatened displacement from
power appears to them as not just a social but a spiritual issue. Their
sudden concern with dogma is, therefore, in part a concern to justify
themselves morally and metaphysically, not only in the eyes of the mass
of the population but in their own, and to maintain at least the essentials
of the established Balinese world view and value system in a radically
changed social setting. Like so many other religious innovators,
they are simultaneously reformists and restorationists.
Aside from the intensification of religious concern and the systematization
of doctrine, there is a third side to this process of rationalization
-the social-organizational. If a new "Bali-ism" is to flourish, it needs
not only a popular change of heart and an explicit codification, but a
more formally organized institutional structure in which it can be socially
embodied. This need, essentially an ecclesiastical one, is coming
to revolve around the problem of the relation of Balinese religion to the
national state, in particular around its place-or lack thereof-in the
Republican Ministry of Religion.
The Ministry, which is headed by a full cabinet member, is centered
in Djakarta, but has offices scattered over much of the country. It is entirely
dominated by Muslims, and its main activities are building
mosques, publishing Indonesian translations of the Koran and commentaries,
appointing Muslim marriage-closers, supporting Koranic schools,
disseminating information about Islam, and so on. It has an elaborate
bureaucracy, in which there are special sections for Protestants and
Catholics (who largely boycott it anyway on separatist grcunds) as distinct
religions. But Balinese religion is thrown into the general residual
category perhaps best translated as "wild"-that is, pagan, heathen,
primitive, etc.-the members of which have no genuine rights in, or aid
from, the Ministry. These "wild" religions are considered, in the classical
Muslim distinction between "peoples of the Book" and "religions of
ignorance," as threats to true piety and fair game for conversion. 16
The Balinese naturally take a dim view of this and have constantly
petitioned Djakarta for equal recognition with Protestantism, Catholicism,
and Islam as a fourth major religion. President Sukarno, himself
half-Balinese, and many other national leaders sympathize, but they
•s See Swellengrebel, Bali, Introduction, pp. 72-73, for some parliamentary exchanges
on this issue.
188 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
cannot, as yet, afford to alienate the politically powerful orthodox Muslims
and so have vacillated, giving little effective support. The Muslims
say that the adherents of Balinese Hinduism are all in one place, unlike
the Christians who are scattered all over Indonesia; the Balinese point
out that there are Balinese communities in Djakarta and elsewhere in
Java, as well as in south Sumatra (transmigrants), and instance the recent
erection of Balinese temples in east Java. The Muslims say, you
have no Book, how can you be a world religion? The Balinese reply, we
have manuscripts and inscriptions dating from before Mohammed. The
Muslims say, you believe in many gods and worship stones; the Balinese
say, God is One but has many names and the "stone" is the vehicle
of God, not God himself. A few of the more sophisticated Balinese
even claim that the real reason why the Muslims are unwilling to admit
them to the Ministry is the fear that if "Bali-ism" were to become an
officially recognized religion, many Javanese, who are Islamic . in name
only and still very Hindu-Buddhist in spirit, would convert, and "Baliism"
would grow rapidly at the expense of Islam.
In any case, there is an impasse. And, as a result, the Balinese have
set up their own independent, locally financed "Ministry of Religion,''
and are attempting through it to reorganize some of their most central
religious institutions. The main effort, so far, has been concentrated
(with largely indifferent results) upon regularizing the qualifications for
Brahmana priests. Instead of resting the priestly role mainly on its hereditary
aspect, which in itself they, of course, do not question, or on
the ritual virtuosity involved, the "Ministry" wishes to rest it on religious
knowledge and wisdom. It wants to insure that the priests know
what the scriptures mean and can relate them to contemporary life, are
of good moral character, have attained at least some degree of genuine
scholarship, and so on. Our young men will no longer follow a man just
because he is a Brahmana, the officials say; we must make him a figure
of moral and intellectual respect, a true spiritual guide. And to this end
they are attempting to exercise some control over ordination, even to
the point of setting qualifying examinations, and to make the priest�
hood a more corporate body by holding meetings of all the priests in aQ
area. The representatives of the "Ministry" also tour the villages givinl
educational speeches on the moral significance of Balinese religion, o�
the virtues of monotheism and the dangers of idol worship, and so o�
They are even attempting to put some order into the temple system, �'
establish a systematic classification of temples, and perhaps eventuallY)
to elevate one kind, most likely the village origin-temple, to pre-emi�
"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali 18g
nence in a universalistic pattern comparable to that of a mosque or a
church.
All this is, however, still largely in the paper-planning stage, and it
cannot be claimed that very much actual reorganization of the institutional
structure of Balinese religion has in fact taken place. But there is
an office of the "Ministry" in each Balinese regency now, headed by a
salaried Brahmana priest (a regularly paid "official" priesthood being in
itself something of a revolution), assisted by three or four clerks, most
of them also members of the Brahmana caste. A religious school, independent
of the "Ministry" but encouraged by it, has been established,
and even a small religious political party centered around a ranking
noble and dedicated to forwarding these changes has been founded, so
that at least the faint beginnings of religious bureaucratization are mani­
fest.
What will come of all this-the intensified religious questioning, the
spread of religious literacy, and the attempt to reorganize religious
institutions-remains simply to be seen. In many ways, the whole drift
of the modern world would seem to be against the sort of movement toward
religious rationalization which these developments portend, and
perhaps Balinese culture will, in the end, be swamped and left jejune by
just the sort of "modern materialist ideas" which Sir Richard Winstedt
fears. But not only do such overall drifts-when they do not turn out to
be mirages altogether-often pass over deeply rooted cultural configurations
with rather less effect upon them than we would have thought
possible, but, for all its present weakness, the regenerative potential of a
triangular alliance of troubled youth, threatened aristocrats, and aroused
priests should not be underestimated. Today in Bali some of the same
social and intellectual processes which gave rise to the fundamental religious
transformations of world history seem to be at least well begun,
and whatever their vicissitudes or eventual outcome, their career can
hardly help but be an instructive one. By looking closely at what happens
on this peculiar little island over the next several decades we may
gain insights into the dynamics of religious change of a specificity and
an immediacy that history, having already happened, can never give
US. I7
17 In 1 962, "Balinese Religion" was finally admitted as an official "Great Reli·
gion" in Indonesia. Since that time, and particularly since the 1 965 massacres,
conversions from Islam to "Bali-ism" have indeed markedly increased in Java.
And on Bali itself, the Hindu reform movement has grown into a m;ijor force.
On all this, see C. Geertz, " Religious Change and Social Order in Soeharto's Indonesia,"
Asia 21 (Autumn 1 972):62-84.
PA R T I V
Chapter 8 jIdeology
As a Cultural System
I
It is one of the minor ironies of modern intellectual history that the
term "ideology" has itself become thoroughly ideologized. A concept
that once meant but a collection of political proposals, perhaps somewhat
intellectualistic and impractical but at any rate idealistic-"social
romances" as someone, perhaps Napoleon, called them-has now become,
to quote Webster's, "the integrated assertions, theories, and aims
constituting a politico-social program, often with an implication of factitious
propagandizing; as, Fascism was altered in Germany to fit the
Nazi ideology"-a much more formidable proposition. Even in works
that, in the name of science, profess to be using a neutral sense of the
term, the effect of its employment tends nonetheless to be distinctly polemical:
in Sutton, Harris, Kaysen, and Tobin's in many ways excellent
The American Business Creed, for example, an assurance that "one has
no more cause to feel dismayed or aggrieved by having his own views
described as 'ideology' than had Moliere's famous character by the discovery
that all his life he had been talking prose," is followed immediately
by the listing of the main characteristics of ideology as bias, oversimplification,
emotive language, and adaption to public prejudice. 1 No
1 F. X. Sutton, S. E. Harris, C. Kaysen, and J. Tobin, The American Business
Creed (Cambridge, Mass., 1 956), pp. 3-6.
194 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
one, at least outside the Communist bloc, where a somewhat distinctive
conception of the role of thought in society is institutionalized, would
call himself an ideologue or consent unprotestingly to be called one by
others. Almost universally now the familiar parodic paradigm applies:
"I have a social philosophy ; you have political opinions; he has an ide­
ology."
The historical process by which the concept of ideology came to be
itself a part of the very subject matter to which it referred has been
traced by Mannheim ; the realization (or perhaps it was only an admission)
that sociopolitical thought does not grow out of disembodied reflection
but "is always bound up with the existing life situation of the
thinker" seemed to taint such thought with the vulgar struggle for advantage
it had professed to rise above.2 But what is of even more immediate
importance is the question of whether or not this absorption into
its own referent has destroyed its scientific utility altogether, whether or
not having become an accusation, it can remain an analytic concept. In
Mannheim's case, this problem was the animus of his entire work-the
construction, as he put it, of a "nonevaluative conception of ideology."
But the more he grappled with it the more deeply he became engulfed
in its ambiguities until, driven by the logic of his initial assumptions to
submit even his own point of view to sociological analysis, he ended, as
is well known, in an ethical and epistemological relativism that he himself
found uncomfortable. And so far as later work in this area has been
more than tendentious or mindlessly empirical, it has involved the employment
of a series of more or less ingenious methodological devices
to escape from what may be called (because, like the puzzle of Achilles
and the tortoise, it struck at the very foundations of rational knowledge)
Mannheim's Paradox.
As Zeno's Paradox raised (or, at least, articulated) unsettling questions
about the validity of mathematical reasoning, so Mannheim's Paradox
raised them with respect to the objectivity of sociological analysis.
Where, if anywhere, ideology leaves off and science begins has been the
Sphinx's Riddle of much of modern sociological thought and the rustless
weapon of its enemies. Claims to impartiality have been advanced
in the name of disciplined adherence to impersonal research procedures,
of the academic man's institutional insulation from the immediate con-
2 K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Harvest ed. (New York, n.d.), pp.
59-83; see also R. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York,
1949), pp. 2 1 7-220.
Ideology As a Cultural System 195
cerns of the day and his vocational commitment to neutrality, and of deliberately
cultivated awareness of and correction for one's own biases
and interests. They have been met with denial of the impersonality (and
the effectiveness) of the procedures, of the solidity of the insulation, and
of the depth and genuineness of the self-awareness. "I am aware," a recent
analyst of ideological preoccupations among American intellectuals
concludes, somewhat nervously, "that many readers will claim that my
position is itself ideological." a Whatever the fate of his other predictions,
the validity of this one is certain. Although the arrival of a scientific
sociology has been repeatedly proclaimed, the acknowledgment of
its existence is far from universal, even among social scientists themselves;
and nowhere is resistance to claims to objectivity greater than in
the study of ideology.
A number of sources for this resistance have been cited repeatedly in
the apologetic literature of the social sciences. The value-laden nature
of the subject matter is perhaps most frequently invoked: men do not
care to have beliefs to which they attach great moral significance examined
dispassionately, no matter for how pure a purpose; and if they are
themselves highly ideologized, they may find it simply impossible to believe
that a disinterested approach to critical matters of social and political
conviction can be other than a scholastic sham. The inherent elusiveness
of ideological thought, expressed as it is in intricate symbolic
webs as vaguely defined as they are emotionally charged; the admitted
fact that ideological special pleading has, from Marx forward, so often
been clothed in the guise of "scientific sociology"; and the defensiveness
of established intellectual classes who see scientific probing into the social
roots of ideas as threatening to their status, are also often mentioned.
And, when all else fails, it is always possible to point out once
more that sociology is a young science, that it has been so recently
founded that it has not had time to reach the levels of institutional solidity
necessary to sustain its claims to investigatory freedom in sensitive
areas. All these arguments have, doubtless, a certain validity. But
what-by a curious selective omission the unkind might well indict as
ideological-is not so often considered is the possibility that a great
part of the problem lies in the lack of conceptual sophistication within
social science itself, that the resistance of ideology to sociological analysis
is so great because such analyses are in fact fundamentally inade-
3 W. White, Beyond Conformity (New York, 1961), p. 2 1 1 .
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
quate ; the theoretical framework they employ is conspicuously incom­
plete.
I shall try in this essay to show that such is indeed the case: that the
social sciences have not yet developed a genuinely nonevaluative conception
of ideology; that this failure stems less from methodological indiscipline
than from theoretical clumsiness; that this clumsiness manifests
itself mainly in the handling of ideology as an entity in itself-as
an ordered system of cultural symbols rather than in the discrimination
of its social and psychological contexts (with respect to which our analytical
machinery is very much more refined) ; and that the escape from
Mannheim's Paradox lies, therefore, in the perfection of a conceptual
apparatus capable of dealing more adroitly with meaning. Bluntly, we
need a more exact apprehension of our object of study, lest we find ourselves
in the position of the Javanese folk-tale figure, "Stupid Boy,"
who, having been counseled by his mother to seek a quiet wife, returned
with a corpse.
II
That the conception of ideology now regnant in the social sciences is a
thoroughly evaluative (that is, pejorative) one is readily enough demonstrated.
" [The study of ideology ) deals with a mode of thinking which
is thrown off its proper course," Werner Stark informs us; "ideological
thought is . . . something shady, something that ought to be overcome
and banished from our mind." It is not (quite) the same as lying, for,
where the liar at least attains to cynicism, the ideologue remains merely
a fool: "Both are concerned with untruth, but whereas the liar tries to
falsify the thought of others while his own private thought is correct,
while he himself knows well what the truth is, a person who falls for an
ideology is himself deluded in his private thought, and if he misleads
others, does so unwillingly and unwittingly." 4 A follower of Mannheim,
Stark holds that all forms of thought are socially conditioned in
the very nature of things, but that ideology has in addition the unfortunate
quality of being psychologically "deformed" ("warped," "contaminated,"
"falsified," "distorted," "clouded") by the pressure of personal
4 W. Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1 958), p. 48.
Ideology As a Cultural System 197
emotions like hate, desire, anxiety, or fear. The sociology of knowledge
deals with the social element in the pursuit and perception of truth, its
inevitable confinement to one or another existential perspective. But the
study of ideology-an entirely different enterprise-deals with the
causes of intellectual error:
Ideas and beliefs, we have tried to explain, can be related to reality in a
double way: either to the facts of reality, or to the strivings to which this
reality, or rather the reaction to this reality, gives rise. Where the former
connection exists, we find thought which is, in principle, truthful; where the
latter relation obtains, we are faced with ideas which can be true only by
accident, and which are likely to be vitiated by bias, the word taken in the
widest possible sense. The former type of thought deserves to be called theoretical;
the latter must be characterized as paratheoretical. Perhaps one
might also describe the former as rational, the latter as emotionally tinged
-the former as purely cognitive, the latter as evaluative. To borrow Theodor
Geiger's simile . . . thought determined by social fact is like a pure
stream, crystal-clear, transparent; ideological ideas like a dirty river, muddied
and polluted by the impurities that have flooded into it. From the one
it is healthy to drink; the other is poison to be avoided.�>
This is primitive, but the same confinement of the referent of the
term "ideology" to a form of radical intellectual depravity also appears
in contexts where the political and scientific arguments are both far
more sophisticated and infinitely more penetrating. In his seminal essay
on "Ideology and Civility," for example, Edward Shils sketches a portrait
of "the ideological outlook," which is, if anything, even grimmer
than Stark's.6 Appearing "in a variety of forms, each alleging itself to
be unique"-Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, Russian
Bolshevism, French and Italian Communism, the Action Fran�ise, the
British Union of Fascists, "and their fledgling American kinsman,
'McCarthyism,' which died in infancy"-this outlook "encircled and invaded
public life in the Western countries during the 1 9th century and
in the 20th century . . . threatened to achieve universal domination." It
consists, most centrally, of "the assumption that politics should be conducted
from the standpoint of a coherent, comprehensive set of beliefs
which must override every other consideration." Like the politics it supports,
it is dualistic, opposing the pure "we" to the evil "they," pro�
Ibid., pp. 90-9 1 . Italics in the original. For approximation of the same argument
in Mannheim, formulated as a distinction between "total" and "particular"
ideology, see Ideology and Utopia, pp. 55-59.
e E. Shils, "Ideology and Civility: On the Politics of the Intellectual," The Sewanee
Review 66 ( 1 958): 450-480.
198 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
claiming that he who is not with me is against me. It is alienative in
that it distrusts, attacks, and works to undermine established political
institutions. It is doctrinaire in that it claims complete and exclusive
possession of political truth and abhors compromise. It is totalistic in
that it aims to order the whole of social and cultural life in the image of
its Ideals, futuristic in that it works toward a utopian culmination of
history in which such an ordering will be realized. It is, in short, not the
sort of prose any good bourgeois gentleman (or even any good democrat)
is likely to admit to speaking.
Even on more abstract and theoretical levels, where the concern is
more purely conceptual, the notion that the term "ideology" properly
applies to the views of those "stiff in opinions, and always in the
wrong" does not disappear. In Talcott Parsons's most recent contemplation
of Mannheim's Paradox, for example, "deviations from [social ]
scientific objectivity" emerge as the "essential criteria of an ideology":
"The problem of ideology arises where there is a discrepancy between
what is believed and what can be [established as] scientifically
correct." 7 The "deviations" and "discrepancies" involved are of two
general sorts. First, where social science, shaped as is all thought by the
overall values of the society within which it is contained, is selective in
the sort of questions it asks, the particular problems it chooses to
tackle, and so forth, ideologies are subject to a further, cognitively more
pernicious "secondary" selectivity, in that they emphasize some aspects
of social reality-that reality, for example, as revealed by current social
scientific knowledge-and neglect or even suppress other aspects.
"Thus the business ideology, for instance, substantially exaggerates the
contribution of businessmen to the national welfare and underplays the
contribution of scientists and professional men. And in the current ideology
of the 'intellectual,' the importance of social 'pressures to conformity'
is exaggerated and institutional factors in the freedom of the
individual are ignored or played down." Second, ideological thought,
not content with mere overselectivity, positively distorts even those aspects
of social reality it recognizes, distortion that becomes apparent
only when the assertions involved are placed against the background of
the authoritative findings of social science. "The criterion of distortion
is that statements are made about society which by social-scientific
7 T. Parsons, "An Approach to the Sociology of Knowledge," Transactions of
the Fourth World Congress of Sociology_ (M ilan and Stressa, 1 959), pp. 25-49. Italics
in original.
Ideology As a Cultural System 199
methods can be shown to be positively in error, whereas selectivity is
involved where the statements are, at the proper level, 'true,' but do not
constitute a balanced account of the available truth." That in the eyes of
the world there is much to choose between being positively in error and
rendering an unbalanced account of the available truth seems, however,
rather unlikely. Here, too, ideology is a pretty dirty river.
Examples need not be multiplied, although they easily could be.
More important is the question of what such an egregiously loaded concept
is doing among the analytic tools of a social science that, on the
basis of a claim to cold-blooded objectivity, advances its theoretical interpretations
as "undistorted" and therefore normative visions of social
reality. If the critical power of the social sciences stems from their disinterestedness,
is not this power compromised when the analysis of political
thought is governed by such a concept, much as the analysis of
religious thought would be (and, on occasion, has been) compromised
when cast in terms of the study of "superstition"?
The analogy is not farfetched. In Raymond Aron's The Opium of the
Intellectuals, for example, not only the title-ironically echoic of
Marx's bitter iconoclasm-but the entire rhetoric of the argument ("political
myths," "the idolatry of history," "churchmen and faithful," "secular
clericalism," and so forth) reminds one of nothing so much as the
literature of militant atheism.8 Shils's tack of invoking the extreme pathologies
of ideological thought-Nazism, Bolshevism, or whatever-as
its paradigmatic forms is reminiscent of the tradition in which the Inquisition,
the personal depravity of Renaissance popes, the savagery of
Reformation wars, or the primitiveness of Bible-belt fundamentalism is
offered as an archetype of religious belief and behavior. And Parsons's
view that ideology is defined by its cognitive insufficiencies vis-a-vis science
is perhaps not so distant as it might appear from the Comtean
view that religion is characterized by an uncritically figurative conception
of reality, which a sober sociology, purged of metaphor, will soon
render obsolete: We may wait as long for the "end of ideology" as the
positivists have waited for the end of religion. Perhaps it is even not too
much to suggest that, as the militant atheism of the Enlightenment and
after was a response to the quite genuine horrors of a spectacular outburst
of religious bigotry, persecution, and strife (and to a broadened
knowledge of the natural world), so the militantly hostile approach to
s R. Aron, The Opium ofthe Intellectuals (New York, 1 962).
200 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ideology is a similar response to the political holocausts of the past
half-century (and to a broadened knowledge of the social world). And,
if this suggestion is valid, the fate of ideology may also turn out to be
similar-isolation from the mainstream of social thought.9
Nor can the issue be dismissed as merely a semantic one. One is, naturally,
free to confine the referent of the term "ideology" to "something
shady" if one wishes; and some sort of historical case for doing so can
perhaps be made. But if one does so limit it, one cannot then write
works on the ideologies of American businessmen, New York "literary"
intellectuals, members of the British Medical Association, industrial labor-union
leaders, or famous economists and expect either the subjects
or interested bystanders to credit them as neutral. to Discussions of sociopolitical
ideas that indict them ab initio, in terms of the very words
used to name them, as deformed or worse, merely beg the questions
they pretend to raise. It is also possible, of course, that the term "ideology"
should simply be dropped from scientific discourse altogether and
left to its polemical fate-as "superstition" in fact has been. But, as
there seems to be nothing at the moment with which to replace it and as
it is at least partially established in the technical lexicon of the social
sciences, it seems more advisable to proceed with the effort to defuse
it. I 1
9 As the danger of being misinterpreted here is serious, may I hope that my
criticism will be credited as technical and not political if I note that my own general
ideological (as I would frankly call it) position is largely the same as that of
Aron, Shils, Parsons, and so forth; that I am in agreement with their plea for a
civil, temperate, unheroic politics? Also it should be remarked that the demand
for a nonevaluative concept of ideology is not a demand for the nonevaluation of
ideologies, any more than a nonevaluative concept of religion implies religious
relativism.
IO Sutton, et al., American Business Creed; White, Beyond Conformity; H.
Eckstein, Pressure Group Politics: The Case of the British Medical Association
(Stanford, 1 960); C. Wright M ills, The New Men of Power (New York, 1 948); J.
Schumpeter, "Science and Ideology," A merican Economic Review 39 ( 1 949):
345-359.
1 1 There have been, in fact, a number of other terms used in the literature for
the general range of phenomena that "ideology" denotes, from Plato's "noble
lies" through Sorel's "myths" to Pareto's "derivations"; but none of them has
managed to reach any greater level of technical neutrality than has "ideology."
See H. D. Lasswell, "The Language of Power," in Lasswell, N. Leites, and Associates,
Language of Politics (New York, 1 949), pp. 3- 19.
Ideology As a Cultural System 201
III
As the flaws hidden in a tool show up when it is used, so the intrinsic
weaknesses of the evaluative concept of ideology reveal themselves
when it is used. In particular, they are exposed in the studies of the social
sources and consequences of ideology, for in such studies this concept
is coupled to a highly developed engine of social- and personalitysystem
analysis whose very power only serves to emphasize the lack of
a similar power on the cultural (that is, the symbol-system) side. In investigations
of the social and psychological contexts of ideological
thought (or at least the "good" ones), the subtlety with which the contexts
are handled points up the awkwardness with which the thought is
handled, and a shadow of imprecision is cast over the whole discussion,
a shadow that even the most rigorous methodological austerity cannot
dispel.
There are currently two main approaches to the study of the social
determinants of ideology: the interest theory and the strain theory.12 For
the first, ideology is a mask and a weapon; for the second, a symptom
and a remedy. In the interest theory, ideological pronouncements are
seen against the background of a universal struggle for advantage; in the
strain theory, against the background of a chronic effort to correct sociopsychological
disequilibrium. In the one, men pursue power; in the
other, they flee anxiety. As they may, of course, do both at the same
time-and even one by means of the other-the two theories are not
necessarily contradictory; but the strain theory (which arose in response
to the empirical difficulties encountered by the interest theory), being
less simplistic, is more penetrating, less concrete, more comprehensive.
The fundamentals of the interest theory are too well known to need
review; developed to perfection of a sort by the Marxist tradition, they
are now standard intellectual equipment of the man-in-the-street, who is
only too aware that in political argumentation it all comes down to
whose ox is gored. The great advantage of the interest theory was and is
its rooting of cultural idea-systems in the solid ground of social structure,
through emphasis on the motivations of those who profess such
systems and on the dependence of those motivations in turn upon social
12 Sutton, et at., American Business Creed, pp. 1 1- 1 2, 303-3 10.
202 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
position, most especially social class. Further, the interest theory welded
political speculation to political combat by pointing out that ideas are
weapons and that an excellent way to institutionalize a particular view
of reality-that of one's group, class, or party-is to capture political
power and enforce it. These contributions are permanent; and if interest
theory has not now the hegemony it once had, it is not so much because
it has been proved wrong as because its theoretical apparatus turned out
to be too rudimentary to cope with the complexity of the interaction
among social, psychological, and cultural factors it itself uncovered.
Rather like Newtonian mechanics, it has not been so much displaced by
subsequent developments as absorbed into them.
The main defects of the interest theory are that its psychology is too
anemic and its sociology too muscular. Lacking a developed analysis of
motivation, it has been constantly forced to oscillate between a narrow
and superficial utilitarianism that sees men as impelled by rational calculation
of their consciously recognized personal advantage and a
broader, but no less superficial, historicism that speaks with a studied
vagueness of men's ideas as somehow "reflecting," "expressing," "corresponding
to," "emerging from," or "conditioned by" their social commitments.
Within such a framework, the analyst is faced with the choice
of either revealing the thinness of his psychology by being so specific as
to be thoroughly implausible or concealing the fact that he does not
have any psychological theory at all by being so general as to be truistic.
An argument that for professional soldiers "domestic [governmental)
policies are important mainly as ways of retaining and enlarging
the military establishment [because ) that is their business; that is what
they are trained for" seems to do scant justice to even so uncomplicated
a mind as the military mind is reputed to be; while an argument that
American oil men "cannot very well be pure-and-simple oil men" because
"their interests are such" that "they are also political men" is as
enlightening as the theory (also from the fertile mind of M. Jourdain)
that the reason opium puts you to sleep is that it has dormitive powers.
13
On the other hand, the view that social action is fundamentally an
unending struggle for power leads to an unduly Machiavellian view of
ideology as a form of higher cunning and, consequently, to a neglect of
its broader, less dramatic social functions. The battlefield image of sota
The quotations are from the most eminent recent interest theorist, C.
Wright M ills, The Causes of World War Three (New York, 1 958), pp. 54, 65.
Ideology As a Cultural System 203
ciety as a clash of interests thinly disguised as a clash of principles
turns attention away from the role that ideologies play in defining (or
obscuring) social categories, stabilizing (or upsetting) social expectations,
maintaining (or undermining) social norms, strengthening (or
weakening) social consensus, relieving (or exacerbating) social tensions.
Reducing ideology to a weapon in a guerre de plume gives to its analysis
a warming air of militancy, but it also means reducing the intellectual
compass within which such analysis may be conducted to the constricted
realism of tactics and strategy. The intensity of interest theory
is-to adapt a figure from Whitehead-but the reward of its narrow­
ness.
As "interest," whatever its ambiguities, is at one and the same time a
psychological and sociological concept-referring both to a felt advantage
of an individual or group of individuals and to the objective structure
of opportunity within which an individual or group moves-so also
is "strain," for it refers both to a state of personal tension and to a
condition of societal dislocation. The difference is that with "strain"
both the motivational background and the social structural context
are more systematically portrayed, as are their relations with one another.
It is, in fact, the addition of a developed conception of personality
systems (basically Freudian), on the one hand, and of social systems
(basically Durkheimian) on the other, and of their modes of
interpenetration-the Parsonian addition-that transforms interest
theory into strain theory. I4
The clear and distinct idea from which strain theory departs is the
chronic malintegration of society. No social arrangement is or can be
completely successful in coping with the functional problems it inevitably
faces. All are riddled with insoluble antinomies: between liberty and
political order, stability and change, efficiency and humanity, precision
and flexibility, and so forth. There are discontinuities between norms in
different sectors of the society-the economy, the polity, the family,
and so on. There are discrepancies between goals within the different
sectors-between the emphases on profit and productivity in business
firms or between extending knowledge and disseminating it in universities,
for example. And there are the contradictory role expectations of
which so much has been made in recent American sociological literau
For the general schema, see Parsons, The Social System (New York, 1 95 1),
especially Chaps. 1 and 7. The fullest development of the strain theory is in Sutton
et al., American Business Creed, especially Chap. 1 5 .
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ture on the foreman, the working wife, the artist, and the politician. Social
friction is as pervasive as is mechanical friction-and as irremov­
able.
Further, this friction or social strain appears on the level of the
individual personality-itself an inevitably malintegrated system of conflicting
desires, archaic sentiments, and improvised defenses-as psychological
strain. What is viewed collectively as structural inconsistency
is felt individually as personal insecurity, for it is in the experience of
the social actor that the imperfections of society and contradictions of
character meet and exacerbate one another. But at the same time, the
fact that both society and personality are, whatever their shortcomings,
organized systems, rather than mere congeries of institutions or clusters
of motives, means that the sociopsychological tensions they induce
are also systematic, that the anxieties derived from social interaction
have a form and order of their own. In the modern world at least, most
men live lives of patterned desperation.
Ideological thought is, then, regarded as (one sort of) response to this
desperation: "Ideology is a patterned reaction to the patterned strains of
a social role." 1:; It provides a "symbolic outlet" for emotional disturbances
generated by social disequilibrium. And as one can assume that
such disturbances are, at least in a general way, common to all or most
occupants of a given role or social position, so ideological reactions to
the disturbances will tend to be similar, a similarity only reinforced by
the presumed commonalities in "basic personality structure" among
members of a particular culture, class, or occupational category. The
model here is not military but medical: An ideology is a malady (Sutton,
et al., mention nail-chewing, alcoholism, psychosomatic disorders,
and "crotchets" among the alternatives to it) and demands a diagnosis.
"The concept of strain is not in itself an explanation of ideological patterns
but a generalized label for the kinds of factors to look for in
working out an explanation." 16
But there is more to diagnosis, either medical or sociological, than
the identification of pertinent strains; one understands symptoms not
merely etiologically but teleologically-in terms of the ways in which
they act as mechanisms, however unavailing, for dealing with the disturbances
that have generated them. Four main classes of explanation have
been most frequently employed: the cathartic, the morale, the solidarity,
1 5 Sutton, et al., American Business Creed, pp. 307-308.
16 Parsons, "An Approach."
Ideology As a Cultural System 205
and the advocatory. By the "cathartic explanation" is meant the venerable
safety-valve or scapegoat theory. Emotional tension is drained off
by being displaced onto symbolic enemies ("The Jews," "Big Business,"
"The Reds," and so forth). The explanation is as simple-minded as the
device; but that, by providing legitimate objects of hostility (or, for that
matter, of love), ideology may ease somewhat the pain of being a petty
bureaucrat, a day laborer, or a small-town storekeeper is undeniable. By
the "morale explanation" is meant the ability of an ideology to sustain
individuals (or groups) in the face of chronic strain, either by denying it
outright or by legitimizing it in terms of higher values. Both the struggling
small businessman rehearsing his boundless confidence in the inevitable
justness of the American system and the neglected artist attributing
his failure to his maintenance of decent standards in a Philistine
world are able, by such means, to get on with their work. Ideology
bridges the emotional gap between things as they are ·and as one would
have them be, thus insuring the performance of roles that might otherwise
be abandoned in despair or apathy. By the "solidarity explanation"
is meant the power of ideology to knit a social group or class together.
To the extent that it exists, the unity of the labor movement, the business
community, or the medical profession obviously rests to a significant
degree on common ideological orientation; and the South would
not be The South without the existence of popular symbols charged with
the emotions of a pervasive social predicament. Finally, by the "advocatory
explanation" is meant the action of ideologies (and ideologists)
in articulating, however partially and indistinctly, the strains that impel
them, thus forcing them into the public notice. "Ideologists state the
problems for the larger society, take sides on the issues involved and
'present them in the court' of the ideological market place." tr Although
ideological advocates (not altogether unlike their legal counterparts)
tend as much to obscure as to clarify the true nature of the problems
involved, they at least call attention to their existence and, by polarizing
issues, make continued neglect more difficult. Without Marxist attack,
there would have been no labor reform; without Black Nationalists, no
deliberate speed.
It is here, however, in the investigation of the social and psychological
roles of ideology, as distinct from its determinants, that strain
theory itself begins to creak and its superior incisiveness, in comparison
with i nterest theory, to evaporate. The increased precision in the
1 7 White, Beyond Conformity, p. 204.
206 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
location of the springs of ideological concern does not, somehow, carry
over into the discrimination of its consequences, where the analysis becomes,
on the contrary, slack and ambiguous. The consequences envisaged,
no doubt genuine enough in themselves, seem almost adventitious,
the accidental by-products of an essentially nonrational, nearly automatic
expressive process initially pointed in another direction-as when
a man stubbing his toe cries an involuntary "ouch!" and incidentally
vents his anger, signals his distress, and consoles himself with the sound
of his own voice; or as when, caught in a subway crush, he issues a spontaneous
"damn!" of frustration and, hearing similar oaths from others,
gains a certain perverse sense of kinship with fellow sufferers.
This defect, of course, can be found in much of the functional analysis
in the social sciences: a pattern of behavior shaped by a certain set
of forces turns out, by a plausible but nevertheless mysterious coincidence,
to serve ends but tenuously related to those forces. A group of
primitives sets out, in all honesty, to pray for rain and ends by strengthening
its social solidarity; a ward politician sets out to get or remain
near the trough and ends by mediating between unassimilated immigrant
groups and an impersonal governmental bureaucracy; an ideologist
sets out to air his grievances and finds himself contributing, through
the diversionary power of his illusions, to the continued viability of the
very system that grieves him.
The concept of latent function is usually invoked to paper over this
anomalous state of affairs, but it rather names the phenomenon (whose
reality is not in question) than explains it; and the net result is that
functional analyses-and not only those of ideology-remain hopelessly
equivocal. The petty bureaucrat's anti-Semitism may indeed give
him something to do with the bottled anger generated in him by constant
toadying to those he considers his intellectual inferiors and so
drain some of it away; but it may also simply increase his anger by providing
him with something else about which to be impotently bitter.
The neglected artist may better bear his popular failure by invoking the
classical canons of his art; but such an invocation may so dramatize for
him the gap between the possibilities of his environment and the demands
of his vision as to make the game seem unworth the candle.
Commonality of ideological perception may link men together, but it
may also provide them, as the history of Marxian sectarianism demonstrates,
with a vocabulary by means of which to explore more exquisitely
the differences among them. The clash of ideologists may bring a
Ideology As a Cultural System
social problem to public attention, but it may also charge it with such
passion that any possibility of dealing with it rationally is precluded. Of
all these possibilities, strain theorists are, of course, very well aware.
Indeed they tend to stress negative outcomes and possibilities rather
more than the positive, and they but rarely think of ideology as more
than a faute de mieux stopgap-like nail-chewing. But the main point
is that, for all its subtlety in ferreting out the motives of ideological
concern, strain theory's analysis of the consequences of such concern remains
crude, vacillatory, and evasive. Diagnostically it is convincing;
functionally it is not.
The reason for this weakness is the virtual absence in strain theory
(or in interest theory either) of anything more than the most rudimentary
conception of the processes of symbolic formulation. There is a
good deal of talk about emotions "finding a symbolic outlet" or "becoming
attached to appropriate symbols"-but very little idea of how
the trick is really done. The link between the causes of ideology and its
effects seems adventitious because the connecting element-the autonomous
process of symbolic formulation-is passed over in virtual silence.
Both interest theory and strain theory go directly from source
analysis to consequence analysis without ever seriously examining
ideologies as systems of interacting symbols, as patterns of interworking
meanings. Themes are outlined, of course; among the content analysts,
they are even counted. But they are referred for elucidation, not to
other themes nor to any sort of semantic theory, but either backward to
the effect they presumably mirror or forward to the social reality they
presumably distort. The problem of how, after all, ideologies transform
sentiment into significance and so make it socially available is short-circuited
by the crude device of placing particular symbols and particular
strains (or interests) side by side in such a way that the fact that the first
are derivatives of the second seems mere common sense-or at least
post-Freudian, post-Marxian common sense. And so, if the analyst be
deft enough, it does. 111 The connection is not thereby explained but
merely educed. The nature of the relationship between the sociopsychological
stresses that incite ideological attitudes and the elaborate symbolic
structures through which those attitudes are given a public existence
is much too complicated to be comprehended in terms of a vague
and unexamined notion of emotive resonance.
18 Perhaps the most impressive tour de force in this paratactic genre is Nathan
Leites's A Study of Bolshevism (New York, 1 953).
208 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
IV
It is of singular interest in this connection that, although the general
stream of social scientific theory has been deeply influenced by almost
every major intellectual movement of the last century and a halfMarxism,
Darwinism, Utilitarianism, Idealism, Freudianism, Behaviorism,
Positivism, Operationalism-and has attempted to capitalize on
virtually every important field of methodological innovation from ecology,
ethology, and comparative psychology to game theory, cybernetics,
and statistics, it has, with very few exceptions, been virtually untouched
by one of the most important trends in recent thought: the effort to construct
an independent science of what Kenneth Burke has called "symbolic
action." 19 Neither the work of such philosophers as Peirce, Wittgenstein,
Cassirer, Langer, Ryle, or Morris nor of such literary critics
as Coleridge, Eliot, Burke, Empson, Blackmur, Brooks, or Auerbach
seems to have had any appreciable impact on the general pattern of social
scientific analysis.2o Aside from a few more venturesome (and
largely programmatic) linguists-a Whorf or a Sapir-the question of
how symbols symbolize, how they function to mediate meanings has
simply been bypassed. "The embarrassing fact," the physician cum
novelist Walker Percy has written, "is that there does not exist todaya
natural empirical science of symbolic behavior as such. . . . Sapir's
gentle chiding about the lack of a science of symbolic behavior and the
need of such a science is more conspicuously true today than it was
thirty-five years ago." 2 1
19 K. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, Studies in Symbolic Action
(Baton Rouge, 1 94 1 ). In the following discussion, I use "symbol" broadly in the
sense of any physical, social, or cultural act or object that serves as the vehicle
for a conception. For an explication of this view, under which "five" and "the
Cross" are equally symbols, see S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 4th ed.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1 960), pp. 60-66.
20 Useful general summaries of the tradition of literary criticism can be found
in S. E. Hyman, The Armed Vision (New York, 1 948) and in R. Welleck and A.
Warren, Theory of literature, 2nd ed. (New York, 1 958). A similar summary of
the somewhat more diverse philosophical development is apparently not available,
but the seminal works are C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshorne
and P. Weiss, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1 93 1 -1 958); E. Cassirer, Die Phi/osophie
der symbolischen Foremen, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1 923 - 1 929); C. W. Morris, Signs,
Language and Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, N .J ., 1 944); and L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical
in vestigations (Oxford, 1 953).
2 1 W. Percy, "The Symbol ic Structure of Interpersonal Process," Psychiatry 14
( 1 96 1 ):39-52. Italics in original. The reference is to Sapir's "The Status of. Un-
Ideology As a Cultural System
It is the absence of such a theory and in particular the absence of any
analytical framework within which to deal with figurative language that
have reduced sociologists to viewing ideologies as elaborate cries of
pain. With no notion of how metaphor, analogy, irony, ambiguity, pun,
paradox, hyperbole, rhythm, and all the other elements of what we
tamely call "style" operate-even, in a majority of cases, with no recognition
that these devices are of any importance in casting personal attitudes
into public form, sociologists lack the symbolic resources out of
which to construct a more incisive formulation. At the same time that
the arts have been establishing the cognitive power of "distortion" and
philosophy has been undermining the adequacy of an emotivist theory
of meaning, social scientists have been rejecting the first and embracing
the second. It is not therefore surprising that they evade the problem
of construing the import of ideological assertions by simply failing
to recognize it as a problem.22
In order to make explicit what I mean, let me take an example that
is, I hope, so thoroughly trivial in itself as both to still any suspicions
that I have a hidden concern with the substance of the political issue involved
and, more important, to bring home the point that concepts developed
for the analysis of the more elevated aspects of culturepoetry,
for example-are applicable to the more lowly ones without in
any way blurring the enormous qualitative distinctions between the two.
In discussing the cognitive inadequacies by which ideology is defined
for them, Sutton et al. use as an example of the ideologist's tendency to
"oversimplify" the denomination by organized labor of the Taft-Hartley
ACt as a "slave labor law":
Ideology tends to be simple and clear-cut, even where its simplicity and
clarity do less than justice to the subject under discussion. The ideological
picture uses sharp lines and contrasting blacks and whites. The ideologist exaggerates
and caricatures in the fashion of the cartoonist. In contrast, a scientific
description of social phenomena is likely to be fuzzy and indistinct.
In recent labor ideology the Taft-Hartley Act has been a "slave labor act."
By no dispassionate examination does the Act merit this label. Any detached
guistics as a Science," originally published in 1 929 and reprinted in D. Mandie·
baum, ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1 949),
pp. 160- 1 66.
22 A partial exception to this stricture, although marred by his obsession with
power as the sum and substance of politics, is Lasswell's "Style in the Language
of Politics," in Lasswell et al. • Language of Politics, po. 20-39. It also should be
remarked that the emphasis on verbal symbol ism in the following d iscussion is
merely for the sake of simplicity and is not intended to deny the importance of
plastic, theatrical, or other nonlinguistic devices-the rhetoric of uniforms, floodlit
stages, and marching bands-in ideological thought.
210 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
assessment of the Act would have to consider its many provisions individually.
On any set of values. even those of trade unions themselves. such an
assessment would yield a mixed verdict. But mi,- ed verdicts are not the stuff
of ideology. They are too complicated, too fuzzy. Ideology must categorize
the Act as a whole with a symbol to rally workers. voters and legislators to
action.23
Leaving aside the merely empirical question of whether or not it is in
fact true that ideological formulations of a given set of social phenomena
are inevitably "simpler" than scientific formulations of the same
phenomena, there is in this argument a curiously depreciatory-one
might even say "oversimple"-view of the thought processes of laborunion
leaders on the one hand and "workers, voters and legislators" on
the other. It is rather hard to believe that either those who coined and
disseminated the slogan themselves believed or expected anyone else to
believe that the law would actually reduce (or was intended to reduce)
the American worker to the status of a slave or that the segment of the
public for whom the slogan had meaning perceived it in any such terms.
Yet it is precisely this flattened view of other people's mentalities that
leaves the sociologist with only two interpretations, both inadequate, of
whatever effectiveness the symbol has: either it deceives the uninformed
(according to interest theory), or it excites the unreflective (according to
strain theory). That it might in fact draw its power from its capacity to
grasp, formulate, and communicate social realities that elude the tempered
language of science, that it may mediate more complex meanings
than its literal reading suggests, is not even considered. "Slave labor
act" may be, after all, not a label but a trope.
More exactly, it appears to be a metaphor or at least an attempted
metaphor. Although very few social scientis�s seem to have read much
of it, the literature on metaphor-"the power whereby language, even
with a small vocabulary, manages to embrace a multi-million things"is
vast and by now in reasonable agreement.24 In metaphor one has, of
course, a stratification of meaning, in which an incongruity of sense on
one level produces an influx of significance on another. As Percy has
pointed out, the feature of metaphor that has most troubled philosophers
(and, he might have added, scientists) is that it is "wrong": "It asserts
of one thing that it is something else." And, worse yet, it tends to
23 Sutton, et al., American Business Creed, pp. 4-5.
24 An excellent recent review is to be found in P. Henle, ed., Language,
Thought and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1 958), pp. 1 73- 1 95. The quotation is from
Langer, Philosophy, p. 1 1 7.
Ideology As a Cultural System 21 1
be most effective when most "wrong." 25 The power of a metaphor derives
precisely from the interplay between the discordant meanings it
symbolically coerces into a unitary conceptual framework and from the
degree to which that coercion is successful in overcoming the psychic
resistance such semantic tension inevitably generates in anyone in a position
to perceive it. When it works, a metaphor transforms a false identification
(for example, of the labor policies of the Republican Party and
of those of the Bolsheviks) into an apt analogy; when it misfires, it is a
mere extravagance.
That for most people the "slave labor law" figure was, in fact, pretty
much a misfire (and therefore never served with any effectiveness as "a
symbol to rally workers, voters and legislators to action") seems evident
enough, and it is this failure, rather than its supposed clear-cut simplicity,
that makes it seem no more than a cartoon. The semantic tension
between the image of a conservative Congress outlawing the closed shop
and of the prison camps of Siberia was-apparently-too great to be
resolved into a single conception, at least by means of so rudimentary a
stylistic device as the slogan. Except (perhaps) for a few enthusiasts, the
analogy did not appear; the false identification remained false. But failure
is not inevitable, even on such an elementary level. Although, a
most unmixed verdict, Sherman's "War is hell" is no social-science
proposition, even Sutton and his associates would probably not regard it
as either an exaggeration or a caricature.
More important, however, than any assessment of the adequacy of
the two tropes as such is the fact that, as the meanings they attempt to
spark against one another are after all socially rooted, the success or
failure of the attempt is relative not only to the power of the stylistic
mechanisms employed but also to precisely those sorts of factors upon
which strain theory concentrates its attention. The tensions of the Cold
War, the fears of a labor movement only recently emerged from a bitter
struggle for existence, and the threatened eclipse of New Deal liberalism
after two decades of dominance set the sociopsychological stage
both for the appearance of the "slave labor" figure and-when it
proved unable to work them into a cogent analogy-for its miscarriage.
The militarists of 1 934 Japan who opened their pamphlet on Basic
Theory of National Defense and Suggestions for Its Strengthening with
the resounding familial metaphor, "War is the father of creation and the
mother of culture," would no doubt have found Sherman's maxim as
2& W. Percy, "Metaphor as M istake," The Sewanee Review 66 ( 1 958): 79-99.
212 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
unconvincing as he would have found theirs.26 They were energetically
preparing for an imperialist war in an ancient nation seeking its footing
in the modern world; he was wearily pursuing a civil war in an unrealized
nation torn by domestic hatreds. It is thus not truth that varies with
social, psychological, and cultural contexts but the symbols we construct
in our unequally effective attempts to grasp it. War is hell and not the
mother of culture, as the Japanese eventually discovered-although no
doubt they express the fact in a grander idiom.
The sociology of knowledge ought to be called the sociology of meaning,
for what is socially determined is not the nature of conception but
the vehicles of conception. In a community that drinks its coffee black,
Henle remarks, to praise a girl with "You're the cream in my coffee"
would give entirely the wrong impression; and, if omnivorousness were
regarded as a more significant characteristic of bears than their clumsy
roughness, to call a man "an old bear" might mean not that he was
crude, but that he had catholic tastes.27 Or, to take an example from
Burke, since in Japan people smile on mentioning the death of a close
friend, the semantic equivalent (behaviorally as well as verbally) in
American English is not "He smiled," but "His face fell" ; for, with
such a rendering, we are "translating the accepted social usage of Japan
into the corresponding accepted social usage of the West." 2s And,
closer to the ideological realm, Sapir has pointed out that the chairmanship
of a committee has the figurative force we give it only because we
hold that "administrative functions somehow stamp a person as superior
to those who are being directed"; "should people come to feel that administrative
functions are little more than symbolic automatisms, the
chairmanship of a committee would be recognized as little more than a
petrified symbol and the particular value that is now felt to inhere in it
would tend to disappear." 29 The case is no different for "slave labor
law." If forced labor camps come, for whatever reasons, to play a less
prominent role in the American image of the Soviet Union, it will not
be the symbol's veracity that has dissolved but its very meaning, its capacity
to be either true or false. One must simply frame the argument
-that the Taft-Hartley Act is a mortal threat to organized labor-in
some other way.
26 Quoted in J. Crowley, "Japanese Army Factionalism in the Early 1 930's,"
The Journal of Asian Studies 2 1 ( 1 95 8): 309-326.
27 Henle, Language, Thought and Culture, pp. 4-5 .
28 K. Burke, Counterstatement (Chicago, 1 957), p. 1 49.
29 Sapir, "Status of Linguistics," p. 568.
Ideology As a Cultural System 213
In short, between an ideological figure like "slave labor act" and the
social realities of American life in the midst of which it appears, there
exists a subtlety of interplay, which concepts like "distortion," "selectivity,"
or "oversimplification" are simply incompetent to formulate.ao Not
only is the semantic structure of the figure a good deal more complex
than it appears on the surface, but an analysis of that structure forces
one into tracing a multiplicity of referential connections between it and
social reality, so that the final picture is one of a configuration of dissimilar
meanings out of whose interworking both the expressive power
and the rhetorical force of the final symbol derive. This interworking is
itself a social process, an occurrence not "in the head" but in that public
world where "people talk together, name things, make assertions, and to
a degree understand each other." a • The study of symbolic action is no
less a sociological discipline than the study of small groups, bureaucracies,
or the changing role of the American woman; it is only a good
deal less developed.
v
Asking the question that most students of ideology fail to ask-what,
precisely, do we mean when we assert that sociopsychological strains
are "expressed" in symbolic forms?-gets one, therefore, very quickly
3o Metaphor is, of course, not the only stylistic resource upon which ideology
draws. Metonymy ("All I have to offer is blood, sweat and tears"), hyperbole
("The thousand-year Reich"), meiosis ("I shall return"), synechdoche ("Wall
Street"), oxymoron ("Iron Curtain"), personification ("The hand that held the
dagger bas plunged it into the back of its neighbor"), and all the other figures the
classical rhetoricians so painstakingly collected and so carefully classified are utilized
over and over again, as are such syntactical devices as antithesis, inversion,
and repetition; such prosodic ones as rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration; such literary
ones as irony, eulogy, and sarcasm. Nor is all ideological expression figurative.
The bulk of it consists of quite literal, not to say flat-footed, assertions, which, a
certain tendency toward prima facie implausibility aside, are difficult to distinguish
from properly scientific statements: "The history of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggles"; "The whole of the morality of Europe is based
upon the values which are useful to the herd"; and so forth. As a cultural system,
an ideology that has developed beyond the stage of mere sloganeering consists of
an intricate structure of interrelated meanings-interrelated in terms of the semantic
mechanisms that formulate them-of which the two-level organization of
an isolated metaphor is but a feeble representation.
31 Percy, "Symbolic Structure."
2 14 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
into quite deep water indeed; into, in fact, a somewhat untraditional
and apparently paradoxical theory of the nature of human thought as a
public and not, or at least not fundamentally, a private activity.32 The
details of such a theory cannot be pursued any distance here, nor can
any significant amount of evidence be marshaled to support it. But at
least its general outlines must be sketched if we are to find our way
back from the elusive world of symbols and semantic process to the (apparently)
more solid one of sentiments and institutions, if we are to
trace with some circumstantiality the modes of interpenetration of culture,
personality, and social system.
The defining proposition of this sort of approach to thought en plein
air-what, following Galanter and Gerstenhaber, we may call "the extrinsic
theory"-is that thought consists of the construction and manipulation
of symbol systems, which are employed as models of other systems,
physical, organic, social, psychological, and so forth, in such a
way that the structure of these other systems-and, in the favorable
case, how they may therefore be expected to behave-is, as we say,
"understood." 33 Thinking, conceptualization, formulation, comprehension,
understanding, or what-have-you, consists not of ghostly happenings
in the head but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic
models against the states and processes of the wider world:
Imaginal thinking is neither more nor less than constructing an image of the
environment, running the model faster than the environment, and predicting
that the environment will behave as the model does. . . . The first step in
the solution of a problem consists in the construction of a model or image
of the "relevant features" of the [environment] . These models can be constructed
from many things, including parts of the organic tissue of the body
and, by man, paper and pencil or actual artifacts. Once a model has been
constructed it can be manipulated under various hypothetical conditions and
constraints. The organism is then able to "observe" the outcome of these
manipulations, and to project them onto the environment so that prediction
is possible. According to this view, an aeronautical engineer is thinking
when he manipulates a model of a new airplane in a wind tunnel. The motorist
is thinking when he runs his finger over a line on a map. the finger
serving as a model of the relevant aspects of the automobile, the map as a
model of the road. External models of this kind are often used in thinkinJ
about complex [environments) . Images used in covert thinking depend
32 G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York, 1949).
33 E. Galanter and M . Gerstenhaber, "On Thought: The Extrinsic Theory,"
Psycho/. Rev. 63 ( 1956):2 18-227.
Ideology As a Cultural System 2 1 5
upon the availability of the physico-chemical events of the organism which
must be used to form models.34
This view does not, of course, deny consciousness: it defines it. Every
conscious perception is, as Percy has argued, an act of recognition, a
pairing in which an object (or an event, an act, an emotion) is identified
by placing it against the background of an appropriate symbol:
It is not enough to say that one is conscious of something; one is also conscious
of something being something. There is a difference between the apprehension
of a gestalt (a chicken perceived the Jastrow effect as well as a
human) and the grasping of it under its symbolic vehicle. As I gaze about
the room, I am aware of a series of almost effortless acts of matching:
seeing an object and knowing what it is. If my eye falls upon an unfamiliar
something, I am immediately aware that one term of the match is missing, I
ask what [the object] is-an exceedingly mysterious question.35
What is missing and what is being asked for are an applicable symbolic
model under which to subsume the "unfamiliar something" and so
render it familiar:
If I see an object at some distance and do not quite recognize it, I may see
it, actually see it, as a succession of different things, each rejected by the
criterion of fit as I come closer, until one is positively certified. A patch of
sunlight in a field I may actually see as a rabbit-a seeing which goes
much further than the guess that it may be a rabbit; no, the perceptual gestalt
is so construed, actually stamped by the essence of rabbitness: I could
have sworn it was a rabbit. On coming closer, the sunlight pattern changes
enough so that the rabbit-cast is disallowed. The rabbit vanishes and I make
another cast: it is a paper bag. and so on. But most significant of all, even
the last, the "correct" recognition is quite as mediate an apprehension as the
incorrect ones; it is also a cast, a pairing, an approximation. And let us note
in passing that even though it is correct, even though it is borne out by all
indices, it may operate quite as effectively to conceal as to discover. When I
recognize a strange bird as a sparrow, I tend to dispose of the bird under its
appropriate formulation: it is only a sparrow.3&
Despite the somewhat intellectualist tone of these various examples, the
extrinsic theory of thought is extendable to the affective side of human
34 Ibid. I have quoted this incisive passage above (pp. 77-78), in attempting to
set the extrinsic theory of thought in the context of recent evolutionary, neurological,
and cultural anthropological findings.
3� W. Percy, "Symbol, Consciousness and lntersubjectivity," Journal of Philosophy
5 5 ( 1 958): 63 1-64 1 . Italics in original. Quoted by permission.
36 Ibid. Quoted by permission.
�.u6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTUREs:�
·.;
mentality as well. 37 As a road map transforms mere physical locations \
into "places," connected by numbered routes and separated by mea.
sured distances, and so enables us to find our way from where we are to
where we want to go, so a poem like, for example, Hopkins's "Felix
Randal" provides, through the evocative power of its charged language,
a symbolic model of the emotional impact of premature death, which, if ·.
we are as impressed with its penetration as with the road map's, transforms
physical sensations into sentiments and attitudes and enables u8
to react to such a tragedy not "blindly" but "intelligently." The centra L
rituals of religion-a mass, a pilgrimage, a corroboree-are symboli� :
models (here more in the form of activities than of words) of a particu� ·
lar sense of the divine, a certain sort of devotional mood, which their
continual re-enactment tends to produce in their participants. Of course, ·
as most acts of what is usually called "cognition" are more on the level
of identifying a rabbit than operating a wind tunnel, so most of what is:
usually called "expression" (the dichotomy is often overdrawn and a}. ,.
most universally misconstrued) is mediated more by models drawn from. ,
popular culture than from high art and formal religious ritual. But the ':
point is that the development, maintenance, and dissolution of "moods,'� ;
"attitudes," "sentiments," and so forth are no more "a ghostly process,<
occurring in streams of consciousness we are debarred from visiting'
;
.
than is the discrimination of objects, events, structures, processes, and
so forth in our environment. Here, too, "we are describing the ways in
which . . . people conduct parts of their predominantly public
behavior." 38
Whatever their other differences, both so-called cognitive and so-:·
called expressive symbols or symbol-systems have, then, at least one .
thing in common: they are extrinsic sources of information in terms of :
which human life can be patterned-extrapersonal mechanisms for the ·:
perception, understanding, judgment, and manipulation of the world. :
Culture patterns-religious, philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, ideo- !
logical-are "programs" ; they provide a template or blueprint for: ·
the organization of social and psychological processes, much as genetic,
systems provide such a template for the organization of organic pro-
;
cesses:
i
These considerations define the terms in which we approach the problem ofj
"reductionism"' in psychology and social science. The levels we have tent�i;,
37 S. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1 953).
38 The quotations are from Ryle, Concept of Mind, p. S 1 . :
Ideology As a Cultural System
tively discriminated [organism, personality, social system, culture] . are
. . . levels of organization and control. The lower levels "condition," and
thUS in a sense "determine" the structures into which they enter, in the same
sense that the stability of a building depends on the properties of the materials
out of which it is constructed. But the physical properties of the materials
do not determine the plan of the building; this is a factor of another
order, one of organization. And the organization controls the relations of
the materials to each other, the ways in which they are utilized in the building
by virtue of which it constitutes an ordered system of a particular type
-looking "downward" in the series, we can always investigate and discover
sets of "conditions" in which the function of a higher order of organization
is dependent. There is, thus, an immensely complicated set of physiological
conditions on which psychological functioning is dependent, etc. Properly
understood and evaluated, these conditions are always authentic determinants
of process in the organized systems at the next higher levels. We may,
however, also look "upward" in the series. In this direction we see "structures,"
organization patterns, patterns of meaning, "programs," etc., which
are the focus of the organization of the system at the level on which we
have concentrated our attention.a9
The reason such symbolic templates are necessary is that, as has been
often remarked, human behavior is inherently extremely plastic. Not
strictly but only very broadly controlled by genetic programs or models
-intrinsic sources of information-such behavior must, if it is to have
any effective form at all, be controlled to a significant extent by extrinsic
ones. Birds learn how to fly without wind tunnels, and whatever reactions
lower animals have to death are in great part innate, physiologicaJiy
preformed.•o The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability
39 T. Parsons, "An Approach to Psychological Theory in Terms of the Theory
of Action," in Psychology: A Study of a Science, ed. S. Koch (New York, 1 959),
vol. 3. Italics in original. Compare: "In order to account for this selectivity, it is
necessary to assume that the structure of the enzyme is related in some way to
the structure of the gene. By a logical extension of this idea we arrive at the concept
that the gene is a representation-blueprint so to speak-of the enzyme
molecule, and that the function of the gene is to serve as a source of information
regarding the structure of the enzyme. It seems evident that the synthesis of an
enzyme-a giant protein molecule consisting of hundreds of amino acid units arranged
end-to-end in a specific and unique order-requires a model or set of instructions
of some kind. These instructions must be characteristic of the species;
they must be automatically transmitted from generation to generation, and they
must be constant yet capable of evolutionary change. The only known entity that
could perform such a function is the gene. There are many reasons for believing
that it transmits information, by acting as a model or template." N. H. Horowitz,
"The Gene," Scientific American, February 1956, p. 85.
40 This point is perhaps somewhat too baldly put in light of recent analyses of
animal learning; but the essential thesis-that there is a general trend toward a
more diffuse, less determinate control of behavior by intrinsic (innate) parameters
2 18 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
of man's innate response capacities mean that the particular pattern his
behavior takes is guided predominantly by cultural rather than genetic
templates, the latter setting the overall psychophysical context within
which precise activity sequences are organized by the former. The toolmaking,
laughing, or lying animal, man, is also the incomplete-or,
more accurately, self-completing-animal. The agent of his own realization,
he creates out of his general capacity for the construction of
symbolic models the specific capabilities that define him. Or-to return
at last to our subject-it is through the construction of ideologies, schematic
images of social order, that man makes himself for better or
worse a political animal.
Further, as the various sorts of cultural symbol-systems are extrinsic
sources of information, templates for the organization of social and psychological
processes, they come most crucially into play in situations
where the particular kind of information they contain is lacking, where
institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent.
It is in country unfamiliar emotionally or topographically that one
needs poems and road maps.
So too with ideology. In polities firmly embedded in Edmund Burke's
golden assemblage of "ancient opinions and rules of life," the role of
ideology, in any explicit sense, is marginal. In such truly traditional political
systems the participants act as (to use another Burkean phrase)
men of untaught feelings; they are guided both emotionally and intellectually
in their judgments and activities by unexamined prejudices, which
do not leave them "hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled
and unresolved." But when, as in the revolutionary France Burke
was indicting and in fact in the shaken England from which, as perhaps
his nation's greatest ideologue, he was indicting it, those hallowed opinions
and rules of life come into question, the search for systematic ideological
formulations, either to reinforce them or to replace them, flourishes.
The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics
possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful,
the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped.41
as one moves from lower to higher animals-seems well established. See above,
Chapter 3, pp. 70-76.
41 Of course, there are moral, economic, and even aesthetic ideologies, as well
as specifically political ones, but as very few ideologies of any social prominence
lack political impl ications, it is perhaps permissible to view the problem here in
this somewhat narrowed focus. In any case, the arguments developed for pol itical
ideologies apply with equal force to nonpolitical ones. For an analysis of a moral
Ideology As a Cultural System 2 19
It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to
free itself from the immediate governance of received tradition, from
the direct and detailed guidance of religious or philosophical canons on
the one hand and from the unreflective precepts of conventional moralism
on the other, that formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take
hold.42 The differentiation of an autonomous polity implies the differentiation,
too, of a separate and distinct cultural model of political action,
for the older, unspecialized models are either too comprehensive or too
concrete to provide the sort of guidance such a political system demands.
Either they trammel political behavior by encumbering it with
transcendental significance, or they stifle political imagination by binding
it to the blank realism of habitual judgment. It is when neither a society's
most general cultural orientations nor its most down-to-earth,
"pragmatic" ones suffice any longer to provide an adequate image of
political process that ideologies begin to become crucial as sources of
sociopolitical meanings and attitudes.
In one sense, this statement is but another way of saying that ideology
is a response to strain. But now we are including cultural as well as
social and psychological strain. It is a loss of orientation that most directly
gives rise to ideological activity, an inability, for lack of usable
models, to comprehend the universe of civic rights and responsibilities
in which one finds oneself located. The development of a differentiated
polity (or of greater internal differentiation within such a polity) may
and commonly does bring with it severe social dislocation and psychological
tension. But it also brings with it conceptual confusion, as the
established images of political order fade into irrelevance or are driven
into disrepute. The reason why the French Revolution was, at least up
to its time, the greatest incubator of extremist ideologies, "progressive"
and "reactionary" alike, in human history was not that either personal
insecurity or social disequilibrium were deeper and more pervasive than
at many earlier periods-though they were deep and pervasive enough
ideology cast in terms very similar to those developed in this paper, see A. L.
Green, "The Ideology of Anti-Fluoridation Leaders," The Journal of Social Issues
1 7 ( 1 96 1 ) : 1 3 -25.
42 That such ideologies may call, as did Burke's or De Maistre's, for the reinvigoration
of custom or the reimposition of rel igious hegemony is, of course, no
contradiction. One constructs arguments for tradition only when its credentials
have been questioned. To the degree that such appeals are successful they bring,
not a return to naive traditionalism, but ideological retraditionalization-an altogether
different matter. See Mannheim, "Conservative Thought," in his Essays on
Sociology and Social Psychology (New York, 1953), especially pp. 94-98.
220 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
-but because the central organizing principle of political life, the divine
right of kings, was destroyed.43 It is a confluence of sociopsychological
strain and an absence of cultural resources by means of which to
make sense of the strain, each exacerbating the other, that sets the stage
for the rise of systematic (political, moral, or economic) ideologies.
And it is, in turn, the attempt of ideologies to render otherwise incomprehensible
social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to
make it possible to act purposefully within them, that accounts both for
the ideologies' highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which,
once accepted, they are held. As metaphor extends language by broadening
its semantic range, enabling it to express meanings it cannot or at
least cannot yet express literally, so the head-on clash of literal meanings
in ideology-the irony, the hyperbole, the overdrawn antithesisprovides
novel symbolic frames against which to match the myriad "unfamiliar
somethings" that, like a journey to a strange country, are
produced by a transformation in political life. Whatever else ideologies
may be-projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior
motives, phatic expressions of group solidarity-they are, most distinctively,
maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation
of collective conscience. Whether, in any particular case, the map is
accurate or the conscience creditable is a separate question to which
one can hardly give the same answer for Nazism and Zionism, for the
nationalisms of McCarthy and of Churchill, for the defenders of segregation
and its opponents.
VI
Though ideological ferment is, of course, widespread in modern society,
perhaps its most prominent locus at the moment lies in the new (or renewed)
states of Asia, Africa, and some parts of Latin America; for it
is in these states, Communist or not, that the initial steps away from a
43 It is important to remember, too, that the principle was destroyed long before
the king; it was to the successor principle that he was, in fact, a ritual sacrifice:
"When [Saint-Just] exclaims: 'To determine the principle in virtue of whicb
the accused [Louis XVI] is perhaps to die, is to determine the principle by
which the society that judges him lives,' he demonstrates that it is the philosophers
who are going to kill the King: the King must die in the name of the social
contract." A. Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1958), p. 1 1 4.
Ideology As a Cultural System 221
traditional politics of piety and proverb are just now being taken. The
attainment of independence, the overthrow of established ruling classes,
the popularization of legitimacy, the rationalization of public administration,
the rise of modern elites, the spread of literacy and mass communications,
and the propulsion willy-nilly of inexperienced governments
into the midst of a precarious international order that even its
older participants do not very well understand all make for a pervasive
sense of disorientation, a disorientation in whose face received images
of authority, responsibility, and civic purpose seem radically inadequate.
The search for a new symbolic framework in terms of which to
formulate, think about, and react to political problems, whether in the
form of nationalism, Marxism, liberalism, populism, racism, Caesarism,
ecclesiasticism, or some variety of reconstructed traditionalism (or,
most commonly, a confused melange of several of these) is therefore
tremendously intense.
Intense-but indeterminate. For the most part, the new states are
still groping for usable political concepts, not yet grasping them; and
the outcome in almost every case, at least in every non-Communist case,
is uncertain not merely in the sense that the outcome of any historical
process is uncertain but in the sense that even a broad and general assessment
of overall direction is extremely difficult to make. Intellectually,
everything is in motion, and the words of that extravagant poet
in politics, Lamartine, written of nineteenth century France, apply to
the new states with perhaps even greater appropriateness than they did
to the dying July Monarchy:
These times are times of chaos; opinions are a scramble; parties are a jumble;
the language of new ideas has not been created; nothing is more difficult
than to give a good definition of oneself in religion, in philosophy, in
politics. One feels, one knows, one lives, and at need, one dies for one's
cause, but one cannot name it. It is the problem of this time to classify
things and men. . . . The world has jumbled its catalog.44
This observation is no truer anywhere in the world right now [ 1 964 1
than it is in Indonesia, where the whole political process is mired in a
slough of ideological symbols, each attempting and so far each failing to
unjumble the Republic's catalogue, to name its cause, and to give point
and purpose to its polity. It is a country of false starts and frantic revi-
44 Alphonse de Lamartine, "Declaration of Principles," in Introduction to Contemporary
Civilization in the West, A Source Book (New York, 1946), 2:
328-333.
222 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
sions, of a desperate search for a political order whose image, like a mirage,
recedes more rapidly the more eagerly it is approached. The salving
slogan amid all this frustration is, "The Revolution Is Unfinished!"
And so, indeed, it is. But only because no one knows, not even those
who cry most loudly that they do, precisely how to go about the job of
finishing it.45
The most highly developed concepts of government in traditional Indonesia
were those upon which the classic Hinduized states of the
fourth to fifteenth centuries were built, concepts that persisted in somewhat
revised and weakened form even after these states were first Islamicized
and then largely replaced or overlaid by the Dutch colonial regime.
And of these concepts the most important was what might be
called the theory of the exemplary center, the notion that the capital
city (or more accurately the king's palace) was at once a microcosm of
the supernatural order-"an image of . . . the universe on a smaller
scale"-and the material embodiment of political order.46 The capital
was not merely the nucleus, the engine, or the pivot of the state; it was
the state.
In the Hindu period, the king's castle comprehended virtually the entire
town. A squared-off "heavenly city" constructed according to the
ideas of Indic metaphysics, it was more than a locus of power; it was a
synoptic paradigm of the ontological shape of existence. At its center
was the divine king (an incarnation of an Indian deity), his throne symbolizing
Mount Meru, seat of the gods; the buildings, roads, city walls,
and even, ceremonially, his wives and personal staff were deployed
quadrangularly around him according to the directions of the four sacred
winds. Not only the king himself but his ritual, his regalia, his
court, and his castle were shot through with charismatic significance.
The castle and the life of the castle were the quiddity of the kingdom,
and he who (often after meditating in the wilderness to attain the appropriate
spiritual status) captured the castle captured the whole empire,
45 The following very schematic and necessarily ex cathedra discussion is
based mainly on my own research and represents only my own views, but I have
also drawn heavily on the work of Herbert Feith for factual material. See especially,
The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (New York, 1962)
and "Dynamics of Guided Democracy," in Indonesia, ed. R. McVey (New
Haven, 1963), pp. 309-409. For the general cultural analysis within which my interpretations
are set, see C. Geertz, The Religion ofJava (New York, 1960).
46 R. Heine-Geldern, "Conceptions of State and Kinship in Southeast Asia."
Far Eastern Quarterly 2 ( 1 942): 1 5-30.
Ideology As a Cultural System
grasped the charisma of office, and displaced the no-longer-sacred
king.47
The early polities were thus not so much solidary territorial units as
loose congeries of villages oriented toward a common urban center,
each such center competing with others for ascendency. Whatever degree
of regional or, at moments, interregional hegemony prevailed depended,
not on the systematic administrative organization of extensive
territory under a single king, but on the varying abilities of kings to mobilize
and apply effective striking forces with which to sack rival capitals,
abilities that were believed to rest on essentially religious-that is,
mystical-grounds. So far as the pattern was territorial at all, it consisted
of a series of concentric circles of religio-military power spreading
out around the various city-state capitals, as radio waves spread
from a transmitter. The closer a village to a town, the greater the impact,
economically and culturally, of the court on that village. And,
conversely, the greater the development of the court-priests, artisans,
nobles, and king-the greater its authenticity as an epitome of cosmic
order, its military strength, and the effective range of its circles of outward-spreading
power. Spiritual excellence and political eminence were
fused. Magical power and executive influence flowed in a single stream
outward and downward from the king through the descending ranks of
his staff and whatever lesser courts were subordinate to him, draining
out finally into the spiritually and politically residual peasant mass.
Theirs was a facsimile concept of political organization, one in which
the reflection of the supernatural order microscopically mirrored in the
life of the capital was in turn further and more faintly reflected in the
countryside as a whole, producing a hierarchy of less and less faithful
copies of an eternal, transcendent realm. In such a system, the administrative,
military, and ceremonial organization of the court orders the
world around it iconically by providing it with a tangible paragon.48
47 Ibid.
48 The whole expanse of Yawa-land [Java] is to be compared with one town
in the Prince's reign.
By thousands are [counted] the people's dwelling places, to be compared
with the manors of Royal servants, surround ing the body of the Royal
compound.
All kinds of foreign islands; to be compared with them are the cultivated
land's areas, made happy and quiet.
Of the aspect of parks. then, are the forests and mountains. all of them set
foot on by Him, without feel ing anxiety.
Canto 17, stanza 3 of the "Nagara-Kertagama," a fourteenth century royal
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
When Islam came, the Hindu political tradition was to some extent
weakened, especially in the coastal trade kingdoms surrounding the
Java Sea. The court culture nevertheless persisted, although it was overlaid
and interfused with Islamic symbols and ideas and set among an
ethnically more differentiated urban mass, which looked with less awe
on the classical order. The steady growth-especially on Java-of
Dutch administrative control in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries constricted the tradition still further. But, since the lower levels
of the bureaucracy continued to be manned almost entirely by Indonesians
of the old upper classes, the tradition remained, even then, the
matrix of supravillage political order. The Regency or the District Office
remained not merely the axis of the polity but the embodiment of it,
a polity with respect to which most villagers were not so much actors as
audience.
It was this tradition with which the new elite of republican Indonesia
was left after the revolution. That is not to say that the theory of the exemplary
center persisted unchanged, drifting like some Platonic archetype
through the eternity of Indonesian history, for (like the society as a
whole) it evolved and developed, becoming ultimately perhaps more
conventional and less religious in general temper. Nor does it mean that
foreign ideas, from European parliamentarianism, from Marxism, from
Islamic moralism, and so forth did not come to play an essential role in
Indonesian political thought, for modern Indonesian nationalism is very
far from being merely old wine in a new bottle. It is simply that, as yet,
the conceptual transition from the classic image of a polity as a concentrated
center of pomp and power, alternately providing a cynosure for
popular awe and lashing out militarily at competing centers, to one of a
polity as a systematically organized national community has, for all
these changes and influences, still not been completed. Indeed, it has
been arrested and to some extent reversed.
This cultural failure is apparent from the growing, seemingly unquenchable
ideological din that has engulfed Indonesian politics since
the revolution. The most prominent attempt to construct, by means of a
figurative extension of the classic tradition, an essentially metaphoric reworking
of it, a new symbolic framework within which to give form and
meaning to the emerging republican polity, was President Sukarno's faepic.
Translated in Th. Piegeaud, Java in the 14th Century (The Hague, 1960),
3 :21 . The term nagara still means, indifferently, "palace," "capital city," "state,"
"country," or "government"-sometimes even "civilization"-in Java.
Ideology As a Cultural System 225
mous Pantjasila concept, first set forth in a public speech toward the
end of the Japanese occupation.49 Drawing on the lndic tradition of
fixed sets of numbered precepts-the three jewels, the four sublime
moods, the eightfold path, the twenty conditions of successful rule, and
so forth-it consisted of five (pantja) principles (sila) that were intended
to form the "sacred" ideological foundations of an independent
Indonesia. Like all good constitutions, the Pantjasila was short, ambiguous,
and impeccably high-minded, the five points being "nationalism,"
"humanitarianism," "democracy," "social welfare," and (pluralistic)
"monotheism." Finally, these modern concepts, set so nonchalantly in a
medieval frame, were explicitly identified with an indigenous peasant
concept, gotong rojong (literally, "the collective bearing of burdens"; figuratively,
"the piety of all for the interests of all"), thus drawing together
the "great tradition" of the exemplary state, the doctrines of contemporary
nationalism, and the "little traditions" of the villages into
one luminous image.so
The reasons why this ingenious device failed are many and complex,
and only a few of them-like the strength in certain sectors of the population
of Islamic concepts of political order, which are difficult to reconcile
with Sukarno's secularism-are themselves cultural. The Pantjasila,
playing upon the microcosm-macrocosm conceit and upon the
traditional syncretism of Indonesian thought, was intended to contain
within it the political interests of the Islamic and Christian, gentry and
peasantry, nationalist and communist, commercial and agrarian, Javanese
and "Outer Island" groups in Indonesia-to rework the old facsimile
pattern into a modern constitutional structure in which these various
tendencies would, each emphasizing one or another aspect of the
doctrine, find a modus vivendi at each level of administration and party
struggle. The attempt was not so totally ineffective or so intellectually
fatuous as it has sometimes been painted. The cult of the Pantjasila (for
that is what it literally became, complete with rites and commentaries)
did provide for a while a flexible ideological context within which parliamentary
institutions and democratic sentiments were being soundly, if
gradually, forged at both local and national levels. But the combination
of a deteriorating economic situation, a hopelessly pathological relationship
with the former metropole, the rapid growth of a subversive (in
49 For a description of the Pantjasila speech, see G. Kahin, Nationalism and
Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca, 1952), pp. 1 22- 127.
50 The quotations are from the Pantjasila speech, as quoted in ibid., p. 1 26.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
principle) totalitarian party, a renascence of Islamic fundamentalism,
the inability (or unwillingness) of leaders with developed intellectual
and technical skills to court mass support, and the economic illiteracy,
administrative incapacity, and personal failings of those who were able
(and only too willing) to court such support soon brought the clash of
factions to such a pitch that the whole pattern dissolved. By the time of
the Constitutional Convention of 1 957, the Pantjasila had changed from
a language of consensus to a vocabulary of abuse, as each faction used
it more to express its irreconcilable opposition to other factions than its
underlying rules-of-the-game agreement with them, and the Convention,
ideological pluralism, and constitutional democracy collapsed in a single
heap.51
What has replaced them is something very much like the old exemplary
center pattern, only now on a self-consciously doctrinaire rather
than an instinctive religion-and-convention basis and cast more in the
idiom of egalitarianism and social progress than in that of hierarchy and
patrician grandeur. On the one hand, there has been, under President
Sukarno's famous theory of "guided democracy" and his call for the
reintroduction of the revolutionary (that is, authoritarian) constitution
of 1 945, both an ideological homogenization (in which discordant
streams of thought-notably those of Moslem modernism and democratic
socialism-have simply been suppressed as illegitimate) and an
accelerated pace of flamboyant symbol-mongering, as though, the effort
to make an unfamiliar form of government work having misfired, a desperate
attempt to breathe new life into a familiar one was being
launched. On the other hand, the growth of the political role of the
army, not so much as an executive or administrative body as a backstop
enforcement agency with veto power over the whole range of politically
relevant institutions, from the presidency and the civil service to the
parties and the press, has provided the other-the minatory-half of
the traditional picture.
Like the Pantjasila before it, the revised (or revivified) approach was
introduced by Sukarno in a major speech-"The Rediscovery of Our
Revolution"-given on Independence Day (August 1 7) in 1 959, a
speech that he later decreed, along with the expository notes on it pre-
51 The proceedings of the Convention, unfortunately still untranslated, form
one of the fullest and most instructive records of ideological combat in the new
states available. See Tentang Negara Republik Indonesia Dalam Konstituante, 3
vols. (n.p. [ Djakarta?] , n.d. [ 1958?] ).
Ideology As a Cultural System
pared by a body of personal attendants known as The Supreme Advisory
Council, to be the "Political Manifesto of the Republic":
There thus came into existence a catechism on the basis, aims and duties of
the Indonesian revolution ; the social forces of the Indonesian revolution. its
nature, future and enemies; and its general program. covering the political,
economic, social. mental. cultural. and security fields. Early in 1 960 the central
message of the celebrated speech was stated as consisting of five ideas
-the 1 945 constitution, Socialism a Ia Indonesia, Guided Democracy,
Guided Economy. and Indonesian Personality-and the first letters of these
five phrases were put together to make the acronym USDEK. With "Political
Manifesto" becoming "Manipol," the new creed became known as
"Manipol-USDEK." s2
And, as the Pantjasila before it, the Manipol-USDEK image of political
order found a ready response in a population for whom opinions
have indeed become a scramble, parties a jumble, the times a chaos:
Many were attracted by the idea that what Indonesia needed above all was
men with the right state of mind, the right spirit, the true patriotic dedication.
"Returning to our own national personality" was attractive to many
who wanted to withdraw from the challenges of modernity, and also to
those who wanted to believe in the current political leadership but were
aware of its failures to modernize as fast as such countries as India and Malaya.
And for members of some Indonesian communities, notably for many
[lndic-minded] Javanese, there was real meaning in the various complex
schemes which the President presented in elaboration of Manipoi-USDEK,
explaining the peculiar significance and tasks of the current stage of history.
[But] perhaps the most important appeal of Manipol-USDEK, however, lay
in the simple fact that it promised to give men a pegangan-something to
which to hold fast. They were attracted not so much by the content of this
pegangan as by the fact that the President had offered one at a time when
the lack of a sense of purpose was sorely felt. Values and cognitive patterns
being in flux and in conflict, men looked eagerly for dogmatic and schematic
formulations of the political good.53
While the President and his entourage concern themselves almost entirely
with the "creation and recreation of mystique," the army concerns
itself mainly with combating the numerous protests, plots, mutinies, and
rebellions that occur when that mystique fails to achieve its hoped-for
52 Feith, "Dynamics of Guided Democracy," p. 367. A vivid, if somewhat
shrill, description of "Manipoi-USDEKism" in action can be found in W. Hanna,
Bung Karno's Indonesia (New York, 1 961).
53 Feith, "Dynamics of Guided Democracy," 367-368. Pegang literally means
"to grasp"; thus pegangan, "something graspable."
228 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
effect and when rival claims to leadership arise.54 Although involved in
some aspects of the civil service, in the managing of the confiscated
Dutch enterprises, and even in the (nonparliamentary) cabinet, the army
has not been able to take up, for lack of training, internal unity, or
sense of direction, the administrative, planning, and organizational tasks
of the government in any detail or with any effectiveness. The result is
that these tasks are either not performed or very inadequately performed,
and the supralocal polity, the national state, shrinks more and
more to the limits of its traditional domain, the capital city-Djakarta
-plus a number of semi-independent tributary cities and towns held to
a minimal loyalty by the threat of centrally applied force.
That this attempt to revive the politics of the exemplary court will
long survive is rather doubtful. It is already being severely strained by
its incapacity to cope with the technical and administrative problems involved
in the government of a modern state. Far from arresting Indonesia's
decline into what Sukarno has called "the abyss of annihilation,"
the retreat from the hesitant, admittedly hectic and awkwardly functioning
parliamentarianism of the Pantjasila period to the Manipol-USDEK
alliance between a charismatic president and a watchdog army has
probably accelerated it. But what will succeed this ideological framework
when, as seems certain, it too dissolves, or from where a conception
of political order more adequate to Indonesia's contemporary needs
and ambitions will come, if it does come, is impossible to say.
Not that Indonesia's problems are purely or even primarily ideological
and that they will-as all too many Indonesians already
think-melt away before a political change of heart. The disorder is
more general, and the failure to create a conceptual framework in terms
of which to shape a modern polity is in great part itself a reflection of
the tremendous social and psychological strains that the country and its
population are undergoing. Things do not merely seem jumbled-they
are jumbled, and it will take more than theory to unjumble them. It will
take administrative skill, technical knowledge, personal courage and resolution,
endless patience and tolerance, enormous self-sacrifice, a virtually
incorruptible public conscience, and a very great deal of sheer
(and unlikely) good luck in the most material sense of the word. Ideological
formulation, no matter how elegant, can substitute for none of
these elements; and, in fact, in their absence, it degenerates, as it has in
Indonesia, into a smokescreen for failure, a diversion to stave off deM
Ibid.
Ideology As a Cultural System 229
spair, a mask to conceal reality rather than a portrait to reveal it. With
a tremendous population problem; extraordinary ethnic, geographical,
and regionai diversity; a moribund economy; a severe lack of trained
personnel ; popular poverty of the bitterest sort; and pervasive, implacable
social discontent, Indonesia's social problems seem virtually insoluble
even without the ideological pandemonium. The abyss into which Ir.
Sukarno claims to have looked is a real one.
Yet, at the same time, that Indonesia (or, I should imagine, any new
nation) can find her way through this forest of problems without any
ideological guidance at all seems impossible.5s The motivation to seek
(and, even more important, to use) technical skill and knowledge, the
emotional resilience to support the necessary patience and resolution,
and the moral strength to sustain self-sacrifice and incorruptibility must
come from somewhere, from some vision of public purpose anchored in
a compelling image of social reality. That all these qualities may not be
present; that the present drift to revivalistic irrationalism and unbridled
fantasy may continue; that the next ideological phase may be even further
from the ideals for which the revolution was ostensibly fought than
is the present one; that Indonesia may continue to be, as Bagehot called
France, the scene of political experiments from which others profit
much but she herself very little; or that the ultimate outcome may be viciously
totalitarian and wildly zealotic is all very. true. But whichever
way events move, the determining forces will not be wholly sociological
or psychological but partly cultural-that is, conceptual. To forge a
theoretical framework adequate to the analysis of such three-dimensional
processes is the task of the scientific study of ideology-a task
but barely begun.
ss For an analysis of the role of ideology in an emerging African nation, conducted
along lines similar to our own, see L. A. Fallers, "Ideology and Culture in
Uganda Nationalism," American Anthropologist 63 (1961): 677-686. For a superb
case study of an "adolescent" nation in which the process of thorough-going ideological
reconstruction seems to have been conducted with reasonable success, see B.
Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 196 1), especially Chap. 10.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
VII
Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions
posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not
merely answers. they are strategic answers, stylized answers.
For there is a difference in style or strategy, if
one says "yes" in tonalities that imply "thank God!" or
in tonalities that imply "alas!" So I should propose an
initial working distinction between "strategies" and "situations"
whereby we think of . . . any work of critical
or imaginative cast . . . as the adopting of various strategies
for the encompassing of situations. These strategies
size up the situations, name their structure and outstanding
ingredients, and name them in a way that contains
an attitude toward them.
This point of view does not, by any means, vow us
to personal or historical subjectivism. The situations are
real; the strategies for handling them have public content;
in so far as situations overlap from individual to individual,
or from one historical period to another, the
strategies possess universal relevance.
KENNETH BURKE, The Philosophy of Uterary Form
As both science and ideology are critical and imaginative "works" (that
is symbolic structures), an objective formulation both of the marked differences
between them and of the nature of their relationship to one another
seems more likely to be achieved by proceeding from such a concept
of stylistic strategies than from a nervous concern with
comparative epistemological or axiological status of the two forms of
thought. No more than scientific studies of religion ought to begin with
unnecessary questions about the legitimacy of the substantive claims of
their subject .matter ought scientific studies of ideology to begin with
such questions. The best way to deal with Mannheim's, as with any true
•
paradox, is to circumvent it by reformulating one's theoretical approach
so as to avoid setting off yet once more down the well-worn path of argument
that led to it in the first place.
The differentiae of science and ideology as cultural systems are to be
sought in the sorts of symbolic strategy for encompassing situations that
they respectively represent. Science names the structure of situations in
Ideology As a Cultural System
such a way that the attitude contained toward them is one of disinterestedness.
Its style is restrained, spare, resolutely analytic: by shunning
the semantic devices that most effectively formulate moral sentiment, it
seeks to maximize intellectual clarity. But ideology names the structure
of situations in such a way that the attitude contained toward them is
one of commitment. Its style is ornate, vivid, deliberately suggestive: by
objectifying moral sentiment through the same devices that science
shuns, it seeks to motivate action. Both are concerned with the definition
of a problematic situation and are responses to a felt lack of
needed information. But the information needed is quite different, even
in cases where the situation is the same. An ideologist is no more a
poor social scientist than a social scientist is a poor ideologist. The two
are-or at least they ought to be-in quite different lines of work, lines
so different that little is gained and much obscured by measuring the activities
of the one against the aims of the other.:;6
Where science is the diagnostic, the critical, dimension of culture,
ideology is the justificatory, the apologetic one-it refers "to that part
of culture which is actively concerned with the establishment and defense
of patterns of belief and value." :;r That there is natural tendency
for the two to clash, particularly when they are directed to the interpretation
of the same range of situations, is thus clear; but that the clash is
inevitable and that the findings of (social) science necessarily will undermine
the validity of the beliefs and values that. ideology has chosen
to defend and propagate seem most dubious assumptions. An attitude at
once critical and apologetic toward the same situation is no intrinsic
contradiction in terms (however often it may in fact turn out to be an
empirical one) but a sign of a certain level of intellectual sophistication.
One remembers the story, probably ben trovato, to the effect that when
Churchill had finished his famous rally of isolated England, "We shall
fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight
in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills . . . ," he
56 This point is, however, not quite the same as saying that the two sorts of
activity may not in practice be carried on together, any more than a man cannot,
for example, paint a portrait of a bird that is both ornithologically accurate and
aesthetically effective. Marx is, of course, the outstanding case, but for a more recent
successful synchronization of scientific analysis and ideological argument, see
E. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (New York, 1956). Most such attempts to mix
genres are, however, distinctly less happy.
57 Fallers, "Ideology and Culture." The patterns of belief and value defended
may be, of course, those of a socially subordinate group, as well as those of a socially
dominant one, and the "apology'' therefore for reform or revolution.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
turned to an aide and whispered, "and we shall hit them over the head
with soda-water bottles, because we haven't any guns."
The quality of social rhetoric in ideology is thus not proof that the
vision of sociopsychological reality upon which it is based is false and
that it draws its persuasive power from any discrepancy between what is
believed and what can, now or someday, be established as scientifically
correct. That it may indeed lose touch with reality in an orgy of autistic
fantasy-even that, in situations where it is left uncriticized by either a
free science or competing ideologies well-rooted in the general social
structure, it has a very strong tendency to do so-is all too apparent.
But however interesting pathologies are for clarifying normal function.:
ing (and however common they may be empirically), they are misleading
as prototypes of it. Although fortunately it never had to be tested,
it seems most likely that the British would have indeed fought on the
beaches, landing grounds, streets, and hills-with soda-water bottles
too, if it came to that-for Churchill formulated accurately the mood
of his countrymen and, formulating it, mobilized it by making it a
public possession, a social fact, rather than a set of disconnected, unrealized
private emotions. Even morally loathsome ideological expressions
may still catch most acutely the mood of a people or a group. Hitler
was not distorting the German conscience when he rendered his
countrymen's demonic self-hatred in the tropological figure of the magically
corrupting Jew; he was merely objectifying it-transforming a
prevalent personal neurosis into a powerful social force.
But though science and ideology are different enterprises, they are
not unrelated ones. Ideologies do make empirical claims about the condition
and direction of society, which it is the business of science (and,
where scientific knowledge is lacking, common sense) to assess. The social
function of science vis-1\-vis ideologies is first to understand them
-what they are, how they work, what gives rise to them-and second
to criticize them, to force them to come to terms with (but not necessarily
to surrender to) reality. The existence of a vital tradition of scientific
analysis of social issues is one of the most effective guarantees
against ideological extremism, for it provides an incomparably reliable
source of positive knowledge for the political imagination to work with
and to honor. It is not the only such check. The existence, as mentioned,
of competing ideologies carried by other powerful groups in the
society is at least as important; as is a liberal political system in which
dreams of total power are obvious fantasies; as are stable social condi-
•
Ideology As a Cultural System 233
tions in which conventional expectations are not continually frustrated
and conventional ideas not radically incompetent. But, committed with
a quiet intransigence to a vision of its own, it is perhaps the most in­
domitable.
Chapter 9/
After the Revolution:
The Fate of Nationalism
in the New States
Between 1 945 and 1 968 sixty-six "countries"-the actualities demand
the quotation marks-attained political independence from colonial
rule. Unless one counts the American engagement in Vietnam, an ambiguous
case, the last great struggle for national liberation was that
which triumphed in Algeria in the summer of 1 962. Though a few
other collisions are apparently still to come-in the Portuguese territories
of Africa, for example-the great revolution against Western governance
of Third World peoples is essentially over. Politically, morally,
and sociologically, the results are mixed. But from the Congo to Guyana
the wards of imperialism are, formally anyway, free. •
Considering all that independence seemed to promise-popular rule,
1 The term "new states," indeterminate to begin with, becomes even more so
as time passes and the states age. Though my main referent is the countries that
have gained independence since World War II, I do not hesitate, where it suits
my purposes and seems realistic, to extend the term to cover states like those of
the M iddle East, whose formal independence came earlier, or even those, like
Ethiopia, Iran, or Thailand, which in the strict sense were never colonies at all.
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 2.35
rapid economic growth, social equality, cultural regeneration, national
greatness and, above all, an end to the ascendancy of the West-it is
not surprising that its actual advent has been anticlimactic. It is not that
nothing has happened, that a new era has not been entered. Rather, that
era having been entered, it is necessary now to live in it rather than
merely imagine it, and that is inevitably a deflating experience.
The signs of this darkened mood are everywhere: in nostalgia for the
emphatic personalities and well-made dramas of the revolutionary struggle;
in disenchantment with party politics, parliamentarianism, bureaucracy,
and the new class of soldiers, clerks, and local powers; in uncertainty
of direction, ideological weariness, and the steady spread of
random violence; and, not the least, in a dawning realization that things
are more complicated than they look, that social, economic, and political
problems, once thought to be mere reflexes of colonial rule, to di�appear
when it disappeared, have less superficial roots. Philosophically,
the lines between realism and cynicism, between prudence and apathy,
and between maturity and despair may be very broad; but sociologically,
they are always very narrow. And in most of the new states right
now they have thinned almost to the vanishing point.
Behind the mood, which is of course not unmixed, lie the realities of
postcolonial social life. The sacred leaders of the national struggle are
either gone (Gandhi, Nehru, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Muhammed V, U Nu,
Jinnah, Ben Bella, Keita, Azikiwe, Nasser, Bandaranaike), replaced by
less confident heirs or less theatrical generals, or have been diminished
to mere heads of state (Kenyatta, Nyerere, Bourguiba, Lee, Sekou
Toure, Castro). The near-millennial hopes of political deliverance once
invested in a handful of extraordinary men are not only now diffused
among a larger number of distinctly less extraordinary ones but are
themselves attenuated. The enormous concentration of social energies
that charismatic leadership can, whatever its other defects, clearly accomplish,
dissolves when such leadership disappears. The passing of the
generation of prophet-liberators in the last decade has been nearly as
momentous, if not quite as dramatic, an event in the history of the new
states as was their appearance in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Here
and there, new ones will doubtless from time to time emerge, and some
may make a considerable impact upon the world. But, unless a wave of
Communist uprisings, of which there is now little indication, sweeps
through the Third World throwing up a cloud of Che Guevaras, there
will not soon again be such a galaxy of successful revolutionary heroes
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
as there were in the Olympian days of the Bandung Conference. Most
new states are in for a period of commonplace rulers.
In addition to the reduction in the grandeur of leadership, there has
been a solidification of the white collar patriciate-what American sociologists
like to call "the new middle class" and the French, less euphemistic,
call Ia classe dirigeante-which surrounds and in many
places engulfs that leadership. Just as colonial rule tended almost everywhere
to transform those who happened to be socially ascendant (and
submissive to its demands) at the time of its advent into a privileged
corps of officials and overseers, so independence tended almost every�
where to create a similar, though larger, corps out of those who happened
to be ascendant (and responsive to its spirit) at its advent. In
some cases, the class continuity between the new elite and the old is
great, in some less great; determining its composition has been the
major internal political struggle of the revolutionary and immediate
postrevolutionary periods. But accommodative, parvenu, or something
in between, it is now rather definitely in place, and the avenues of mobility
that for a moment seemed so wide open seem now, to most people,
distinctly less so. As political leadership has slipped back toward
the "normal," or anyway appearing such, so too has the stratification
system.
So too, indeed, has society as a whole. The consciousness of massive,
univocal, irresistible movement, the stirring to action of an entire people,
that the attack upon colonialism almost everywhere induced has not
wholly disappeared, but it has powerfully lessened. There is much less
talk, both inside the new states and in the scholarly literature concerning
them, about "social mobilization" than there was five, not to say
ten, years ago (and what there is seems increasingly hollow). And this is
because there is in fact much less social mobilization. Change continues,
and indeed may even be accelerating under a general illusion that nothing.
much is happening, an illusion in good part generated by the great
expectations that accompanied liberation in the first place.2 But the
general forward motion of "the nation as a whole" has been replaced by
2 For an incisive, if anecdotal, discussion of the way in which contemporary
social conditions in the Third World hamper the recognition of change on the
part of "the natives" and foreign observers alike, see A. Hirschman, "Underdevel·
opment, Obstacles to the Perception of Change, and Leadership," Daedalus 91
( 1 968): 925-937. For some comments of my own relative to the tendency of
Western scholars-and, inferentially, Third World intellectuals-to underestimate
the present rate (and to misconceive the direction) of change in the new states. .
see "Myrdal's Mythology," Encounter, June 1 969, pp. 26-34.
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 237
a complex, uneven, and many-directioned movement by its various
parts, which conduces to a sense less of progress than of agitated stag­
nation.
Yet, despite the sense of diluted leadership, renascent privilege, and
arrested movement, the force of the great political emotion upon which
the independence movement was everywhere built remains but slightly
dimmed. Nationalism-amorphous, uncertainly focused, half-articulated,
but for all that highly inflammable-is still the major collective passion
in most new states, and in some it is virtually the only one. That, like
the Trojan War, the world revolution may not take place as scheduled,
that poverty, inequality, exploitation, superstition, and great power politics
are going to be around for a while, is an idea, however galling, that
most people at least can somehow contrive to live with. But, once
aroused, the desire to become a people rather than a population, a recognized
and respected somebody in the world who counts and is attended
to, is, short of its satisfaction, apparently unappeasable. At least
it has nowhere yet been appeased.
Actually, the novelties of the postrevolutionary period have, in many
ways, exacerbated it. The realization that the power imbalance between
the new states and the West has not only not been corrected by the destruction
of colonialism, but has in some respects increased, while at the
same time the buffer colonial rule provided against the direct impact of
that imbalance has been removed, leaving fledgling states to fend for
themselves against stronger, more practiced, established states, renders
nationalist sensitivity to "outside interference" just that much more intense
and that much more general. In the same way, emerging into the
world as an independent state has led to a similar sensitivization to the
acts and intentions of neighboring states-most of them likewise just
emerged-that was not present when such states were not free agents
but, as oneself, "belonged" to a distant power. And internally, removing
European rule has liberated the nationalisms within nationalisms that
virtually all the new �tates contain and produced as provincialism or
separatism, a direct and in some cases-Nigeria, India, Malaysia, Indonesia,
Pakistan-immediate threat to the new-wrought national identity
in whose name the revolution was made.
The effects of this persistent nationalistic sentiment amid national
disappointment have been naturally varied: a withdrawal into don'ttouch-me
isolationism, as in Burma; a surge of neotraditionalism, as in
Algeria; a turn toward regional imperialism, as in precoup Indonesia;
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
an obsession with a neighboring enemy, as in Pakistan ; a collapse into
ethnic civil war, as in Nigeria; or, in the majority of the cases where the
conflict is for the moment less severe, an underdeveloped version of
muddling-through, which contains a little of all these plus a certain
amount of whistling in the dark. The postrevolutionary period was envisioned
to be one of organizing rapid, large-scale, broadly coordinated
social, economic, and political advance. But it has turned out to be
rather more a continuation, under changed, and in some ways even less
propitious, circumstances, of the main theme of the revolutionary and
immediate prerevolutionary periods: the definition, creation, and solidification
of a viable collective identity.
In this process, the formal liberation from colonial rule turns out not
to have been the climax but a stage; a critical and necessary stage, but a
stage nonetheless, and quite possibly far from the most consequential
one. As in medicine the severity of surface symptoms and the severity
of underlying pathology are not always in close correlation, so in sociology
the drama of public events and the magnitude of structural change
are not always in precise accord. Some of the greatest revolutions occur
in the dark.
Four Phases of Nationalism
The tendency for the velocities of outward change and inward transformation
to be out of phase with one another is clearly enough demonstrated
in the general history of decolonization.
If, keeping all the limitations of periodization in mind, one divides
that history into four major phases-that in which the nationalist movements
formed and crystallized; that in which they triumphed; that in
which they organized themselves into states; and that (the present one)
in which, organized into states, they find themselves obliged to define
and stabilize their relationships both to other states and to the irregular
societies out of which they arose-this incongruence comes plainly into
view. The most obvious changes, those which caught and held the attention
of the entire world, occurred in the second and third of these
phases. But the bulk of the more far-reaching changes, those altering
the general shape and direction of social evolution, occurred or are occurring
in the less spectacular first and fourth.
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 239
The first, formative stage of nationalism consisted essentially of confronting
the dense assemblage of cultural, racial, local, and linguistic
categories of self-identification and social loyalty that centuries of uninstructed
history had produced with a simple, abstract, deliberately constructed,
and almost painfully self-conscious concept of political
ethnicity-a proper "nationality" in the modern manner. The granular
images into which individuals' views of who they are and who they
aren't are so intensely bound in traditional society, were challenged by
the more general, vaguer, but no less charged conceptions of collective
identity, based on a diffuse sense of common destiny, that tend to characterize
industrialized states. The men who raised this challenge, the nationalist
intellectuals, were thus launching a revolution as much cultural,
even epistemological, as it was political. They were attempting to transform
the symbolic framework through which people experienced social
reality, and thus, to the extent that life is what we make of it all, that
reality itself.
That this effort to revise the frames of self-perception was an uphill
battle, that in most places it was hardly more than just begun, and that
in all it remained confused and incomplete goes without saying-or
would, had not the contrary so often been asserted. Indeed, the very
success of the independence movements in rousing the enthusiasm of
the masses and directing it against foreign domination tended to obscure
the frailty and narrowness of the cultural foundations upon which those
movements rested, because it led to the notion that anticolonialism and
collective redefinition are the same thing. But for all the intimacy (and
complexity) of their interconnections, they are not. Most Tamils, Karens,
Brahmins, Malays, Sikhs, lbos, Muslims, Chinese, Nilotes, Bengalis,
or Ashantis found it a good deal easier to grasp the idea that they
were not Englishmen than that they were Indians, Burmese, Malayans,
Ghanaians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, or Sudanese.
As the mass attack (more massive, and more violent, in some places
than others) upon colonialism developed, it seemed to create, in and of
itself, the basis of a new national identity that independence would
merely ratify. The popular rallying behind a common, extremely specific
political aim-an occurrence that surprised the nationalists nearly
as much as it did the colonialists-was taken for a sign of a deeper solidarity,
which produced by it would yet outlive it. Nationalism came to
mean, purely and simply, the desire-and the demand-for freedom.
Transforming a people's view of themselves, their society, and their
culture-the sort of thing that absorbed Gandhi, Jinnah, Fanon, Su-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
karno, Senghor, and indeed all the bitter theorists of national
awakening-was identified, to a large extent by some of these same
men, with the access of such peoples to self-government. "Seek ye first
the political kingdom"-the nationalists would make the state, and the
state would make the nation.
The task of making the state turned out to be exacting enough to permit
this illusion, indeed the whole moral atmosphere of the revolution,
to be sustained for some time beyond the transfer of sovereignty. The
degree to which this proved possible, necessary, or even advisable, varied
widely from Indonesia or Ghana at one extreme to Malaysia or
Tunisia at the other. But, with a few exceptions, by now all the new
states have organized governments that maintain general dominion
within their borders, and well or badly, function. And as government
shakes down into some reasonably recognizable institutional formparty
oligarchy, presidential autocracy, military dictatorship, reconditioned
monarchism, or, very partially in the best of cases, representative
democracy-it becomes less and less easy to avoid confronting the
fact that to make Italy is not to make Italians. Once the political revolution
is accomplished, and a state, if hardly consolidated, is at least established,
the question: Who are we, who have done all this? re-emerges
from the easy populism of the last years of decolonization and the first
of independence.
Now that there is a local state rather than a mere dream of one, the
task of nationalist ideologizing radically changes. It no longer consists
in stimulating popular alienation from a foreign-dominated political
order, nor with orchestrating a mass celebration of that order's demise.
It consists in defining, or trying to define, a collective subject to whom
the actions of the state can be internally connected, in creating, or
trying to create, an experiential ''we" from whose will the activities of
government seem spontaneously to flow. And as such, it tends to revolve
around the question of the content, relative weight, and proper relationship
of two rather towering abstractions: "The Indigenous Way of
Life" and "The Spirit of the Age."
To stress the first of these is to look to local mores, established institutions,
and the unities of common experience-to "tradition," "culture,"
"national character," or even "race"-for the roots of a new
identity. To stress the second is to look to the general outlines of the
history of our time, and in particular to what one takes to be the overall
direction and significance of that history. There is no new state in which
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 24 1
both these themes (which, merely to have names for them, I shall call
"essentialism" and "epochalism") are not present; few in which they
are not thoroughly entangled with one another; and only a small, incompletely
decolonized minority in which the tension between them is
not invading every aspect of national life from language choice to foreign
policy.
Language choice is, in fact, a good, even a paradigmatic, example. I
cannot think of a new state in which this question has not in some form
or other risen to the level of national policy.3 The intensity of the disturbance
it has thereby generated, as well as the effectiveness with
which it has been handled, varies quite widely; but for all the diversity
of its expressions, the "language issue" turns precisely on the essentialism-epochalism
dilemma.
For any speaker of it, a given language is at once either more or less
his own or more or less someone else's, and either more or less cosmopolitan
or more or less parochial-a borrowing or a heritage; a passport
or a citadel. The question of whether, when, and for what purposes
to use it is thus also the question of how far a people should form itself
by the bent of its genius and how far by the demands of its times.
The tendency to approach the "language issue" from the linguistic
standpoint, homemade or scientific, has somewhat obscured this fact.
Most discussion, inside the new states and out, concerning the "suitability"
of a given language for national use has suffered from the notion
that this suitability turns on the inherent nature of the language-on the
adequacy of its grammatical, lexical, or "cultural" resources to the expression
of complex philosophical, scientific, political, or moral ideas.
But what it really turns on is the relative importance of being able to
give one's thoughts, however crude or subtle, the kind of force that
speaking one's mother tongue permits as against being able to participate
in movements of thought to which only "foreign," or in some cases
"literary," languages can give access.
It doesn't matter therefore whether, in concrete form, the problem is
the status of classical as against colloquial Arabic in Middle Eastern
countries; the place of an "elite" Western language amid a collection of
"tribal" languages in sub-Saharan Africa; the complex stratification of
local, regional, national, and international languages in India or the
Philippines; or the replacement of a European language of limited
3 For a general review, see J. A. Fishman et al., eds., lAnguage Problems of
Developing Nations (New York, 1968).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
world significance by others of greater significance in Indonesia. The
underlying issue is the same. It is not whether this or that language is
"developed" or "capable of development"; it is whether this or that language
is psychologically immediate and whether it is an avenue to the
wider community of modern culture.
It is not because Swahili lacks a stable syntax or Arabic cannot build
combining forms-dubious propositions in any case4-that language
problems are so prominent in the Third World: it is because, for the
overwhelming majority of speakers of the overwhelming majority of
languages in the new states, the two sides of this double question tend
to work out inversely. What, from the ordinary speaker's view, is the
natural vehicle of thought and feeling (and particularly in cases like Arabic,
Hindi, Amharic, Khmer, or Javanese-the repository of an advanced
religious, literary, and artistic tradition to boot) is, from the
view of the main current of twentieth century civilization, virtually a
patois. And what for that current are the established vehicles of its expression,
are for that ordinary speaker at best but half-familiar languages
of even less familiar peoples.5
Formulated this way, the "language problem" is only the "nationality
problem" writ small, though in some places the conflicts arising from it
are intense enough to make the relationship seem reversed. Generalized,
the "who are we" question asks what cultural forms-what systems of
meaningful symbols-to employ to give value and significance to the
activities of the state, and by extension to the civil life of its citizens.
Nationalist ideologies built out of symbolic forms drawn from local
4 For the first (not accepted, but attacked), see L. Harries, "Swah ili in Mod·
ern East Africa," in Fishman et al., lAnguage Problems, p. 426. For the second·
(accepted during an incisive discussion along the general lines here being devel-:
oped), see C. Gallagher, "North African Problems and Prospects: Language aod:
Identity," in lAnguage Problems, p. 1 40. My point, of course, is not that techni-·
cal linguistic matters have no relevance to language problems in the new states.;
but merely that the roots of those problems are much deeper and that expandin&,
lexicons, standard izing usages, improving writing systems, and rational izing in-'
struction, though valuable in themselves, do not touch the central difficulty. .
s The main exception so far as the Third World generally is concerned it '
Latin America, but there-proving the rule-language issues are very much less:
prominent than in the new states proper and tend to reduce to education and mi-,
nority group problems. (For an example, see D. H. Burns, "Bilingual EducatiOil�
in the Andes of Peru," in Fishman et al., lAnguage Problems, pp. 403-41 3.) TO!
what degree the fact that Spanish (or, more, Portuguese) is just enough of a car·j
rier of modern thought to be felt to be an avenue to it and just marginal enousb.,
a carrier of it not actually to be a very good one has played a part in the intel�j
lectual pro
.
vincializ�tion or �ati
.
n A
.
meri�a-so
.
that it has in fact ha� a langu.,-j
problem Without qu1te reahzmg 1t-1s an mterestmg and separate question. J
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 243
traditions-which are, that is, essentialist-tend, like vernaculars, to
be psychologically immediate but socially isolating; built out of forms
implicated in the general movement of contemporary history-that is,
epochalist-they tend, like lingua francas, to be socially deprovincializing
but psychologically forced.
However, rarely is such an ideology anywhere purely essentialist or
purely epochalist. All are mixed and one can speak at best only of a
bias in one direction or another, and often not even of that. Nehru's
image of "India" was doubtless heavily epochalist, Gandhi's doubtless
heavily essentialist; but the fact that the first was the disciple of the second
and the second the patron of the first (and neither managed to convince
all Indians that he was not, in the one case, a brown Englishman,
or, in the other, a medieval reactionary) demonstrates that the relation
between these two routes to self-discovery is a subtle and even paradoxical
one. Indeed, the more ideologized new states-Indonesia, Ghana,
Algeria, Egypt, Ceylon, and the like-have tended to be both intensely
epochalist and intensely essentialist at the same time, whereas countries
more purely essentialist like Somalia or Cambodia, or epochalist like
Tunisia or the Philippines, have been rather the exceptions.
The tension between these two impulses-to move with the tide of
the present and to hold to an inherited course-gives new state nationalism
its peculiar air of being at once hell-bent toward modernity and
morally outraged by its manifestations. There is a certain irrationality
in this. But it is more than a collective derangement; it is a social cataclysm
in the process of happening.
Essentialism and Epochalism
The interplay of essentialism and epochalism is not, therefore, a kind of
cultural dialectic, a logistic of abstract ideas, but a historical process as
concrete as industrialization and as tangible as war. The issues are
being fought out not simply at the doctrine and argument level-though
there is a great deal of both-but much more importantly in the material
transformations that the social structures of all the new states are
Undergoing. Ideological change is not an independent stream of thought
244 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE-
I
running alongside social process and reflecting (or determining) it, it it
a dimension of that process itself.
The impact within any new state society of the desire for coherence
and continuity on the one hand and for dynamism and contemporaneity
on the other is both extremely uneven and highly nuanced. The pull of
indigenous tradition is felt most heavily by its appointed, and these days
rather besieged, guardians-monks, mandarins, pandits, chiefs, ule�
and so on; that of what is usually referred to (not altogether accurately)
as "the West," by the urban youth, the troubled schoolboys of Cairo;
Djakarta, or Kinshasa who have surrounded words like shabb, pemuda;
and jeunesse with an aura of energy, idealism, impatience, and menace.
But stretching out between these all-too-visible extremes is the great
bulk of the population, among whom essentialist and epochalist sentiments
are scrambled into a vast confusion of outlooks, which, because
the current of social change produced it, only the current of social
change can sort out.
As illustrative cases, compressed to the dimensions of historical anec·
dotes, of the generation of this confusion and of the efforts now being
made to dissolve it, Indonesia and Morocco can serve as well as any..
My reason for choosing them is that they are the cases I happen to
know firsthand and, in dealing with the interplay between institutional.
change and cultural reconstruction, the degree to which one can substi�·
tute a synoptic vision for an intimate one is limited. Their experiences
are, as all social experiences, unique. But they are not so different either
from one another or from those of new states as a whole as to be
unable to reveal, in their very particularity, some generic outlines of the
problems faced by societies struggling to bring what they like to call
their "personality" into a workable alignment with what they like to call
their "destiny."
In Indonesia, the essentialist element is, and long has been, extremely
unhomogeneous. To an extent, this is true for virtually all the new
states, which tend to be bundles of competing traditions gathered accidentally
into concocted political frameworks rather than organically
evolving civilizations. But in Indonesia, the outlands at once of India,
China, Oceania, Europe, and the Middle East, cultural diversity has
been for centuries both especially great and especially complex. The.
edge of everything classical, it has been itself shamelessly eclectic.
Up until about the third decade of this century, the several ingredient
traditions-Jodie, Sinitic, Islamic, Christian, Polynesian-were sui"';
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 245
pended in a kind of half-solution in which contrasting, even opposed
styles of life and world outlooks managed to coexist, if not wholly without
tension, or even without violence, at least in some sort of usually
workable, to-each-his-own sort of arrangement. This modus vivendi
began to show signs of strain as early as the mid-nineteenth century, but
its dissolution got genuinely under way only with the rise, from 1 9 1 2
on, of nationalism; its collapse, which is still not complete, only i n the
revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods. For then what had been
parallel traditionalisms, encapsulated in localities and classes, became
competing definitions of the essence of the New Indonesia. What was
once, to employ a term I have used elsewhere, a kind of "cultural balance
of power" became an ideological war of a peculiarly implacable
sort.
Thus, in apparent paradox (though, in fact, it has been a nearly universal
occurrence in the new states) the move toward national unity intensified
group tensions within the society by raising settled cultural
forms out of their particular contexts, expanding them into general allegiances,
and politicizing them. As the nationalist movement developed,
it separated into strands. In the Revolution these strands became parties,
each promoting a different aspect of the eclectic tradition . as the only
true basis of Indonesian identity. Marxists looked mainly to the folk
melange of peasant life for the essence of the national heritage; the
technicians, clerks, and administrators of the classe dirigeante to the
Indic aestheticism of the Javanese aristocracy; and the more substantial
merchants and landholders to Islam. Village populism, cultural elitism,
religious puritanism: some differences of ideological opinion can perhaps
be adjusted, but not these.
Rather than adjusted they were accentuated, as each strand attempted
to graft a modernist appeal onto its traditionalist base. For the populist
element, this was Communism; and the Indonesian Communist party,
professing to discern an indigenous radical tradition in the collectivism,
social egalitarianism, and anticlericalism of rural life, became the chief
spokesman both for peasant essentialism, especially Javanese peasant
essentialism, and for a revolutionary epochalism of the usual "rise of
the masses" sort. For the salaried element, the modernist appeal was industrial
society as found (or imagined) in Europe and the United States,
and it proposed a marriage of convenience between oriental spirituality
and occidental drive, between "wisdom" and "technique," that would
somehow preserve cherished values while transforming the material
246 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE�
basis of the society out of which those values had arisen. And for the;
pious, it was naturally enough religious reform, a celebration of the ef.
:
fort to renovate Islamic civilization in such a way as to regain its lost,
rightful leadership of the moral, material, and intellectual progress of
mankind. But, in the event, none of these things-Peasant Revolution�
The Meeting of East and West, or The Cultural Resurgence of Islamhappened.
What happened was the mass slaughter of 1 965, in which
somewhere between a quarter and three-quarters of a million people
lost their lives. The blood bath in which the Sukarno regime with painful
slowness drowned was the result of a 'last complex of causes, and it
would be absurd to reduce it to an ideological explosion. Yet, whatever
the role of economic, political, psychological, or-for that matteraccidental
factors in bringing it on (and, what is even harder to explain,
sustaining it), it marked the end of a distinct phase in the progress of
Indonesian nationalism. Not only were the slogans of unity ("one people,
one language, one nation"; "from many, one"; "collective harmony";
and so on), which had not been easy to credit in the first place,
now rendered implausible altogether, but the theory that the native
eclecticism of Indonesian culture would yield easily to a generalized
modernism clamped onto one or another element of it was definitively
disproved. Multiform in the past, it would seem also to have to be multiform
in the present.
In Morocco, the main obstacle to defining an integral national self
has not been cultural heterogeneity, which in comparative terms has not
been so very great, but social particularism, which in comparative terms
has been extreme. Traditional Morocco consisted of an enormous, illorganized
field of rapidly forming and rapidly dissolving political constellations
on every level from the court to the camp, every basis from
the mystical to the occupational, and every scale from the grand to the.
microscopic. The continuity of the social order lay less in any durability
of the arrangements composing it or the groups embodying it, for the
sturdiest of them were fugitive, than in the constancy of the processes
by which, incessantly reworking those arrangements and redefining
those groups, it formed, reformed, and re-reformed itself.
Insofar as this unsettled society had a center, it was the Alawite monarchy.
But even in the best times the monarchy was hardly more than
the largest bear in the garden. Embedded in a patrimonial bureaucracy
of the most classic sort, a haphazard assortment of courtiers, chieftains,
scribes, and judges, it struggled continuously to bring competing centers
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 247
of power-of which there were literally hundreds, each resting on
slightly different ground from the next-within its control. Although
between its founding in the seventeenth century and its submission in
) 9 1 2 it never altogether failed in this, it also never more than very partially
succeeded. Not quite an anarchy and not quite a polity, the Moroccan
state had, with its endemic particularism, just enough reality to
persist.
Initially the effect of colonial domination, which only formally lasted
about forty years, was to eviscerate the monarchy and turn it into a
kind of Moorish tableau vivant; but intentions are one thing and events
are another, and the ultimate result of European rule was to establish
the king as the axis of the Moroccan political system rather more emphatically
than had originally been the case. Though the earliest movements
toward independence were undertaken by an uneasy, and as it
turned out unstable, coalition of Western-educated intellectuals and neotraditional
Muslim reformers, it was the arrest, exile, and triumphant
restoration of Muhammed V in 1 953- 1 955 that finally secured the independence
movement, and, in securing it, turned the throne into the
focus of Morocco's growing but still intermittent sense of nationhood.
The country got, revived, ideologized, and better organized, its center
back. But, it soon turned out, it also got, similarly improved, its particularism
back.
Much postrevolutionary political history has demonstrated this fact:
that however transformed, the crucial struggle still consists in an attempt
by the king and his staff to sustain the monarchy as a viable institution
in a society in which everything from landscape and kinship
structure to religion and national character conspires to partition political
life into disparate and disconnected exhibitions of parochial power.
The first such exhibitions came with a series of so-called tribal
uprisings-in part foreign-stimulated, in part the result of domestic political
maneuvering, in part a return of the culturally repressed-that
harried the new state during the first few years of independence. These
were eventually put down with a combination of royal force and royal
intrigue. But they were merely the first, rather elemental indications of
what life was going to be like for a classical monarchy that, returning
from the limbo of colonial subservience, had to establish itself as at
once the authentic expression of the nation's soul and the appropriate
vehicle of its modernization.
As Samuel Huntington has pointed out, the peculiar fate of traditional
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES]
monarchies almost everywhere in the new states is to have also to be.
modernizing monarchies, or at least to look like such.6 A king content
merely to reign can remain a political icon, a piece of cultural bric-a"'(:
brae. But if he wants also to rule, as Moroccan kings have always very
much wanted to do, he must make himself the expression of a powerful,
force in contemporary social life. For Muhammed V, and, since 1 961,.
his son Hassan II, this force has been the emergence for the first time in.
the country's history of a Western-educated class large enough to permeate
the entire society and discrete enough to represent a distinctive interest.
Though their styles have been somewhat different-Hassan is re..:
mote where Muhammed was paternal-they have each struggled �
once to organize and to place themselves at the head of The New Mid-.
die Class, The Intermediate Sectors, La Classe Dirigeante, The National
Elite, or whatever this forming crowd of officials, officers, managers,
educators, technicians, and publicists ought properly to be called. .
Suppressing the tribal rebellions was thus less the end of the old .
order than the end of an ineffective strategy for dominating it. Aftet:
1 95 8, the essentials of what has become the palace's established ap-.,
proach to securing a firmer grip on the Moroccan half-polity emerged.:
-the construction of a constitutional monarchy, constitutional enough'
to attract the support of the educated elite and monarchical enough to.
maintain the substance of royal power. Desiring the fate of neither the
English monarchy nor the Iraqi, Muhammed V, and even more Hassan
II, have sought to create an institution which, invoking Islam, Arabism,
and three centuries of Alawite rule, could draw its legitimacy from the.
past and, calling for rationalism, dirigisme, and technocracy, its authority
from the present.
The stages in the recent history of this effort to turn Morocco, by a.
kind of political miscegenation, into what can only be called a royalist
republic-the separation of the secularist, religious, and traditionalist
wings of the nationalist movement and the consequent formation of a
6 S. P. Huntington, "The Political Modernization of Traditional Monarchies,
..
Daedalus 95 ( 1966):763-768; see also his Political Order in Changing Societies (NeW
Haven, 1968). With Huntington's general analysis, too much influenced, i n my
opinion. by the analogy of the king vs. aristocracy struggle in premodern Euro�
I am, however, in some d isagreement. For Morocco, anyway, the image of a populist
monarchy "out of style in middle-class circles," appealing over the heads of•
"local privilege, corporate autonomy [and ] feudal power" to the masses in the,
interests of progressive reform, seems to me very nearly the reverse of the trutb.
For more realistic views of postindependence Moroccan politics, see J. WaterbutY•!
The Commander ofthe Faithful (London, 1970). '
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 249
multiparty system in 1 958- 1 959; the failure of the king's own coalition
party, the Front for the Defense of Constitutional Institutions, to gain a
parliamentary majority in the 1 963 general elections; the royal suspension,
ostensibly temporary, of parliament in 1 965 ; the dime-novel murder
(in France) of the major opponent of the whole project, Mehdi Ben
Sarka, in 1 968-need not be traced out here. The point is that the tension
between essentialism and epochalism is as observable in the vicissitudes
of the postrevolutionary Moroccan political system as in those of
the Indonesian; and if it has not as yet attained so flamboyant a denouement,
and one may hope never will, it has been moving in the same
direction of increasing unmanageability, as the relationship between
what Edward Shils has called the "will to be modern" and what Mazzini
called the "need to exist and have a name" grows steadily more involved.7
And though the form it takes and the speed at which it moves
naturally vary, the same process is occurring in, if perhaps not all, at
least the overwhelming majority of the new states as, the revolution accomplished,
the point of it is sought.
Concepts of Culture
Until Talcott Parsons, carrying forward Weber's double rejection (and
double acceptance) of German idealism and Marxist materialism, provided
a viable alternative, the dominant concept of culture in American
social science identified culture with learned behavior. This concept can
hardly be called "wrong"-isolated concepts are neither "wrong" nor
"right"-and for many, rather routine purposes it was, and remains,
serviceable. But it is now clear to virtually everyone whose interests extend
any distance beyond the descriptive that it is very difficult to generate
analyses of much theoretical power from such a diffuse, empiricist
notion. The day when social phenomena were explained by redescribing
them as culture patterns and noting that such patterns are handed down
from generation to generation is very nearly past. And Parsons, insisting
in his grave and toneless voice that to interpret the way a group of
human beings behave as an expression of their culture while defining
7 E. Shils, "Political Development in the New States," Comparative Studies in
Society and History 2 ( 1 960): 265-292, 379-4 1 1 .
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
their culture as the sum of the ways in which they have learned to be-:have
is not terribly informative, is as responsible for its passing as any
single figure in contemporary social science.
In place of this near-idea, Parsons, following not only Weber but a
line of thought stretching back at least to Vico, has elaborated a concept
of culture as a system of symbols by which man confers significance
upon his own experience. Symbol systems, man-created, shared, conventional,
ordered, and indeed learned, provide human beings with a meaningful
framework for orienting themselves to one another, to the world
around them, and to themselves. At once a product and a determinant
of social interaction, they are to the process of social life as a computer's
program is to its operations, the genic helix to the development
of the organism, the blueprint to the construction of the bridge, the
score to the performance of the symphony, or, to choose a humbler;
analogy, the recipe to the baking of the cake-so the symbol system is.
the information source that, to some measurable extent, gives shape;:
direction, particularity, and point to an ongoing flow of activity.
Yet these analogies, which suggest a pre-existing template stamping
form onto a process external to it, pass rather facilely over what has
emerged as the central theoretical problem for this more sophisticated
approach: namely, how to conceptualize the dialectic between the crystallization
of such directive "patterns of meaning" and the concrete
course of social life.
There is a sense in which a computer's program is an outcome of
prior developments in the technology of computing, a particular helix of
phylogenetic history, a blueprint of earlier experiments in bridge build·,
ing, a score of the evolution of musical performance, and a recipe of &
long series of successful and unsucccessful cakes. But the simple fact
that the information elements in these cases are materially separablei
from the processual-one can, in principle anyhow, write out the program,
isolate the helix, draw the blueprint, publish the score, note down.:
the recipe-makes them less useful as models for the interaction of cul-i
tural patterns and social processes where, a few more intellectualized·
realms like music and cake-baking in part aside, the very question at
issue is precisely how such a separation is, even in thought, actually to
be effected. The workability of the Parsonian concept of culture resti;
almost entirely on the degree to which such a model can be constructed:.
-on the degree to which the relationship between the development o�
symbol systems and the dynamics of social process can be circumstan�
.After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 251
dally exposed, thereby rendering the depiction of technologies, rituals,
myths, and kinship terminologies as man-made information sources for
the directive ordering of human conduct more than a metaphor.
This problem has haunted Parsons' writings on culture from the
earliest days when he regarded it as a set of Whiteheadian "external objects"
psychologically incorporated into personalities and thus, by extension,
institutionalized in social systems, to the most recent where he
sees it more in the control-mechanism terms of cybernetics. But nowhere
has it come home more to roost than in discussing ideology; for,
of all the realms of culture, ideology is the one in which the relationship
between symbolic structures and collective behavior is at once the most
conspicuous and the least clear.
'
For Parsons, an ideology is but a special sort of symbol system:
A system of beliefs held in common by members of a collectivity
which is oriented to the evaluative integration of the collectivity, by interpretation
of the empirical nature of the collectivity and of the situation in
which it is placed, the processes by which it developed to its given state, the
goals to which its members are collectively oriented, and their relation to
the future course of events.s
Yet, left at that, this formulation fuses together modes of self-interpretation
that do not entirely go together, and, glossing over the moral
tension inherent in ideological activity, obscures the interior sources of
its enormous sociological dynamism. In particular, the two clauses I
have underscored, the "interpretation of the empirical nature of the collectivity,"
and " [the interpretation] of the situation in which [that
collectivity] is placed," are not, as I hope I have by now demonstrated,
as coordinate as practical enterprises in social self-definition as the
mere "and" conjoining them might suggest. So far as new state nationalism
is concerned, they are in fact very deeply, in some places irreconcilably,
at odds. To deduce what the nation is from a conception of the
world-historical situation in which it is thought to be enclosed"epochalism"-produces
one sort of moral-political universe; to diagnose
the situation with which the nation is faced from a prior conception
of what it is intrinsically-"essentialism"-produces quite another;
and to combine the two (the most common approach) produces a
confused assortment of mixed cases. For this reason, among others, nationalism
is not a mere by-product but the very stuff of social change in
8 T. Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 1 95 I), p. 349. Italics added.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
so many new states; not its reflection, its cause, its expression, or its engine,
but the thing itself.
To see one's country as the product of "the processes by which it developed
to its given state," or, alternatively, to see it as the ground of
"the future course of events," is, in short, to see it rather differently.
But, more than that, it is to look in rather different places to see it: to
parents, to traditional authority figures, to custom and legend; or, to
secular intellectuals, to the oncoming generation, to "current events,"
and the mass media. Fundamentally, the tension between essentialist
and epochalist strains in new state nationalism is not a tension between
intellectual passions but between social institutions charged with discordant
cultural meanings. An increase in newspaper circulation, an upsurge
of religious activity, a decline in family cohesion, an expansion of
universities, a reassertion of hereditary privilege, a proliferation of folklore
societies are-like their contraries-themselves elements in the
process by which the character and content of that nationalism as an
"information source" for collective behavior are determined. The organized
"systems of belief" propagated by professional ideologists represent
attempts to raise aspects of this process to the level of conscious
thought and so deliberately control it.
But, no more than consciousness exhausts mentality does nationalist
ideology exhaust nationalism; what it does, selectively and incompletely,
is articulate it. The images, metaphors, and rhetorical turns from which
nationalist ideologies are built are essentially devices, cultural devices
designed to render one or another aspect of the broad process of collective
self-redefinition explicit, to cast essentialist pride or epochalist hope
into specific symbolic forms, where more than dimly felt, they can be
described, developed, celebrated, and used. To formulate an ideological
doctrine is to make (or try to make-there are more failures than successes)
what was a generalized mood into a practical force.
The scuffle of political sects in Indonesia and the shifting foundations
of monarchy in Morocco, the first so far an apparent failure, the second
so far an ambiguous success, represent such attempts to draw the intangibilities
of conceptual change into articulate cultural forms. They represent,
also, of course, and even more immediately, a struggle for
power, place, privilege, wealth, fame, and all the other so-called "real"
rewards of life. Indeed, it is because of the fact that they also represent
this that their ability to focus and transform men's views of who they
are and how they should act is so great.
After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States 2.53
The "patterns of meaning" by which social change is formed grow
from the processes of that change itself and, crystallized into proper
ideologies or embedded in popular attitudes, serve in turn, to some
inevitably limited degree, to guide it. The progress from cultural diversity
to ideological combat to mass violence in Indonesia, or the attempt
to dominate a field of social particularisms by fusing the values of a republic
with the facts of an autocracy in Morocco, are without doubt the
hardest of hard political, economic, and stratificatory realities; real
blood has flowed, real dungeons have been built-and, to be fair, real
pain has been relieved. But they are also without doubt the record of
those would-be countries' efforts to breathe intelligibility into an idea of
"nationhood," in terms of which these realities, and worse to come, can
be confronted, shaped, and understood.
And this is true for the new states generally. As the heroic excitements
of the political revolution against colonial domination recede into
an inspirational past to be replaced by the shabbier, but no less convulsive
movements of the dispiriting present, the secular analogues of Weber's
famous "problems of meaning" grow more and more desperate. It
is not only in religion that things are not "merely there and happen" but
"have a 'meaning' and are there because of this meaning," but in politics
as well, and in new-state politics in particular. The questions "What
is it all for?" "What's the use?" and "Why go on?" arise in the context
of mass poverty, official corruption, or tribal violence as much as in
those of wasting illness, defeated hope, or premature death. They get no
better answers, but insofar as they get any at all it is from images of a
heritage worth preserving or a promise worth pursuing, and though
these need not necessarily be nationalist images, almost all of themMarxist
ones included-are.9
Rather like religion, nationalism has a bad name in the modern
world, and, rather like religion, it more or less deserves it. Between
them (and sometimes in combination) religious bigotry and nationalist
hatred have probably brought more havoc upon humanity than any two
forces in history, and doubtless will bring a great deal more. Yet also
9 The question of the relationship between Marxism and nationalism is a
vexed one which it would take another essay even to outline. Suffice it here to
say that, as far as the new states are concerned, Marxist movements, Communist
or non-Communist, have almost everywhere been heavily nationalistic in both
aim and idiom, and there is very little sign that they are becoming any less so.
Actually, the same point could be made about religio-political movementsMuslim,
Buddhist, Hindu, or whatever; they too tend to be as localized in fact as
they are placeless in principle.
254 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTU�
rather like religion, nationalism has been a driving force in some of th�
most creative changes in history, and doubtless will be so again in manjJ
yet to come. It would seem, then, well to spend less time decrying it�
which is a little like cursing the winds-and more in trying to fi&W"O
out why it takes the forms it does and how it might be prevented from
tearing apart even as it creates the societies in which it arises, and �
yond that the whole fabric of modern civilization. For in the new sta•
the age of ideology is not only not over, but, as the inchoate changes of
self-conception wrought by the dramatic events of the past forty yean
emerge into the public light of explicit doctrine, only just beginning. In
preparing ourselves to understand and deal with it, or perhaps only to·
survive it, the Parsonian theory of culture, suitably emended, is one of
our most powerful intellectual tools.
Chapter 1 0 j
The Integrative Revolution:
Primordial Sentiments
and Civil Politics
in the New States
I
In 1 948, scarcely a year after Independence, Pandit Nehru found himself
in the always unsettling position for an opposition politician finally
come to power of being obliged to place in practice a policy he had
long espoused but never liked. With Patel and Sitaramayya, he was appointed
to the Linguistic Provinces Committee.
The Congress had supported the principle of linguistic determination
of state boundaries within India almost since its founding, arguing,
ironically enough, that British maintenance of "arbitrary"-that is,
nonlinguistic-administrative units was part of a divide-and-rule policy.
In 1 920 it had actually reorganized its own regional chapters along lin-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
guistic lines so as better to secure its popular appeal. But with the
echoes of partition perhaps still ringing in his ears, Nehru was deeply
shaken by his experience on the Linguistic Committee, and with the
candor that made him virtually unique among the leaders of the new
states, he admitted it:
[This inquiry) has been in some ways an eye-opener for us. The work of 60
years of the Indian National Congress was standing before us, face to face
with centuries-old India of narrow loyalties, petty jealousies and ignorant
prejudices engaged in mortal conflict and we were simply horrified to see
how thin was the ice upon which we were skating. Some of the ablest men
in the country came before us and confidently and emphatically stated that
language in this country stood for and represented culture, race, history, individuality,
and finally a sub-nation.•
But, horrified or not, Nehru, Patel, and Sitaramayya in the end were
forced to endorse the claims of Andhra as a Telugu-speaking state, and
the thin ice was broken. Within the decade India had been almost entirely
reorganized along linguistic lines, and a wide range of observers, .
both domestic and foreign, were wondering aloud whether the country's
political unity would survive this wholesale concession to "narrow loyalties,
petty jealousies, and ignorant prejudices." 2
The problem that opened Nehru's eyes in such wide astonishment is
phrased in linguistic terms, but the same problem phrased in a wide variety
of terms is, of course, literally pandemic to the new states, as the
countless references to "dual" or "plural" or "multiple" societies, to
"mosaic" or "composite" social structures, to "states" that are not "nations"
and "nations" that are not "states," to "tribalism," "parochialism,"
and "communalism," as well as to pan-national movements of
various sorts demonstrate.
When we speak of communalism in India, we refer to religious con- .
trasts; when we speak of it in Malaya, we are mainly concerned with ra- .
cial ones, and in the Congo with tribal ones.
·
But the grouping under a
'
common rubric is not simply adventitious; the phenomena referred to :
are in some way similar. Regionalism has been the main theme in Indo- :
nesian disaffection, differences in custom in Moroccan. The Tamil mi- ••
i
• Quoted in S. Harrison, "The Challenge to Indian Nationalism," Foreign AI- ;
fairs 34 (April 1956): 3. i
2 For a very dim view, see S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decadel:1
(Princeton, N.J., 1 960). For a lively Indian view that sees the "scheme of dividiDJ.. '1
India in the name of Linguistic States" as "full of poison" but yet necessary "to·
make easy the way to democracy and to remove racial and cultural tension," �j
B. R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States (Delhi, ca. 19SS). �
The Integrative Revolution 257
pority in Ceylon is set off from the Sinhalese majority by religion, language,
race, region, and social custom; the Shiite minority in Iraq is set
off from the dominant Sunnis virtually by an intra-Islamic sectarian difference
alone. Pan-national movements in Africa are largely based on
race, in Kurdistan, on tribalism; in Laos, the Shan States, and Thailand,
on language. Yet all these phenomena, too, are in some sense of a
piece. They form a definable field of investigation.
That is, they would, could we but define it. The stultifying aura of
conceptual ambiguity that surrounds the terms "nation," "nationality,"
and "nationalism" has been extensively discussed and thoroughly deplored
in almost every work that has been concerned to attack the relationship
between communal and political loyalties.a But as the preferred
remedy has been to adopt a theoretical eclecticism that, in its attempt to
do justice to the multifaceted nature of the problems involved, tends to
confuse political, psychological, cultural, and demographic factors, actual
reduction of that ambiguity has not proceeded very far. Thus a recent
symposium on the Middle East refers indiscriminately to the efforts
of the Arab League to destroy existing nation-state boundaries,
those of the Sudan Government to unify a somewhat arbitrary and accidentally
demarcated sovereign state, and those of the Azerin Turks to
separate from Iran and join the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan as
"nationalism." 4 Operating with a similarly omnibus concept, Coleman
sees Nigerians (or some of them) as displaying five different sorts of nationalism
at once-"African," "Nigerian," "Regional," "Group," and
"Cultural." :. And Emerson defines a nation as a "terminal community
-the largest community that, when the chips are down, effectively
commands men's loyalty, overriding the claims both of the lesser communities
within it and those that cut across it or potentially enfold it
within a still greater society . . . ," which simply shifts the ambiguity
from the term "nation" to the term "loyalty," as well as seeming to
leave such questions as whether India, Indonesia, or Nigeria are nations
to the determination of some future, unspecified historical crisis.s
3 See, for example, K. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (New
York., 1953), pp. 1-14; R. Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge, Mass.,
1960); J. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, 1958), p.
4 19 ff; F. Hertz, Nationalism in History and Politics (New York, 1944), pp.
1 1- 1 5.
4 W. Z. Laqueur, ed., The Middle East in Transition: Studies in Contemporary
History (New York., 1 958).
5 Coleman, Nigeria, pp. 425-426.
6 Emerson, Empire to Nation, pp. 95-96.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Some of this conceptual haze is burned away, however, if it is rea).
ized that the peoples of the new states are simultaneously animated by
two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and often actually
opposed motives-the desire to be recognized as responsible agents
whose wishes, acts, hopes, and opinions "matter," and the desire to
build an efficient, dynamic modern state. The one aim is to be noticed:
it is a search for an identity, and a demand that the identity be publicly
acknowledged as having import, a social assertion of the self as "being
somebody in the world." 7 The other aim is practical: it is a demand for
progress, for a rising standard of living, more effective political order• .
greater social justice, and beyond that of "playing a part in the larget
arena of world politics," of "exercising influence among the nations." •·.
The two motives are, again, most intimately related, because citizenship
in a truly modern state has more and more become the most broadly ne•
gotiable claim to personal significance, and because what Mazzini called
the demand to exist and have a name is to such a great extent fired by a '
humiliating sense of exclusion from the important centers of power in
world society. But they are not the same thing. They stem from different
sources and respond to different pressures. It is, in fact, the tension
between them that is one of the central driving forces in the national
evolution of the new states; as it is, at the same time, one of the greatest
obstacles to such evolution.
This tension takes a peculiarly severe and chronic form in the new
states, both because of the great extent to which their peoples' sense of
self remains bound up in the gross actualities of blood, race, language� ·
locality, religion, or tradition, and because of the steadily accelerating
importance in this century of the sovereign state as a positive instru�
ment for the realization of collective aims. Multiethnic, usually multiliR-1
guistic, and sometimes multiracial, the populations of the new states
tend to regard the immediate, concrete, and to them inherently mean;;:
ingful sorting implicit in such "natural" diversity as the substantial con.;:
tent of their individuality. To subordinate these specific and familiar
identifications in favor of a generalized commitment to an overarching
and somewhat alien civil order is to risk a loss of definition as an autonomous
person, either through absorption into a culturally undifferentiated
mass or, what is even worse, through a domination by some othet:
7 I. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (New York, 1 958), p. 42. , ,
8 E. Shils, "Political Development in the New States," Comparative Studies llfi
Society and History 2 ( 1960): 265-292, 379-4 1 1 . ·1
The Integrative Revolution zsg
rival ethnic, racial, or linguistic community that is able to imbue that
order with the temper of its own personality. But at the same time, all
but the most unenlightened members of such societies are at least dimly
aware-and their leaders are acutely aware-that the possibilities for
social reform and material progress they so intensely desire and are so
determined to achieve rest with increasing weight on their being enclosed
in a reasonably large, independent, powerful, well-ordered polity.
The insistence on recognition as someone who is visible and matters
and the will to be modern and dynamic thus tend to diverge, and much
of the political process in the new states pivots around an heroic effort
to keep them aligned.
II
A more exact phrasing of the nature of the problem involved here is
that, considered as societies, the new states are abnormally susceptible
to serious disaffection based on primordial attachments.9 By a primordial
attachment is meant one that stems from the "givens"-or,
more precisely, as culture is inevitably involved in such matters, the assumed
"givens"-of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin
connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that stems from
being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular
language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social
practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on,
are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness
in and of themselves. One is bound to one's kinsman, one's neighbor,
one's fellow believer, ipso facto; as the result not merely of personal
affection, practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation,
but at least in great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import
attributed to the very tie itself. The general strength of such primordial
bonds, and the types of them that are important, differ from
person to person, from society to society, and from time to time. But
for virtually every person, in every society, at almost all times, some at-
9 E. Shils, "Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties," British Journal of
Sociology 8 ( 1 957): 1 30- 1 45.
z6o THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tachments seem to flow more from a sense of natural-some would say
spiritual-affinity than from social interaction.
In modern societies the lifting of such ties to the level of political
supremacy-though it has, of course, occurred and continues to occur
-has more and more come to be deplored as pathological. To an increasing
degree national unity is maintained not by calls to blood and
land but by a vague, intermittent, and routine allegiance to a civil state,
supplemented to a greater or lesser extent by governmental use of police
powers and ideological exhortation. The havoc wreaked, both upon
themselves and others, by those modern (or semimodern) states that did
passionately seek to become primordial rather than civil political communities,
as well as a growing realization of the practical advantages of
a wider-ranging pattern of social integration than primordial ties can
usually produce or even permit, have only strengthened the reluctance
publicly to advance race, language, religion, and the like as bases for
the definition of a terminal community. But in modernizing societies,
where the tradition of civil politics is weak and where the technical requirements
for an effective welfare government are poorly understood,
primordial attachments tend, as Nehru discovered, to be repeatedly, in
some cases almost continually, proposed and widely acclaimed as preferred
bases for the demarcation of autonomous political units. And the
thesis that truly legitimate authority flows only from the inherent coerciveness
such attachments are conceived somehow to possess is frankly,
energetically, and artlessly defended:
The reasons why a unilingual state is stable and a multilingual state unstable
are quite obvious. A state is built on fellow feeling. What is this fellow feeling?
To state briefly it is a feeling of a corporate sentiment of oneness which
makes those who are charged with it feel that they are kith and kin. This
feeling is a double-edged feeling. It is at once a feeling of "consciousness of
kind" which, on the one hand; binds together those who have it so strongly
that it overrides all differences arising out of economic conflicts or social
gradations and, on the other, severs them from those who are not of their
kind. It is a longing not to belong to any other group. The existence of this
fellow feeling is the foundation of a stable and democratic state.JO
10 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States, p. I I . Noting that the modern
bilingual states of Canada, Switzerland, and (white) South Africa might be quoted
against him, Ambedkar adds: "It must not be forgotten that the genius of India is
quite different than the genius of Canada, Switzerland, and South Africa. The genius
of India is to divide-the genius of Switzerland, South Africa and Canada
to unite." [In 1 972, both this note and my passage about the declining role of
primordial divisions in "modern" countries seem, to put it mildly, rather less con-
The Integrative Revolution
It is this crystallization of a direct conflict between primordial and
civil sentiments-this "longing not to belong to any other group"-that
gives to the problem variously called tribalism, parochialism, communalism,
and so on, a more ominous and deeply threatening quality than
most of the other, also very serious and intractable, problems the new
states face. Here we have not just competing loyalties, but competing
loyalties of the same general order, on the same level of integration.
There are many other competing loyalties in the new states, as in any
state-ties to class, party, business, union, profession, or whatever. But
groups formed of such ties are virtually never considered as possible
self-standing, maximal social units, as candidates for nationhood. Conflicts
among them occur only within a more or less fully accepted terminal
community whose political integrity they do not, as a rule, put
into question. No matter how severe they become, they do not threaten,
at least not intentionally, its existence as such. They threaten governments,
or even forms of government, but they rarely at best-and then
usually when they have become infused with primordial sentimentsthreaten
to undermine the nation itself, because they do not involve alternative
definitions of what the nation is, of what its scope of reference
is. Economic or class or intellectual disaffection threatens revolution,
but disaffection based on race, language, or culture threatens partition,
irredentism, or merger, a redrawing of the very limits of the state, a
new definition of its domain. Civil discontent finds its natural outlet in
the seizing, legally or illegally, of the state apparatus. Primordial discontent
strives more deeply and is satisfied less easily. If severe enough,
it wants not just Sukarno's or Nehru's or Moulay Hasan's head, it wants
Indonesia's or India's or Morocco's.
The actual foci around which such discontent tends to crystallize are
various, and in any given case several are usually involved concurrently,
sometimes at cross-purposes with one another. On a merely descriptive
level they are, nevertheless, fairly readily enumerable: 1 1
Assumed Blood Ties. Here the defining element is quasi-kinship.
"Quasi" because kin units formed around known biological relationship
vincing than they did in 1962, when this essay was originally written. But if
events in Canada, Belgium, Ulster, and so on have made primordial definition
seem less predominantly a "new state" phenomenon, they have made the general
argument developed here seem even more germane.]
1 1 For a similar but rather differently conceived and organized listing, see
Emerson, Empire to Nation, Chaps. 6, 7, and 8.
262 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE,
(extended families, lineages, and so on) are too small for even the mostJ
tradition-bound to regard them as having more than limited significance.
'
1
and the referent is, consequently, to a notion of untraceable but yet so-i
ciologically real kinship, as in a tribe. Nigeria, the Congo, and the:
greater part of sub-Saharan Africa are characterized by a prominence
of this sort of primordialism. But so also are the nomads or seminamads
of the Middle East-the Kurds, Baluchis, Pathans, and so on; the
Nagas, Mundas, Santals, and so on, of India; and most of the so-called
hill tribes of Southeast Asia.
Race. Clearly, race is similar to assumed kinship, in that it involves
an ethnobiological theory. But it is not quite the same thing. Here, the
reference is to phenotypical physical features-especially, of course,
skin color, but also facial form, stature, hair type, and so on-rather
than any very definite sense of common descent as such. The communal
problems of Malaya in large part focus around these sorts of differences,
between, in fact, two phenotypically very similar Mongoloid peoples.
"Negritude" clearly draws much, though perhaps not all, of its
force from the notion of race as a significant primordial property, and
the pariah commercial minorities-like the Chinese in Southeast Asia
or the Indians and Lebanese in Africa-are similarly demarcated.
lAnguage. Linguism-for some yet to be adequately explained
reasons-is particularly intense in the Indian subcontinent, has been
something of an issue in Malaya, and has appeared sporadically else-.
where. But as language has sometimes been held to be the altogether essential
axis of nationality conflicts, it is worth stressing that linguism is
not an inevitable outcome of linguistic diversity. As indeed kinship,
race, and the other factors to be listed below, language differences need
not in themselves be particularly divisive; they have not been so for the
most part in Tanganyika, Iran (not a new state in the strict sense, perhaps),
the Philippines, or even in Indonesia, where despite a great confusion
of tongues linguistic conflict seems to be the one social problem
the country has somehow omitted to demonstrate in extreme form. Furthermore,
primordial conflicts can occur where no marked linguistic differences
are involved, as in Lebanon, among the various sorts of Batak-speakers
in Indonesia, and to a lesser extent perhaps between the
Fulani and Hausa in northern Nigeria.
Region. Although a factor nearly everywhere, regionalism naturally
tends to be especially troublesome in geographically heterogeneous
areas. Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin in prepartitioned Vietnam, the two
The Integrative Revolution
baskets on the long pole, were opposed almost purely in regional terms,
sharing language, culture, race, and so on. The tension between East
and West Pakistan [now separated into Bangladesh and Pakistan ] involved
differences in language and culture too, but the geographic element
was of great prominence owing to the territorial discontinuity of
the country. Java versus the Outer Islands in archipelagic Indonesia,
and the Northeast versus the West Coast in mountain-bisected Malaya,
are other examples in which regionalism has been an important primordial
factor in national politics.
Religion. Indian partition is the outstanding case of the operation of
this type of attachment. But Lebanon, the Christian Karens and the
Moslem Arakenese in Burma, the Toba Bataks, Ambonese, and Minahassans
in Indonesia, the Moros in the Philippines, the Sikhs in Indian
Punjab and the Ahmadiyas in Pakistan, and the Hausa in Nigeria are
other well-known examples of its force in undermining or inhibiting a
comprehensive civil sense.
Custom. Again, differences in custom form a basis for a certain
amount of national disunity almost everywhere, and are of especial
prominence in those cases in which an intellectually and Ior artistically
rather sophisticated group sees itself as the bearer of a "civilization"
amid a largely barbarian population that would be well advised to
model itself upon it: the Bengalis in India, the Javanese in Indonesia,
the Arabs (as against the Berbers) in Morocco, the Amhara inanother
"old" new state-Ethiopia, and so forth. But it is important
also to point out that even vitally opposed groups may differ rather little
in their general style of life: Hindu Gujeratis and Maharashtrians in
India; Baganda and Bunyoro in Uganda; Javanese and Sundanese in Indonesia.
And the reverse holds also: the Balinese have far and away the
most divergent pattern of customs in Indonesia, but they have been, so
far, notable for the absence of any sense of primordial discontent at all.
But beyond such a mere listing of the sorts of primordial ties that
tend, in one place or another, to become politicized, it is necessary to
go further and attempt also to classify, or somehow order, the concrete
patterns of primordial diversity and conflict that in fact exist in the various
new states and of which these ties are the components.
This seemingly routine exercise in political ethnography is a rather
more delicate task than at first appears, however, not only because those
communalistic challenges to the integrity of the civil state that are at the
264 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE
moment being openly pressed must be discerned, but also because those
that are latent, lying concealed in the enduring structure of primordial
identifications, ready to take explicit political form given only the
proper sorts of social conditions, must be revealed. The fact that the In- ,
dian minority i n Malaya has not so far posed a very serious threat to •:
the viability of the state does not mean that it might not do so if some- ]
thing odd happened to the world price of rubber or if Mrs. Gandhi's J
hands-off policy toward overseas Indians should be replaced by one�.�
more like that of Mao toward the overseas Chinese. The Moro problem, �
which provided postgraduate field training for select members of several:
generations of West Pointers, now merely simmers in the Philippines, !
but it may not do so forever. The Free Thai movement seems dead atJ
the moment, but it could revive with a change in Thailand's foreign pol- ..
icy or even with Pathet success in Laos. Iraq's Kurds, several times ostensibly
mollified, continue to show signs of restlessness. And so on.
Primordially based political solidarities have a deeply abiding strength·
in most of the new states, but it is not always an active and immediately
'
apparent one.
Initially, a useful analytic distinction can be made with respect to this ·
matter of classification between those allegiances that operate more or
less wholly within the confines of a single civil state and those that do
not but which run across them. Or, put somewhat differently, one can'
contrast those cases in which the racial, tribal, linguistic, and so on, reference
group that is charged with a "corporate sentiment of oneness" is
smaller than the existing civil state, and those where it is larger, or at
least transcends its borders in some fashion. In the first instance primordial
discontent arises from a sense of political suffocation; in the
second, from a sense of political dismemberment. Karen separatism in
Burma, Ashanti in Ghana, or Baganda in Uganda are examples of the
former; pan-Arabism, greater Somaliism, pan-Africanism, of the latter.
Many of the new states are plagued by both these sorts of problems
at once. In the first place, most interstate primordial movements do not
involve entire separate countries, as the pan-movements at least tend to
do, but rather minorities scattered through several, for example: the
Kurdistan movement to unite Kurds in Iran, Syria, Turkey, and the Soviet
Union, perhaps the most unlikely-to-succeed political movement of
all time; the Abako movement of the late Mr. Kasuvubu and his Republic
of The Congo and Angola allies; the Dravidistan movement, ·
insofar as it comes to see itself as extending across Palk Strait from
fhe Integrative Revolution
South India into Ceylon; the movement, or perhaps it is so far only a
formless sentiment, for a unified and sovereign Bengal-greater
Bangladesh-independent of both India and Pakistan. And there are
even a few classical irredentist-type problems scattered among the new
states-the Malays in South Thailand, the Pushtu speakers along the
Afghan border of Pakistan, and so on; and when political boundaries
become more firmly established in sub-Saharan Africa there will be a
great many more of them. In all these cases, there is-or there may
develop-both a desire to escape the established civil state and a longing
to reunite a politically divided primordial community.1z
In the second place, interstate and intrastate primordial attachments
often cross-cut one another in a complex network of balanced-if most
precariously balanced-commitments. In Malaya one of the more effective
binding forces that has, so far at least, held Chinese and Malays together
in a single state despite the tremendous centrifugal tendencies the
racial and cultural difference generates is the fear on the part of either
group that should the Federation dissolve they may become a clearly
submerged minority in some other political framework: the Malays
through the turn of the Chinese to Singapore or China; the Chinese
through the tum of the Malays to Indonesia. In a similar way, in Ceylon
both the Tamils and Sinhalese manage to see themselves as minorities:
the Tamils because 70 percent of the Ceylonese are Sinhalese; the
Sinhalese because the eight million of them in Ceylon are all there are,
while in addition to the two million Tamils on the island there are 28
million more in South India. In Morocco, there has tended to be both a
within-state split between Arab and Berber, and an extrastate split between
partisans of Nasser's pan-Arabism and of Bourguiba's regroupement
maghrebin. And Nasser himself, until his death perhaps the new
states' most accomplished virtuoso in the primordial arts, was absorbed
in juggling pan-Arabist, pan-Islamic, and pan-African sentiments in the
interests of Egyptian hegemony among the Bandung powers.
But whether the relevant attachments outrun state boundaries or not,
most of the major primordial battles are for the moment being fought
within them. A certain amount of international conflict focusing around,
or at least animated by, primordial issues does exist among the new
12 The intensity, prevalence, or even the reality of such desires in each case is
another matter, about which nothing is being asserted here. How much, if any,
feeling in favor of assimilation to Malaya exists among the South Thailand Malays.
the actual strength of the Abako idea, or the attitudes of Tamils in Ceylon
toward the Dravidian separatists of Madras are matters for empirical research.
266 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE,
states. The hostility between Israel and her Arab neighbors and tbe1
quarrel of India and Pakistan over Kashmir are the most prominent!
cases, of course. But the embroilment of two older states, Greece and4
Turkey, over Cyprus is another case; the tension between Somalia and :
Ethiopia concerning an essentially irredentist problem a third; the Indo.;
nesian difficulties vis-a-vis Peking with respect to the issue of "dual citi-:
zenship" for Chinese residents of Indonesia a fourth, and so on. As the :
new states solidify politically, such disputes may well grow both more�
frequent and more intense. But as of now they have not yet become-)
with the exception of the Israeli-Arab conflict and, sporadically, the.:
Kashmir problem-paramount political issues, and the immediate sig-:
nificance of primordial differences is almost everywhere primarily do-j
mestic, though this is not to say that they are therefore without impor�,:
tant international implications. '3
The construction of a typology of the concrete patterns of primordial '
diversity that are found within the various new states is severely ham•;
pered, however, by the simple lack of detailed and reliable information:
in the overwhelming majority of the cases. But, again, a gross and;
merely empirical classification can nonetheless fairly easily be devised> :
and should prove useful as a rough-and-ready guide to a wilderness otb�;
erwise uncharted, and facilitate a more incisive analysis of the role of
primordial sentiments in civil politics than is possible in terms of "pluralism,"
"tribalism," "parochialism," "communalism," and the other
cliches of common-sense sociology:
1 . One common and, relatively speaking, simple pattern seems to be .
that of a single dominant and usually, though not inevitably, larger
group set over against a single strong and chronically troublesome mi�
nority: Cyprus with Greeks and Turks; Ceylon with Sinhalese and Tam• .
ils; Jordan with Jordanians and Palestinians, though in this last case the
dominant group is the smaller.
2. Similar in some ways to this first pattern, but more complex, is
13 Nor does the interstate significance of primordial sentiments lie wholly iJl
their divisive power. Pan-African attitudes, weak and ill-defined as they may be. ·
have provided a useful context of mild solidarity for the confrontation of leaded .
of ml\ior African countries. Burma's strenuous (and expensive) efforts to ;
strengthen and revitalize international Buddhism, as i n the Sixth Great Couneil .
at Yegu in 1 954, served, at least temporarily, to link her more effectively w�;
the other Theravada countries-Ceylon, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. And ••
vague, mainly racial, feeling of common "Malayness" has played a positive r�!
in the relations between Malaya and Indonesia and Malaya and the Philippines.,:
and even, more recently, between Indonesia and the Philippines. j
The Integrative Revolution
that of one central-often enough in a geographic sense as well as a
political-group and several mediumly large and at least somewhat opposed
peripheral groups: the Javanese versus the Outer Island peoples
in Indonesia; the Irrawaddy Valley Burmese versus the various hill
tribes and upland valley peoples in Burma; the central plateau Persians
and the various tribes in Iran (though, again, this is not strictly a new
state) ; the Atlantic Plain Arabs encircled by the diverse Berber tribes
of the Rif, the Atlas, and the Sous; the Mekong Lao and the tribal peoples
in Laos; and so on. How far such a pattern is to be found in black
Africa is unclear. In the one case where it might have crystallized, with
the Ashanti in Ghana, the power of the central group seems to have, at
least temporarily, been broken. And whether in a new state the Baganda
will be able to maintain [or, perhaps now, regain ] their dominant
position vis-a-vis the other Uganda groups through their greater
education, political sophistication, and so on, and despite their comprising
but about a fifth of the population, remains to be seen.
3. Another pattern that forms an internally even less homogeneous
type is a bipolar one of two nearly evenly balanced major groups: Malays
and Chinese in Malaya (though there is also a smaller Indian
group); or Christians and Moslems in Lebanon (though here both
groups are actually aggregates of smaller sects); or Sunnis and Shiis in
Iraq. The two regions of Pakistan, although the Western region is far
from wholly homogeneous within itself, gave that state a sharply bipolar
primordial pattern, which has now torn it in half. Vietnam before partition
tended to take this form-Tonkin versus Cochin-this problem
now having been "solved" with the assistance of the great powers,
though reunification of the country might revive it. Even Libya, which
has scarcely enough people to develop decent group conflicts, has something
of this pattern with the Cyrenecia-Tripolitania contrast.
4. Next, there is the pattern of a relatively even gradation of groups
in importance, from several large ones through several medium-sized
ones to a number of small ones, with no clearly dominant ones and no
sharp cut-off points. India, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Kenya are perhaps
examples.
.
5 . Finally, there is simple ethnic fragmentation, as Wallerstein has
called it, with multiple small groups, into which somewhat residual category
it is necessary to toss much of Africa, at least until more is
known about it. 14 One proposal, issuing from the nothing-if-not-exper-
14 I. Wallerstein, "The Emergence of Two West African Nations: Ghana and
the Ivory Coast" (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1959).
268 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES.
1
imental Leopoldville Government, suggesting a grouping of the Congo
Republic's estimated two hundred and fifty or so separate tribal-linguistic
groups into eighty autonomous tribal regions, which would
then be organized into twelve federated states, gives something of an
indication of the extent to which such fragmentation can go, and the
complexity of primordial allegiances it may involve.
The world of personal identity collectively ratified and publicly expressed
is thus an ordered world. The patterns of primordial identific•tion
and cleavage within the existing new states are not fluid, shapeless,
and infinitely various, but are definitely demarcated and vary in systematic
ways. And as they vary, the nature of the individual's problem of
social self-assertion varies with them, as it does also according to his
position within any one type of pattern. The task of securing recognition
as someone who is somebody to whom attention must be paid appears
in a different form and light to a Sinhalese in Ceylon than it does
to a Javanese in Indonesia or a Malay in Malaya, because to be a member
of a major group set over against one minor one is a quite different
matter from being a member of such a group over against a plurality of
minor ones or another major one. But it appears also in a different
form and light to a Turk in Cyprus than to a Greek, to a Karen in
Burma than to a Burmese, to a Tiv in Nigeria than to a Hausa, because
membership in a minor group places one in a different position from
that in which membership in a major group places one, even within
a single system. I s The so-called pariah communities of "foreign" traders
that are found in so many of the new states-the Lebanese in West Af·
rica, the Indians in East Africa, the Chinese in Southeast Asia and, in a
somewhat different way, the Marwaris in South India-live in an altogether
different social universe, so far as the problem of the maintenance
of a recognized identity is concerned, than do the settled
agricultural groups, no matter how small and insignificant, in the same
societies. The network of primordial alliance and opposition is a dense,
intricate, but yet precisely articulated one, the product, in most cases, of
centuries of gradual crystallization. The unfamiliar civil state, born yes·
terday from the meager remains of an exhausted colonial regime, is su-
15 For a brief discussion of this problem with respect to Indonesia, see C.
Geertz, "The Javanese Village," in Local, Ethnic and National Loyalties in Village
Indonesia, ed. G. W. Skinner, Yale University, Southeast Asia Studies, CUltural
Report Series, No. 8 (New Haven, 1959), pp. 34-4 1 .
'fhe Integrative Revolution
perimposed upon this fine-spun and lovingly conserved texture of pride
and suspicion, and must somehow contrive to weave it into the fabric of
modern politics.
III
The reduction of primordial sentiments to civil order is rendered more
difficult, however, by the fact that political modernization tends initially
not to quiet such sentiments but to quicken them. The transfer of sovereignty
from a colonial regime to an independent one is more than a
mere shift of power from foreign hands to native ones; it is a transformation
of the whole pattern of political life, a metamorphosis of subjects
into citizens. Colonial governments, like the aristocratic governments
of premodern Europe in whose image they were fashioned, are
aloof and unresponsive; they stand outside the societies they rule, and
act upon them arbitrarily, unevenly, and unsystematically. But the governments
of the new states, though oligarchic, are popular and attentive;
they are located in the midst of the societies they rule, and as they develop
act upon them in progressively more continuous, comprehensive,
and purposeful manner. For the Ashanti cocoa farmer, the Gujerati
shopkeeper, or the Malayan Chinese tin miner, his country's attainment
of political independence is also his own attainment, willy-nilly, of
modern political status, no matter how culturally traditional he may remain
nor how ineffectively and anachronistically the new state may in
practice function. He now becomes an integral part of an autonomous
and differentiated polity that begins to touch his life at every point except
the most strictly private. "The same people which has hitherto
been kept as far as possible from government affairs must now be
drawn into them," the Indonesian nationalist Sjahrir wrote on the eve of
World War II, defining exactly the character of the "revolution" that
was in fact to follow in the Indies over the next decade-"That people
must be made politically conscious. Its political interest must be stimulated
and maintained." 1 s
This thrusting of a modern political consciousness upon the mass of a
still largely unmodernized population does indeed tend to lead to the
1s S. Sjahrir, Out of Exile (New York, 1949), p. 2 1 5 .
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
stimulation and maintenance of a very intense popular interest in the affairs
of government. But, as a primordially based "corporate feeling of
oneness," remains for many the fons et origo of legitimate authoritythe
meaning of the term "self' in "self-rule"-much of this interest
takes the form of an obsessive concern with the relation of one's tribe,
region, sect, or whatever to a center of power that, while growing rapidly
more active, is not easily either insulated from the web of primordial
attachments, as was the remote colonial regime, or assimilated
to them as are the workaday authority systems of the "little community."
Thus, it is the very process of the formation of a sovereign civil
state that, among other things, stimulates sentiments of parochialism,
communalism, racialism, and so on, because it introduced into society a
valuable new prize over which to fight and a frightening new force with
which to contend.17 The doctrines of the nationalist propagandists to
the contrary notwithstanding, Indonesian regionalism, Malayan racialism,
Indian linguism, or Nigerian tribalism are, in their political dimensions,
not so much the heritage of colonial divide-and-rule policies as
they are products of the replacement of a colonial regime by an independent,
domestically anchored, purposeful unitary state. Though they
rest on historically developed distinctions, some of which colonial rule
helped to accentuate (and others of which it helped to moderate), they
are part and parcel of the very process of the creation of a new polity
and a new citizenship.
For a telling example in this connection one may look to Ceylon,
which, having made one of the quietest of entries into the family of new
states is now [ 1 962 ) the scene of one of its noisiest communal uproars.
Ceylonese independence was won largely without struggle; in fact, without
even very much effort. There was no embittered nationalist mass
movement, as in most of the other new states, no loudly passionate
hero-leader, no diehard colonial opposition, no violence, no arrests-no
1 7 As Talcott Parsons has pointed out, defined as the capacity to mobilize social
resources for social goals, is not a "zero-sum" quantity within a social
system, but, like wealth, is generated by the working of particular, in this case
political rather than economic, institutions. "The Distribution of Power in American
Society," World Politics 10 ( 1 957): 123-143. The growth of a modern state
within a traditional social context represents, therefore, not merely the shifting or
transfer of a fixed quantity of power between groups in such a manner that ag·
gregatively the gains of certain groups or individuals match the losses of others,
but rather the creation of a new and more efficient machine for the production of
power itself, and thus an increase in the general political capacity of the society.
This is a much more genuinely "revolutionary" phenomenon than a mere redis·
tribution, however radical, of power within a given system.
The Integrative Revolution
revolution really, for the 1 947 transfer of sovereignty consisted of the
replacement of conservative, moderate, aloof British civil servants by
conservative, moderate, aloof British-educated Ceylonese notables who,
to more nativistic eyes at least, "resembled the former colonial rulers in
everything but the color of their skin." 1 8 The revolution was to come
later, nearly a decade after formal independence and the British governor's
valedictory expression of "profound satisfaction that Ceylon has
reached its goal of freedom without strife or bloodshed along the path
of peaceful negotiation" 19 proved to be somewhat premature: in 1 956
wild Tamil-Sinhalese riots claimed more than a hundred lives, in 1 958,
perhaps as many as two thousand.
The country, 70 percent Sinhalese, 23 percent Tamil, has been
marked by a certain amount of group tension for centuries.2° But such
tension has taken the distinctively modern form of an implacable, comprehensive,
and ideologically instigated mass hatred mainly since the
late S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike was swept into the premiership on a sudden
wave of Sinhalese cultural, religious, and linguistic revivalism in
1 956. Himself Oxford-educated, vaguely Marxist, and essentially secularist
in civil matters, Bandaranaike undermined the authority of the
English-speaking (and biethnic Colombo) patriciate by appealing
openly, and one suspects somewhat cynically, to the primordial sentiments
of the Sinhalese, promising a "Sinhala-only" linguistic policy, a
place of pride for Buddhism and the Buddhist clergy, and a radical reversal
of the supposed policy of "pampering" the Tamils, as well as rejecting
Western dress for the traditional "cloth and banian" of the Sinhalese
countryman.21 And if, as one of his more uncritical apologists
claims, his "supreme ambition" was not "to set up an outmoded, paro-
1' D. K. Rangenekar, "The Nationalist Revolution in Ceylon," Pacific Affairs
33 ( 1 960): 361 -374.
It Quoted in M. Weiner, "The Politics of South Asia," in G. Almond and J.
Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, N.J., 1 960), pp.
1 53-246.
2o About half the Tamils are stateless "Indian Tamils"-that is, individuals
transported to Ceylon in the nineteenth century to work on British tea estates,
and now rejected as citizens by India on the ground that they live in Ceylon, and
by Ceylon on the ground that they are but sojourners from India.
21 Commenting on the spectacular failure of Sir Ivor Jennings' 1954 prediction
that Bandaranaike was unlikely to win the leadership of the nationalist movement
because he was a "political Buddhist," having been educated as a Christian,
Rangenekar shrewdly remarks, "In an Asian setting a Western-educated politician
who renounces his Westernization and upholds indigenous culture and civilization
wields a much greater influence than the most dynamic local thoroughbred
can ever hope to do." Rangenekar, "Nationalist Revolution in Ceylon."
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
chial, racialist government," but to "stabilize democracy and convert
his country into a modern welfare state based on Nehru-style
socialism," 22 he soon found himself the helf:.less victim of a rising tide
of primordial fervor, and his death, after thirty hectic and frustrating
months in power, at the hands of an obscurely motivated Buddhist
monk, was merely that much more ironic.
The first definite move toward a resolute, popularly based, social reform
government led, therefore, not to heightened national unity, but to
the reverse-increased linguistic, racial, regional, and religious parochialism,
a strange dialectic whose actual workings have been well-described
by Wriggins.2a The institution of universal suffrage made the
temptation to court the masses by appealing to traditional loyalties virtually
irresistible, and led Bandaranaike and his followers to gamble,
unsuccessfully as it turned out, on being able to tune primordial sentiments
up before elections and down after them. The modernizing efforts
of his government in the fields of health, education, administration, and
so on, threatened the status of consequential rural personages-monks,
ayurvedic doctors, village schoolteachers, local officials-who were
thereby rendered that much more nativistic and insistent upon communal
tokens of reassurance in exchange for their political support. The
search for a common cultural tradition to serve as the content of the
country's identity as a nation now that it had become, somehow, a state,
led only to the revivification of ancient, and better forgotten, Tamil-Sinhalese
treacheries, atrocities, insults, and wars. The eclipse of the Western-educated
urban elite, within which class loyalties and old-school ties
tended to override primordial differences, removed one of the few important
points of amicable contact between the two communities. The
first stirrings of fundamental economic change aroused fears that the position
of the industrious, frugal, aggressive Tamils would be strengthened
at the expense of the less methodical Sinhalese. The intensified
competition for government jobs, the increasing importance of the vernacular
press, and even government-instituted land-reclamation programs-because
they threatened to alter population distribution and
so communal representation in the parliament-all acted in a similarly
provocative manner. Ceylon's aggravated primordial problem is not a
mere legacy, an inherited impediment to her political, social, and eco-
22 Ibid.
23 H. Wriggins, "Impediments to Unity in New Nations-The Case of Ceylon"
(unpublished).
The Integrative Revolution 273
nomic modernization; it is a direct and immediate reftex of her first
serious-if still rather ineffective-attempt to achieve such moderniza­
tion.
And this dialectic, variously expressed, is a generic characteristic of
new-state politics. In Indonesia, the establishment of an indigenous unitary
state made the fact that the thinly populated but mineral-rich Outer
Islands produced the bulk of the country's foreign-exchange earnings,
while densely populated, resource-poor Java consumed the bulk of its
income, painfully apparent in a way it could never become in the colonial
era, and a pattern of regional jealousy developed and hardened to
the point of armed revolt.24 In Ghana, hurt Ashanti pride burst into
open separatism when, in order to accumulate development funds,
Nkrumah's new national government fixed the cocoa price lower than
what Ashanti cocoa growers wished it to be.25 In Morocco, Riffian Berbers,
offended when their substantial military contribution to the struggle
for independence was not followed by greater governmental assistance
in the form of schools, jobs, improved communications facilities,
and so on, revived a classic pattern of tribal insolence-refusal to pay
taxes, boycott of marketplaces, retreat to a predatory mountain lifein
order to gain Rabat's regard.2& In Jordan, Abdullah's desperate attempt
to strengthen his newly sovereign civil state through the annexation
of Cis-Jordan, negotiation with Israel, and modernization of the
army provoked his assassination by an ethnically humiliated pan-Arab
Palestinian.27 Even in those new states where such discontent has not
progressed to the point of open dissidence, there has almost universally
arisen around the developing struggle for governmental power as such a
broad penumbra of primordial strife. Alongside of, and interacting
with, the usual politics of party and parliament, cabinet and bureau-
24 H. Fieth, "Indonesia." in G. MeT. Kahin, ed., Government and Politics of
Southeast Asia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1 959), pp. 1 55-238; and Kahin, G. MeT., ed.,
Mqjor Governments of Asia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1 958), pp. 47 1-592. This is not to say
that the crystallization of regional enmities was the sole motivating force in the
Padang rebellion, nor that the Java-Outer Islands contrast was the only axis of
opposition. In all the quoted examples in this essay, the desire to be recognized
as a responsible agent whose wishes, acts, hopes, and opinions matter is intertwined
with the more familiar desires for wealth, power, prestige, and so on.
Simple primordial determinism is no more defensible a position than economic
determinism.
2S D. Apter, The Gold Coast in Transition (Princeton, N.J., 1 955), p. 68.
26 W. Lewis, "Feuding and Social Change in Morocco," Journal of Coriflict
Resolution 5 ( 1 961): 43-54.
27 R. Nolte, "The Arab Solidarity Agreement," American University Field
Staff Letter, Southwest Asia Series, 1 957.
274 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
cracy, or monarch and army, there exists, nearly everywhere, a sort of
parapolitics of clashing public identities and quickening ethnocratic as­
pirations.
What is more, this parapolitical warfare seems to have its own characteristic
battlegrounds; there are certain specific institutional contexts
outside the customary arenas of political combat into which it has a
strong inclination to settle. Though primordial issues do, of course, turn
up from time to time in parliamentary debates, cabinet deliberations, judicial
decisions, and, more often, in electoral campaigns, they show a
persistent tendency to emerge in purer, more explicit, and more virulent
form in some places where other sorts of social issues do not ordinarily,
or at least so often or so acutely, appear.
One of the most obvious of these is the school system. Linguistic conflicts,
in particular, tend to emerge in the form of school criseswitness
the fierce dispute between Malay and Chinese teachers' unions
over the degree to which Malay should replace Chinese in Chinese
schools in Malaya, the three-way guerrilla war between partisans of English,
Hindi, and various local vernaculars as instruction media in
India, or the bloody riots staged by Bengali-speaking university students
to block the imposition of Urdu by West on East Pakistan. But religious
issues, too, tend to penetrate educational contexts quite readily. In Moslem
countries there is the enduring question of the reform of traditional
Koranic schools toward Western forms; in the Philippines there is the ·
clash between the American-introduced tradition of the secular public
school and the intensified clerical effort to increase the teaching of reli- .
gion in such schools; and in Madras there are the Dravidian separatists
announcing sanctimoniously that "education must be free from political,
religious or communal bias," by which they in fact mean that it "must
not stress Hindu writings such as the epic Ramayana." 28 Even largely
regional struggles tend to engulf the school system: in Indonesia the rise ·
of provincial discontent was accompanied by a competitive multiplication
of local institutions of higher learning to the point where, despite .
the extreme shortage of qualified instructors, there is now a faculty in.:
nearly every major region of the country, monuments to past resenh
ments and perhaps cradles for future ones; and a similar pattern maY::
now be developing in Nigeria. If the general strike is the classical polit-i
ical expression of class warfare, and the coup d'etat of the struggle be- j
'
zs P. Talbot, "Raising a Cry for Secession," American University Field Staff�
Letter, South Asia Series, 1957. 1
The Integrative Revolution 275
tween militarism and parliamentarianism, then the school crisis is perhaps
becoming the classical political-or parapolitical-expression of
the clash of primordial loyalties.
There are a number of other poles around which parapolitical vortices
tend to form, but so far as the literature is concerned they have
been more noted in passing than analyzed in detail. Social statistics is
an example. In Lebanon there has not been a census since 1 932, for
fear that taking one would reveal such changes in the religious composition
of the population as to make the marvelously intricate political arrangements
designed to balance sectarian interests unviable. In India,
with its national language problem, just what constitutes a Hindi
speaker has been a matter of some rather acrimonious dispute, because
it depends upon the rules of counting: Hindi enthusiasts use census figures
to prove that as many as half of India's people speak "Hindi" (including
Urdu and Punjabi), while anti-Hindiists force the figure down as
low as 30 percent by considering such matters as script differences, and
evidently even religious affiliation of the speaker, as linguistically significant.
Then, too, there is the closely related problem of what, in
connection with the strange fact that according to the 1 94 1 census of
India there were 25 million tribal peoples but in the 1 95 1 census only
1 .7 million, Weiner has aptly called "genocide by census redefinition."
29 In Morocco, published figures for the percentage of the
population that is Berber run all the way from 35 to 60 percent, and
some nationalist leaders would like to believe, or have others believe,
that the Berbers are a French invention altogether.ao Statistics, real or
fancied, concerning the ethnic composition of the civil service are a favorite
weapon of primordial demagogues virtually everywhere, being
particularly effective where a number of local officials are members of a
group other than the one they administrate. And in Indonesia a leading
newspaper was banned, at the height of the regionalist crisis, for print-
29 M. Weiner, "Community Associations in Indian Politics" (unpublished). The
reverse process, "ethnogenesis by census redefinition," also occurs, as when in
Libreville, the Gabon capital, Togolese and Dahomeans are lumped statistically
into a new category, "the Popo," or in Northern Rhodesia copperbelt towns
Henga, Tonga, Tambuka, and so on, are "by common consent" grouped together
as Nyasalanders, these manufactured groupings then taking on a real "ethnic" existence.
I. Wallerstein, "Ethnicity and National Integration in West Africa," Cahiers
d'etudes africaines 3 ( 1960): 1 29-1 39.
30 The 35 percent figure can be found in N. Barbour, ed., A Survey of North
West Africa (New York, 1959), p. 79; the 60 percent figure in D. Rustow, "The
Politics of the Near East," in Almond and Coleman, Politics of Developing
Areas, pp. 369-453.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ing, in mock innocence, a simple bar graph depicting export earnings
and government expenditure by province.
Dress (in Burma hundreds of frontier tribesmen brought to Rangoon
for Union day to improve their patriotism are cannily sent home with
gifts of Burmese clothing), historiography (in Nigeria a sudden proliferation
of tendentious tribal histories strengthens the already very powerful
centrifugal tendencies plaguing the country), and the official insignia
of public authority (in Ceylon, Tamils have refused to use automobile
license plates marked with Sinhala characters, and in South India they
have painted over Hindi railroad signs) are other as yet but impressionistically
observed spheres of parapolitical controversy.a1 So, also, is the
rapidly expanding complex of tribal unions, caste organizations, ethnic
fraternities, regional associations, and religious sodalities that seems to
be accompanying urbanization in virtually all the new states, and has
made the major cities in some of them-Lagos, Beirut, Bombay,
Medan-caldrons of communal tension.a2 But, details aside, the point is
that there swirl around the emerging governmental institutions of the '
new states, and the specialized politics they tend to support, a whole
host of self-reinforcing whirlpools of primordial discontent, and that
this parapolitical maelstrom is in great part an outcome-to continue
the metaphor, a backwash-of that process of political development itself.
The growing capacity of the state to mobilize social resources for
public ends, its expanding power, roils primordial sentiments because,
given the doctrine that legitimate authority is but an extension of the inherent
moral coerciveness such sentiments possess, to permit oneself to
be ruled by men of other tribes, other races, or other religions is to submit
not merely to oppression but to degradation-to exclusion from the
moral community as a lesser order of being whose opinions, attitudes,
wishes, and so on, simply do not fully count, as those of children, the
simple-minded, and the insane do not fully count in the eyes of those
who regard themselves as mature, intelligent, and sane.
Though it can be moderated, this tension between primordial senti- ·
ments and civil politics probably cannot be entirely dissolved. The
31 On Burmese dress, see H. Tinker, The Union of Burma (New York, 1 951).
p. 1 84. On Nigerian tribal histories, see Coleman, Nigeria, pp. 327-328. On Cey·
lonese license plates, see Wriggins, "Ceylon's Time of Troubles, 1 956-8," FaT
Eastern Survey 28 ( 1 959): 33-38. On Hindi railroad signs, see Weiner, "Commu·
nity Associations."
32 For a general discussion of the role of voluntary associations in the urbani· ·
zation process in modernizing societies, see Wallerstein, ''The Emergence of Two J
West African Nations," pp. 144-230.
·
The Integrative Revolution 277
power of the "givens" of place, tongue, blood, looks, and way-of-life to
shape an individual's notion of who, at bottom, he is and with whom,
indissolubly, he belongs is rooted in the nonrational foundations of personality.
And, once established, some degree of involvement of this
unreflective sense of collective selfhood in the steadily broadening political
process of the national state is certain, because that process seems
to touch on such an extraordinarily wide range of matters. Thus, what
the new states-or their leaders-must somehow contrive to do as far
as primordial attachments are concerned is not, as they have so often
tried to do, wish them out of existence by belittling them or even denying
their reality, but domesticate them. They must reconcile them with
the unfolding civil order by divesting them of their legitimizing force
with respect to governmental authority, by neutralizing the apparatus of
the state in relationship to them, and by channeling discontent arising
out of their dislocation into properly political rather than parapolitical
forms of expression.
This goal, too, is not fully achievable or at least has never yet been
achieved-even in Mr. Ambedkar's Canada and Switzerland (the less
said of South Africa in this connection, the better) with their supposed
"genius to unite." But it is relatively so, and it is upon the possibility of
such relative achievement that the hope of the new states to turn the attack
upon their integrity and their legitimacy by unfettered primordial
enthusiasms rests. As with industrialization, urbanization, restratification,
and the various other social and cultural "revolutions" these states
seem fated to undergo, the containment of diverse primordial communities
under a single sovereignty promises to tax the political capacity of
their peoples to its utmost limits-in some cases, no doubt, beyond
them.
IV
This "integrative revolution" has, of course, already begun, and a desperate
search for ways and means to create a more perfect union is
everywhere under way. But it has merely begun and just got under way,
so that if one surveys the new states on a broadly comparative basis,
one is confronted with a bewildering picture of diverse institutional and
ideological responses to what, for all its variation in outward form, is
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
essentially a common problem-the political normalization of primordial
discontent.
The new states are, today, rather like naive or apprentice painters or
poets or composers, seeking their own proper style, their own distinctive
mode of solution for the difficulties posed by their medium. Imitative,
poorly organized, eclectic, opportunistic, subject to fads, ill-defined,
uncertain, they are exceedingly difficult to order typologically,
either in classical categories or invented ones, in the same paradoxical
way that it is usually so much more difficult to classify immature artists
firmly into schools or traditions than it is mature ones who have found
their own unique style and identity. Indonesia, India, Nigeria, and the
rest share, in the matter at hand, only a predicament; but a predicament
that is one of the main stimuli to political creativity for them, pressing
them on to a restless experimentation in order to find ways to extricate
themselves from it and triumph over it. Again, this is not to say that all
this creativity will ultimately be successful; there are manque states as
there are manque artists, as France perhaps demonstrates. But it is the
recalcitrance of primordial issues that, among other things, keeps the
process of incessant political, and even constitutional, innovation going,
and gives to any attempt at systematic classification of new state polities
a radically provisional, if not simply premature, quality.
An attempt to order the various governmental arrangements now ·
emerging in the new states as means for coping with problems arising
from linguistic, racial, and so on, heterogeneity must begin, therefore,
with a simple empirical review of a number of such arrangements, a
mere setting out in model form of existing experiments. From such a review
it should be possible to derive a sense of at least the ranges of variation
involved, a notion of the general dimensions of the social field
within which these arrangements are taking shape. Typologizing becomes,
in this approach, a matter, not of devising constructed types,
ideal or otherwise, which will isolate fundamental constancies of struc- '
ture amid the confusion of phenomenal variation, but of determining
the limits with which such variation takes place, the domain over which
it plays. Here, a sense of such ranges, dimensions, limits, and domains
can perhaps best be conveyed, in a kaleidoscopic sort of way, by tllej
rapid presentation of a series of snapshot pictures of the "integrative;
revolution" as it seems to be proceeding in several selected new statel-i
showing different concrete patterns of primordial diversity and differ�$�
modes of political response to those patterns. Indonesia, Malay�
The Integrative Revolution 279
surma, India, Lebanon, Morocco, and Nigeria, culturally distinct and
geographically scattered, are as appropriate subjects as any for this type
of flying survey of divided nations en route-ex hypothesi-to unity.33
33 As, with the partial exception of Indonesia [and now- 1912-Morocco] ,
all the following summaries are based on the literature rather than on field research,
a full bibliography of sources would obviously be too lengthy for inclusion
in an essay. I therefore list below only those works upon which I have relied
rather heavily. The best general survey including the countries discussed is Almond
and Coleman, Politics of Developing Areas, and for Asia I have found the
two previously cited symposia edited by Kahin, Governments and Politics of
Southeast Asia and Major Governments of Asia, most useful. Emerson, Empire
to Nation, also offers some valuable comparative materials.
INDONESIA: H. Feith, The Wilopo Cabinet, 1 952-1 953 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1 958); H.
Feith, The Indonesian Elections of 1 955 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1952); G. Pauker, "The
Role of Political Organization in Indonesia," Far Eastern Survey 27 (1958):
129- 142; G. W. Skinner, Local, Ethnic, and National Loyalties in Village Indo­
nesia.
MALAYA: M. Freedman, "The Growth of a Plural Society in Malaya," Pacific
Affairs 33 ( 1 960): 1 58-167; N. Ginsburg and C. F. Roberts, Jr., Malaya (Seattle,
1958); J. N. Parmer, "Malaya's First Year of Independence," Far Eastern Survey
27 ( 1958): 161-168; T. E. Smith, "The Malayan Elections of 1959," Pacific Affairs
33 ( 1960): 38-47.
BURMA: L. Bigelow, "The 1 960 Elections in Burma," Far Eastern Survey 29
( 1960): 70-74; G. Fairbairn, "Some Minority Problems in Burma," Pacific Affairs
30 ( 1 957): 299-3 1 1 ; J. Silverstein, "Politics in the Shan State: The Question
of the Secession from the Union of Burma," The Journal of Asian Studies 1 8
(1 958): 43-58; H. Tinker, The Union of Burma.
INDIA : Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States; S. Harrison, India; R. L.
Park and I. Tinker, eds., Leadership and Political Institutions in India (Princeton,
N.J., 1959); Report of the States Reorganization Commission (New Delhi,
1955); M. Weiner, Party Politics in India (Princeton, N.J., 1957).
LEBANON : V. Ayoub, "Political Structure of a M iddle East Community: A
Druze Village in Mount Lebanon" (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1 955); P.
Rondot, Les Institutions politiques du Liban (Paris, 1 957); N . A . Ziadeh, Syria
and Lebanon (London, 1 957); N. A. Ziadeh, "The Lebanese Elections, 1 960,"
Middle East Journa1 14 ( 1960): 367-38 1 .
MoRocco: D . Ashford, Political Change in Morocco (Princeton, N .J., 196 1 ); N.
Barbour, ed., A Survey of North West Africa (New York, 1959); H. Favre, "Le
Maroc A L'Epreuve de Ia Democratisation" (unpublished, 1958); J. and S. Lacouture,
Le Maroc A L'Epreuve (Paris, 1 958); W. Lewis, "Rural Administration
in Morocco," Middle East Journal 14 ( 1960): 45-54; W. Lewis, "Feuding and Social
Change in Morocco," The Journal of Cotiflict Resolution 5 ( 1 961): 43-54.
N IGERIA : J. Coleman, Nigeria; Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire
into the Fears of Minorities and the Means of Allaying Them (London, 1 958);
H. and M. Smythe, The New Nigerian Elite (Stanford, Calif.. 1960).
For current events I have found the American University Field Staff Letters,
particularly those on Indonesia (W. Hanna), Malaya (W. Hanna), India (P. Talbot),
Morocco (C. Gallagher), and Nigeria (R. Frodin), very useful.
[Since the above list was compiled, a decade ago, an enormous number of
new works bearing on our subject have appeared. So far as I know, however, a
comprehensive bibliography in this field does not yet exist.]
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
INDONESIA
Until about the beginning of 1 957, the regional tension between Java
and the Outer Islands was kept in bounds by a combination of the continuing
momentum of revolutionary solidarity, a broadly representative
multiparty system, and a characteristically Indonesian bisection of paramount
executive power in an institution called the Dwi-TunggaiIoosely,
"dual Ieadership"-in which the two veteran nationalist leaders,
Sukarno, a Javanese, and Mohammed Hatta, a Sumatran, shared
primacy as President and Vice-President of the Republic. Since then,
the solidarity has faded, the party system collapsed, and the Dwi-Tunggal
split. Despite the effective military suppression of the regional rebellion
of 1 958, and despite Sukarno's feverish attempts to focus the government
on his person as the incarnation of "the spirit of '45," the political
equilibrium thus lost has not been restored, and the new nation has be-
'
come an almost classic case of integrative failure. With every step toward
modernity has come increased regional discontent; with each :
increase in regional discontent has come a new revelation of political
incapacity; and with each new revelation of political incapacity h�
come a loss of political nerve and a more desperate resort to an unstable
amalgam of military coercion and ideological revivalism.
It was the first general elections of 1 955 that, by completing the general
outlines of a parliamentary system, made it inescapably apparent to '
reflective Indonesians that they had either to find some way of solving
their problems within the framework of the modern civil order that they
had almost reluctantly created or face a rising crescendo of primordial
,
discontent and parapolitical conflict. Having been expected to clear the-,
air, the elections only stirred it. They shifted the political center of
gravity away from the Dwi-Tunggal toward the parties. They crystal•,
lized the popular strength of the Communist Party, which not only_
gained some 1 6 percent of the total vote, but drew nearly 90 percent of
its support from Java, thus fusing regional and ideological tensions.
They dramatized the fact that the interest of some of the more important
centers of power in the society-the army, the Chinese, certain�
Outer Island export traders, and so on-were not adequately repre-,1
sented in the formal political system. And they shifted the basis of qual.fj
ification for political leadership away from revolutionary distinction t��
ward mass appeal. At once the elections demanded that, if the existi�
The Integrative Revolution
civil order were to be maintained and developed, a whole new set of relationships
among the president, vice-president, parliament, and cabinet
be worked out; that an aggressive, well-:<>rganized totalitarian party hostile
to the very conception of democratic, multiparty politics be contained;
that important groups outside the parliamentary framework be
brought into effective relation to it; and that a new basis for elite solidarity
other than the shared experiences of 1 945-1949 be found. Given
extremely intractable economic problems, a cold-war international environment,
and a large number of long-standing personal vendettas among
the highly placed, it would perhaps have been surprising had this multiple
demand been met. But there is no reason to believe that given the
requisite political talents, it could not have been.
In any case, it was not. By the end of 1 956 the always delicate relationship
between Sukarno and Hatta became so strained that the latter
resigned, an action that in essence withdrew the stamp of legitimacy
from the central government so far as many of the leading military, financial,
political, and religious groups in the Outer Islands were concerned.
The duumvirate had been the symbolic, and to a great extent
the real, guarantee of the recognition of the various Outer Island peoples
as full and equal partners with the so much more numerous Javanese
in the Republic, a quasi-constitutional warranty that the Javanese
tail would not be permitted to wag the Indonesian dog. Sukarno,
part Javanese mystic and part inveterate eclectic, and Hatta, part
Sumatran puritan and part shirtsleeve administrator, supplemented one
another not only politically but primordially. Sukarno summed up the
syncretic high culture of the elusive Javanese; Hatta, the Islamic mercantilism
of the less subtle Outer Islanders. The major political parties
-particularly the Communists, fusing Marxist ideology with traditional
Javanese "folk religion," and the Moslem Masjumi, which having
gained nearly half of its popular vote in the more orthodox regions outside
Java became their major spokesman-aligned themselves accordingly.
Thus, when the Vice-President resigned and the President moved
to become, under his conception of a back-to- 1 945 (that is, pre-elections)
"guided democracy," the sole axis of Indonesian national life, the
Republic's political balance was upset and the advance toward regional
disaffection entered its radical phase.
Since then, spasmodic violence has alternated with a frantic search
for political panaceas. Abortive coups, misfired assassination attempts,
and unsuccessful insurrections have followed one after the other, punc-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tuated by an astounding wealth of ideological and institutional experiments.
New Life movements have given way to Guided Democracy
movements, and Guided Democracy movements to "Back to the 1 94S
Constitution" movements, while governmental structures-national
councils, state planning commissions, constitutional conventions, and so
on-have multiplied like weeds in a neglected garden. But from all this
nervous tinkering and breathless sloganeering no form competent to
contain the country's diversity has appeared, because such random improvisation
represents not a realistic search for a solution to the nation's
integrative problems but a desperately laid smoke screen behind which
to hide a growing conviction of impending political catastrophe. For the
moment, a new, de facto duumvirate divides leadership-Sukarno, calling
ever more shrilly for a renewal of the "revolutionary spirit of
unity," and Lieutenant General A. H. Nasution, Defense Minister and
former Army Chief of Staff (and another colorless Sumatran professional),
directing the military in its expanded role as a quasi-civil service.
But their relationship to each other, as well as the extent of their
effective power, remains, like just about everything else in Indonesian
political life, undetermined.
The "growing conviction of an impending political catastrophe"
turned out to be all too accurate. President Sukarno's frenzied ideologism
continued to rise until the night of September 30, 1 965, when the
Commander of the Presidential Guard mounted an attempted coup
d'ttat. Six ranking Army generals were murdered (General Nasution
narrowly escaped), but the coup failed when another General, Suharto,
rallied the army and crushed the rebels. There followed several months
of extraordinary popular savagery-mainly in Java and Bali, but also
sporadically in Sumatra-directed against individuals considered to be
followers of the Indonesian Communist Party, which was generally regarded
to have been behind the coup. Several hundred thousand people
were massacred, largely villagers by other villagers (though there were
some army executions as well ), and, in Java at least, mainly along the
pri11Wrdial lines-pious Moslems killing 1ndic syncretists-described
above. ( There were some anti-Chinese actions, too, especially in Sumatra,
but the bulk of the killings were of Javanese by Javanese, Balinese
by Balinese, and so on.) Sukarno was gradually replaced as leader of
the country by Suharto and died in June 1 970, Suharto having officially
succeeded to the presidency two years earlier. Since then the country
The Integrative Revolution
has been run by the army with the assistance of various civilian technical
experts and administrators. A second general election, held in the
summer of 1971 , resulted in the victory of a government-sponsored and
-controlled party and the severe weakening of the older political parties.
At the moment, though tension between primordially defined groups,
religious, regional, and ethnic, remains intense, and in fact may have
been deepened by the events of 1965, open expression of it is largely
absent. That it will long remain so seems-to me at least-unlikely.
MALAYA
In Malaya, the striking thing is the degree to which the overall integration
of the diverse groups in a rigidly multiracial society is taking
place not so much in terms of state structure as such, but of that much
more recent political invention, party organization. It is the Alliance, a
confederation of the United Malays National Organization, the Malayan
Chinese Association, and the Jess important Malayan Indian Congress,
within which primordial conflicts are being informally and realistically
adjusted and where the strong centrifugal tendencies, as intense as perhaps
any state-new, old, or middle-aged-has ever faced, are, so far,
being effectively absorbed, deflected, and contained. Formed in 1 952, at
the height of the terrorist "emergency," by conservative, English-educated,
upper-class elements in the Malay and Chinese communities (the
Indians, never quite certain which way to jump, joined a year or two
later), the Alliance is one of the most remarkable examples of the successful
practice of the art of the impossible in the whole sphere of newstate
politics-a federated, noncommunal party of subparties, themselves
frankly, explicitly, and on occasion enthusiastically communal in
appeal, set in a context of primordial suspicion and hostility that would
make the Habsburg Empire seem like Denmark or Australia. On the
mere surface of things, it ought not to work.
The important question is, anyway, whether it will continue to work.
Malaya has been independent only since mid- 1 957, has benefited from
relatively favorable economic conditions, from-the Communist insurrection
aside-a fairly smooth transfer of sovereignty and the continuing
presence anglaise this has made possible, and the ability of a
conservative, somewhat rationalistic oligarchy to convince the mass of
the population that it is a more suitable vehicle for their aspirations
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
than the left-wing, emotionally populist sort of leadership that characterizes
most of the other new states. Is Alliance rule merely the lull before
the storm as was United National Party rule, which it rather resembles,
in Ceylon? Is it destined to weaken and disintegrate when the
social and economic seas roughen as did the Indonesian Dwi-Tunggalmultiparty
system? Is it, in a word, too good to last?
The omens are mixed. In the first general election, held prior to revolution,
the Alliance captured 80 percent of the popular vote and 5 I of
the 52 elected seats in the federal legislative council, to become virtually
the sole legitimate heir to the colonial regime; but in the 1 959
elections, the first held subsequent to independence, it lost a good deal
of ground to more simply communal parties, its popular vote falling to
5 1 percent and its seats to 73 of 1 03 . The Malay sector, the UMNO,
was weakened by the unexpected sweep of the pious, rural, heavily
Malay northeast by an intensely communal party calling for an Islamic
theocratic state, "the restoration of Malay sovereignty," and "Greater
Indonesia." The Chinese and Indian wings were undercut by Marxist
parties in the large towns along the tin- and rubber-rich central west
coast, where large numbers of new, lower-class Chinese and Indian voters
had entered the rolls under the liberalized postindependence citizenship
laws, the Marxism adapting itself, here as elsewhere, to primordial
loyalties with little difficulty. Buffeted by these loses-which first became
apparent in the state elections held a couple of months prior to
the federal ones-the Alliance in fact came very close to splitting altogether.
The losses of the UMNO tempted younger, less conservative elements
in the MCA to press for a greater number of Chinese candidacies,
for an explicit condemnation by the Alliance of Malay racialism,
and for a review of state educational policy with respect to the language
problem in Chinese schools. Hothead elements in the UMNO responded
in kind, and though the rift was patched, or patched over, in time for
the elections, several of the younger leaders of the MCA resigned, and
the UMNO girded itself to expel primordial "agitators" in its own
midst.
Thus, although as in Indonesia, the holding of general elections
brought latent primordial issues into such a focus that they had to be
faced directly rather than concealed behind a facade of nationalist rhetoric,
in Malaya political talents seem, so far, to have been rather more
competent to this task. Though the Alliance is less absolutely dominant
and perhaps somewhat less integrated than it was in the immediate post-
The Integrative Revolution zSs
independence period, it is still quite comfortably in power and still an
effective civil framework within which very intense primordial issues
can be adjusted and contained rather than allowed to run free in parapolitical
confusion. The pattern that seems to be developing, and perhaps
crystallizing, is one in which a comprehensive national party, with
its three subparts or subparties, comes almost to comprise the state and
is multiply assailed by a field of small parties-by class parties for
being too communal, and communal parties for not being communal
enough (and by both for being "undemocratic" and "reactionary")each
of which is trying to knock chips off one or another part of it by
attacking the points of strain that develop within it as it functions and
by appealing more openly to primordial sentiments. The intricate inner
working of the Alliance as it endeavors to hold the vital center against
efforts from all directions to undermine its basic source of strength-a
matter-of-fact, quid-pro-quo, ail-in-the-same-boat political understanding
among Malay, Chinese, and Indian leaders-is thus the quintessence
of the integrative revolution as it is proceeding in Malaya.
In 1 963 Malaya became Malaysia, a federation of Malaya proper
(i.e., the peninsula), Singapore, and the north Bornean territories of
Sarawak and Sabah. The Alliance remained the majority party, but the
major Singapore party, the People's Action Party, sought to make inroads
among the peninsula Chinese, undercutting the MCA and thus
threatening the Alliance and the Chinese-Malay political balance. In
August 1 965 the strains became such that Singapore left the Federation
and became independent. Intense opposition to the new Federation
from Indonesia and to Sabah's inclusion in it from the Philippines only
added to the stresses involved in the forming of the new political entity.
In the general elections of May 1 969 the narrow Alliance majority was
lost, mainly because of the failure of the MCA to hold Chinese support
(much of which went to the essentially Chinese Democratic Action
Party), but also to further gains by the lslamist Malay communalist
party mentioned in the text, which got nearly a quarter of the vote. The
MCA, feeling it had lost the confidence of the Chinese community, then
quit the Alliance, bringing on a full-fledged crisis. Later in the same
month savage communal riots broke out in the capital, Kuala Lumpur,
in which about 150 persons were killed, most of them in an extremely
brutal fashion, and communications between the Chinese and Malay
communities broke down almost totally. Emergency rule was imposed,
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
and the situation calmed. In September 1 970, Teunku Abdul Rahman,
who had headed the UMNO and the Alliance since their founding, retired
and was replaced by his long-time deputy and the strong man of
the regime, Tun Abdul Razak. The state of emergency was finally
ended and parliamentary government restored after twenty-one months,
in February of 1 971 . For the moment the situation seems to have stabilized,
and the Alliance still holds against the communalist attempts to
chip away at it (a continuing Chinese Communist guerrilla revolt persists,
however, in Sarawak), though the country as a whole may be in
fact further away from communal accord than it was in the first years of
its existence.
BURMA
In Burma, the case is almost diametrically opposite to the Malayan.
Although again, and unlike Indonesia, a comprehensive national party
(U Nu's "clean faction" of the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League)
governs [ 1 962 ] a formally federal state with only weak, if bitter, opposition,
its power is mainly based on a direct appeal to the cultural pride
of the Burmans (that is, speakers of Burmese), while the minorities,
some of whom helped keep the country in a multisided civil war for the
first few years after independence, are catered to by a rather intricate
and highly peculiar constitutional system that protects them in theory
against the Burman dominance that the party system tends to produce
in fact. Here the government itself is to a very great extent the obvious
agency of a single, central primordial group, and it is faced, therefore,
with a very serious problem of maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of
members of peripheral groups-more than one-third of the population
-who are naturally inclined to see it as alien, a problem it has attempted
to solve largely by a combination of elaborate legal gestures of
reassurance and a good deal of aggressive assimilationism.
Briefly, the constitutional system designed to allay minority fears consists
of-to date [ 1 962] -six juridically nonuniform "states," demarcated
largely along regional-linguistic-cultural lines and possessing dissimilar
formal powers. Some states have a-surely nominal-right of
secession; others not. Each state has somewhat different electoral arrangements,
and controls its own elementary schools. The elaboration of state
governmental structure varies from the Chin, which has hardly any local :
The Integrative Revolution
autonomy whatever, to the Shan, where traditional "feudal" chiefs have
been able to maintain a goodly number of their traditional rights; while
Burma proper is not viewed as a constituent state within the Union at
all, but as virtually indistinguishable from it. The degree to which territorial
boundaries match primordial realities varies-with the Karen the
most chronically discontented, and the small Kayah State evidently resting
on the politically convenient invention of a "Red Karen" race.
From each of these states a delegation is elected to the upper house of
the bicameral Union legislature, the Chamber of Nationalities, which is
heavily weighted in favor of the minority peoples. In the Union government
this chamber is overshadowed by the popularly chosen lower
house, the Chamber of Deputies; but as each state delegation to it sits,
along with the lower-house representatives from its state, to form the
State Council that governs the state, it has significant local importance.
Further, the head of the state (that is, of the State Council) is appointed
at the same time to be minister for the state in the Union government,
and constitutional amendments demand two-thirds approval of both
houses, so that the minorities are given at least a formal check on the
powers of the government and the lower chamber to which it is responsible.
And finally, the presidency of the Union, a largely ceremonial office,
is rotated, by informal agreement rather than explicit constitutional
provision, among ethnic groups.
It is within this finely wrought constitutional structure, which so artfully
blurs the distinction between the Union and its constituent
members at precisely the time it seems to be formalizing it most exactly,
that the vigorously assimilationist policies of the AFPFL are pursued.
This tradition of "Burmanization," or of what some minority
groups more bluntly call "AFPFL imperialism," traces back to the very
beginnings of the nationalist movement in the Buddhist student clubs at
the turn of the century; and by the thirties the Thakins were calling for
an independent nation in which Burmese would be the national language,
Burman dress would be the national costume, and the classical
role of the (predominantly Burman) Buddhist monkhood as teacher,
guide, and counselor to the secular government would be restored. Since
independence and the accession of the pietistic Thakin Nu to the premiership,
the government has moved strenuously to bring about these
ends, the noticeable relaxation of the assimilative pressure during the
year and a half of military rule being followed by an even more intense
assertion of such pressure following U Nu's landslide re-election on a
z88 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Buddhism-as-a-state-religion platform in 1 960. (In Burma proper his
"clean" AFPFL captured outright about 80 percent of the lower-house
seats ; in the states and the disaffected Arakan area, about a third.)
As a result, most of the political adjustments of primordial interests in
Burma have tended to be cast, in form at least, in juristic terms, to be
carried out in a rather odd and artificial vocabulary of constitutional legalism.
The Karens' conviction that the official boundaries of their state
were too circumscribed to compensate for the loss of the special privileges
they enjoyed under the colonial regime helped send them into revolt;
their submission following military defeat by Union forces was in
turn sealed and symbolized by their acceptance of those boundaries,
plus a number of additional legal penalties imposed as object lessons:
an explicit denial of the right of secession, the reduction of their representation
in both houses of parliament, and the revocation of an earlier
decision to unite the Kayah State with the Karen. Similarly, the primordial
discontent of the Arakanese and the Mons-which has also periodically
flared into open violence-has been expressed in demands for
Arakanese and Mon states, which i.J Nu has at length been forced to
support despite his oft-reiterated opposition to the formation of any
more states. In Shan State the traditional chiefs have brandished their
constitutional right to secession and a states' rights doctrine that they
claim is written into the constitution, as bargaining weapons in their
higgle with the Union over the amount and kind of compensation to be
paid them for the surrender of various of their traditional powers. And
so on. This irregular and unorthodox constitutional framework, which is
so nicely exact in language and so usefully vague in meaning that "not
even [Burmese ) lawyers seem able to tell whether the Union is in fact a
federal or a unitary state," 34 allows the single-party, Burman-centered
AFPFL regime to pursue its strongly assimilationist policies in almost'
all aspects of actual government, while maintaining at least minimal
loyalty from the non-Burman Burmese, something it did not have a de-·
cade ago-though if its ethnic enthusiasm is not contained, it may not
have it a decade hence either.
In March of 1 962 General Ne Win took over the Burmese government
via a military coup d'etat from U Nu, who was imprisoned. Ne
Win instituted a policy of extreme isolationism for Burma, which,
34 Fairbairn, "Some Minority Problems in Burma."
The Integrative Revolution z8g
among other things, has made it difficult to find out much in detail concerning
what is going on in the country. What does seem clear is that
armed opposition by ethnic minority groups has continued at about the
previous level and has indeed become almost institutionalized as a regular
aspect of the national scene. In January 1 971 , U Nu (who had by
then been released from prison) set up headquarters for a "National
Liberation Front" in Western Thailand, adjoining the rebellious Burmese
Shan States. Little seems yet to have come of that, but the Karen,
Shan, and Kachin revolts seem to be continuing apace. ( The Karens
were awarded a "state" in South Burma in 1 969 by Ne Win, but, regarding
the grant of "autonomy" as too limited, launched an offensive
in early 1971 aimed at toppling Ne Win.) In February of 1 971 a United
National Liberation Front was formed including (the rebel elements of)
the Karens, Mons, Chins, and Shans. ( The Kachins, who have their own
Independence Army, agreed to cooperate but not to join.) Thus, although
it is very difficult to tell, given the near-closure of Burma to outside
observation, how much all of this comes to on the ground, it seems
apparent that not only has the characteristic pattern of Burmese primordial
dissidence not changed under Ne Win but it has hardened into
an enduringfeature ofthe political landscape.
INDIA
India, that vast and various labyrinth of religious, linguistic, regional,
racial, tribal, and caste allegiances, is developing a many-sided political
form to match for baffting irregularity her daedalian social and cultural
structure. Waddling in (in E. M. Forster's gently mocking image)
at this late hour to take her seat among the nations, she is beset by virtually
the entire range of primordial conflicts complexly superimposed
one upon the other. One peels off Punjabi linguism and finds Sikh religious
communalism, scratches Tamil regionalism and finds anti-Brahman
racialism, views Bengali cultural arrogance from a slightly different
angle and sees Greater Bengal patriotism. No general and uniform
political solution to the problem of primordial discontent seems possible
in such a situation, only a loose assemblage of diverse, locally adapted,
ad hoc solutions, related to one another only incidentally and pragmatically.
The policies suitable for the tribal dissidence of the Assam Naga
are not generalizable to the caste-based disaffection of peasant landlords
2.90 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE.S
in Andhra. The central government stance taken toward Orissa princes
cannot be taken toward Gujerati industrialists. The problem of Hindu
fundamentalism in Uttar Pradesh, the heartland of lndic culture, takes a
rather different form in Dravidian Mysore. So far as primordial issues
are concerned, Indian civil politics amounts to a disconnected series of
attempts to make the temporary endure.
The major institutional vehicle through which these attempts are
being made is, of course, the Indian National Congress. Though, like the
Malayan Alliance and the Burmese AFPFL, the Congress is a comprehensive
national party that has largely pre-empted the governmental apparatus
of the new state and become its most important centralizing
force, it has done so neither as a confederation of frankly primordial
subparties nor as an agency of majority-group assimilationism. The first
of these courses is precluded by the multifarious nature of the primordial
pattern-the sheer number of different groups involved-and
the sec�>nd by the absence of any one clearly central group within this
pattern. As a result, the Congress, its slightly North Indian complexion
aside, has tended to become an ethnically neutral, resolutely modernist,
somewhat cosmopolitan force on the national level at the same time that
it has built up a multiplicity of separate, and to a large extent independent,
parochial party machines to secure its power on the local level.
The image the Congress presents is thus a double one: in one focus, lecturing
Hindi zealot and Tamil xenophobe alike, stands Nehru, "a reflective,
cultivated, modern intellectual, full of wistfulness, skepticism, dogmatism,
and self-doubt in the presence of his own country"; as in the
other, deliberately manipulating (among other things) the local realities
of language, caste, culture, and religion to keep the party dominant,
stand a whole set of less pensive regional bosses-Kamaraj Nadar in
Madras, Chavan in Bombay, Atulya Ghosh in Maharashtra, Patnaik in
Orissa, Kairon in Punjab, and Sukhadia in Rajahstan.
The States Reorganization Act of 1 956-itself, as has been mentioned,
the culmination of a process begun within the Congress several
decades before independence-gave this pattern of civil hub and primordial
rim its official institutionalization. The division of the country
into linguistically demarcated subunits is, in fact, part and parcel of the
35 E. Shils, The Intellectual Between Tradition and Modernity: The Indian Sit·
uation, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Supplement I (The Hape.
1 96 1), p. 95. [Now, of course, it is his daughter, Mrs. Gandhi, who stands there,
and rather less wistfully, but the pattern remains.]
The Integrative Revolution
general approach of attempting to insulate parapolitical forces from national
concerns by sequestering them in local contexts. Unlike those of
Burma, the states of India have real and explicitly-perhaps too
explicitly-spelled out constitutional powers in every field from education
and agriculture to taxation and public health, so that the political
process centering around the state assemblies and the formation of state
governments is far from being an inconsequential matter. It is on the
state level that perhaps the bulk of the bitter hand-to-hand clashes that
form the everyday substance of Indian domestic politics are coming to
take place, and where the adjustments of parochial interests are coming
to be effected, insofar as they are effected at all.
Thus, in the 1957 elections, even more than in those of 1952, the
Congress found itself engaged in a multifront war, fighting different
election battles in the various states, against different sorts of opponents
capitalizing on different sorts of discontents-against the Communists
in Kerala, Bengal, and Andhra; against communal religious parties in
Punjab, Uttar and Madhya Pradesh, and Rajahstan; against tribal unions
in Assam and Bihar; against ethno-linguistic fronts in Madras, Maharashtra,
and Gujerat; against feudal-prince restorationist parties in
Orissa, Bihar, and Rajahstan; against the Praja Socialists in Bombay.
Not all these struggles pivoted around primordial issues, but virtually
all-even those involving leftist "class" parties-seem to have been significantly
influenced by them.a6 In any case, as none of these opposition
parties was able to spread beyond the few strorigholds where the particular
veins they tapped proved comparatively rich, the Congress as the
only genuinely national party was able to maintain overwhelming control
of both the central and-with a few exceptions-the state governments,
even though it captured less than half the popular vote.
How, out of this conglomerate hodgepodge of courthouse machinations
arises the rather cerebral, dispassionate, moralistic central
Congress government to serve as a kind of extraordinary committee for
the conduct of foreign policy, as a comprehensive social and economic
planning commission, and as a symbolic expression of all-India national
38 "The success of the Kerala Communist Party as the first regional Communist
Party in India to capture control of a state government can be explained,
above all, by its ability to manipulate the regional patriotism of all Kerala at the
same time that it manipulated politically strategic class lobbies within linguistic
boundaries."-Harrison, India, p. 1 93. In Bombay, both the Communists and the
Praja Socialists joined in the Maharashtra linguistic front; in opposed Gujerat,
the Gqjerati one.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
identity, is something of an Eastern mystery. Most observers put it
down, rather without analysis, to Nehru's charismatic force as a nationalist
hero. His position as apostolic heir to Gandhi and avatar of independence
bridges the gulf between his own cosmopolitan intellectualism
and the provincial horizons of the mass of his people. And it is perhaps
for this reason, as well as for his matchless ability to keep local bosses
loyal, in line, and reasonably unambitious, that the problem of
succession-"after Nehru, who?"-has in India even more of a fundamentally
disquieting quality than in most of the other new states where
succession is also nearly always a prominent anxiety. The fact that
India has been held together up to now, Ambedkar says flatly, is due to
the force of Congress Party discipline-"but how long is the Congress
to last? The Congress is Pandit Nehru and Pandit Nehru is Congress.
But is Pandit Nehru immortal? Anyone who applies his mind to these
questions will realize that the Congress will not last until the sun and
the moon." 37 If the Burmese integrative problem is to restrain primordial
enthusiasm at the center, the Indian seems to be to restrain it at the
periphery.
The fears surrounding the succession problem, real enough when the
above was written, proved to be baseless. After Nehru's death in May
1964, and a briefperiod ofrule by Lal Bahadur Shastri, the "apostolic"
succession pattern was re-established with the accession to the Prime
Ministership of Nehru's daughter and Gandhi's namesake, Mrs. Indira
Gandhi. In the early phases of her regime, the Congress lost ground,
and a series of upheavals on the state level led to the imposition of direct
central government rule in several states. In May 1 969, President
Zakir Husein, a Muslim, died, threatening the Hindu-Muslim understanding
within India and precipitating a showdown between Mrs. Gandhi
and the traditional Congress bosses, which Mrs. Gandhi decisively
won. Though faced with continued upheaval on the state level, Mrs.
Gandhi won a decisive victory in the general elections of March 1971 ,
capturing undisputed control of the government. The Bangladesh revolt,
perhaps the most dramatic, and certainly the most successful, primordial
separatism in the new states so far, broke out later in the year,
followed by Indian intervention and the short, successful war with Pakistan.
With all this, the Congress' ability to keep India's multiple priar
Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States, p. 1 2. The Chinese attack may, of
course, provide an even more powerful cement than Nehru-a common enemy.
The Integrative Revolution Z93
mordial groups under control has surely at least temporarily increased.
But that the problem persists is clear from a wide range of "events,"
stretching from the continuing Naga revolt in Assam to continuing Sikh
riots in Punjab. Indeed, the Bangladesh example may prove a two-sided
one for India in the long run, not only in Bengal itself, but elsewhere:
in February of this year (1972), the Dravidian Advancement Party
launched a campaign for Tamil Nadu, an autonomous Tamil state in
South India, drawing an open parallel with Bangladesh and accusing
Mrs. Gandhi of behaving like General Yahya Khan. Thus, though the
increased strength of the Congress central government has for one moment
somewhat cooled down India's multifront war against primordialism,
it has very farfrom ended it.
LEBANON
Lebanon may be-as Phillip Hitti has pointed out-not much larger
than Yellowstone Park, but it is a good deal more astonishing. Although
its population is almost entirely Arabic-speaking and shares a
generally "Levantine" ethos, it is rigidly partitioned into seven major
Moslem (Sunni, Shi'a, and Druze) and Christian (Maronites, Greek Orthodox,
Greek Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox) sects and about that
many minor ones (Protestants, Jews, Armenian Catholics, and so on), a
confessional heterogeneity that not only forms the principal public
framework of individual self-identification, but is woven directly into
the whole structure of the state. Seats in the parliament are allotted on a
strictly sectarian basis according to demographic proportions that are
fixed by law and that have remained essentially unchanged in the five
elections held since independence. Paramount executive authority is not
merely bisected, but trisected, with the president of the country conventionally
a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, and the chairman of
parliament a Shi'i. Cabinet posts are carefully doled out on a confessional
basis, and a similar balance is maintained in the civil service
from ministry secretaries, district administrators, and diplomatic posts
all the way down to rank-and-file clerical jobs. The judicial system is
equally a maze of religious pluralism, with both the laws themselves
and the courts applying them varying as to sect, final authority in personal
law cases sometimes lying outside the boundaries of the country
altogether. Arab province and Christian outpost, modern commercial
294 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTU�
,,
entrep6t and last relic of the Ottoman millet system, Lebanon is aim�
as much an entente as a state.
The sort of politics this entente supports are equally wondrous. Polit•
ical parties, though formally present, play as yet but a marginal role.
The struggle for pelf and power pivots instead around strong local leaders,
who tend to be either important absentee landlords or, in the free-:
hold sections of the country, heads of large and prominent extended
families. Each of these faction chiefs, whose following is bound to him
in essentially traditional rather than ideological terms, then forms alliances
with similar faction chiefs from other locally represented sects,
yielding in the election campaign a Tammany Hall sort of "one Irish•
man, one Jew, one Italian" ticket-balancing.
This process is encouraged by the device of having the entire electorate
in any one district vote in all the local races regardless of sect
Thus a Maronite voting in a district where there are also Sunni, Greek
Orthodox, and Druze seats at stake chooses among the Sunni, Greek
Orthodox, and Druze candidates as well as among his own-the Maronite
ones-and vice versa. This, in turn, leads to the forming of composite
lists through which the candidates in each sect attempt to link
themselves with popular candidates in other sects so as to attract tht
necessary external votes. As lists are rarely split, because the possibility
of a candidate making effective alliances rests on his ability to bring
loyal voters with him (and because the average voter has little knowl-:
edge of candidates of other sects on which to base rational judgments
of their worth, anyway), this means that although, for any given seat,
Maronite competes against Maronite, or Sunni against Sunni, and so
on, it is actually lists that are elected. The electoral process thus acts
to align certain leaders from the various sects over against certain other
such leaders in such a way that political ties tend to cross-cut sectarian
ones. Members of.different sects are driven into each other's arms in interconfessional
coalitions; members of the same sect are driven apart
into intraconfessional factions.
Such calculated forging (and breaking) of alliances between significant
political personalities is not confined merely to campaign tactics,
but extends over the whole of political life. Among the strongest leaders
the same principles come into play with respect to the higher national
offices; so that, in example, a leading Maronite who considers himself
as a possible president will attempt to align himself in public life with a
leading Sunni who is aiming for the premiership, and so on, both in
The Integrative Revolution 295
order to gain Sunni support and to prevent his immediate Maronite rivals
for the presidency from making so effective an alliance themselves.
Similar patterns operate throughout the system, at every level and in
every aspect of government.
As such coalitions are so opportunistically rather than ideologically
put together, they frequently dissolve overnight, as seeming bosom companions
suddenly fall out and mortal enemies unite amid a storm of accusations
and counteraccusations of betrayal, corruption, incompetence,
and ingratitude. The pattern is thus fundamentally an individualistic,
even egoistic, one, despite its grounding in traditional religious, economic,
and kinship groupings, with each would-be political power
scheming to advance his career by a skillful manipulation of the system.
Both places on tickets led by strong figures and votes themselves are
bought (during the 1960 elections the amount of money in circulation
rose three million Leb.); rivals are slandered and, on occasion, physically
attacked; favoritism, nepotic or otherwise, is accepted procedure;
and spoils are considered the normal reward of office. "There is no
right in Lebanon," Ayoub's Mount Lebanon Druzes say, "there is only
silver and the 'fix.' " as
Yet out of all this low cunning has come not only the most democratic
state in the Arab world, but the most prosperous; and one that
has in addition been able-with one spectacular exception-to maintain
its equilibrium under intense centrifugal pressures from two of the
most radically opposed extrastate primordial yearnings extant: that of
the Christians, especially the Maronites, to be part of Europe, and that
of the Moslems, especially the Sunnis, to be part of pan-Arabia. The
first of these motives finds expression mainly in a so-called isolationist
view of Lebanon as a special and unique phenomenon among the Arab
states, a "nice piece of mosaic," whose distinctiveness must be jealously
conserved; the second takes the form of a call for reunion with Syria.
And insofar as Lebanese politics escapes the merely personal and traditional
and becomes involved with general ideas and issues, it is in these
terms that it tends to polarize.
The one spectacular exception to the maintenance of equilibrium, the
1958 civil war and American intervention, was in great part precipitated
by just this sort of atypical ideological polarization. On the one
hand President Sham'un's unconstitutional attempt to succeed himself
and, presumably, to align Lebanon more closely with the West in order
38 Ayoub, "Political Structure," p. 82.
zg6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURESi
.1
!
to enhance Christian power against the rising tide of Nasserism, excited.·
the ever-present Moslem fears of Christian domination; on the other,
the sudden outburst of pan-Arab enthusiasm stimulated by the Iraqi·
revolution and Syria's turn toward Cairo led to the equally ever-present
Christian fear of drowning in a Moslem sea. But the crisis-and the
Americans-passed. Sham'un was, at least temporarily, discredited for
"dividing the country." The pan-Arabist fever was, also at least temporarily,
checked by a renewed conviction, even within Sunni circles, that
the integrity of the Lebanese state must at all costs be preserved. Civil
rule was quickly restored, and by 1960 a new election could be held.
peacefully enough, bringing back most of the old familiar faces to the
old familiar stands.
It seems, therefore, that Lebanese politics, as they are now constituted,
must remain personalistic, factional, opportunistic, and
unprogrammatic if they are to work at all. Given the extreme confessional
heterogeneity and the penetration of this heterogeneity throughout
the entire organization of the state, any increase in ideologized
party politics tends very quickly to lead to an unstable Christian-Moslem
polarization over the pan-Arab issue and to the breakdown of the
cross-sect links that in the course of normal political maneuvering divide
the sects and unite, if somewhat precariously, the government. Machiavellian
calculation and religious toleration are opposite sides of the
same coin in Lebanon; in the short run, anyway, the alternative to "silver
and 'the fix' " may very well be national dissolution.
Though sorely tried by the continuation of the Arab-Israeli confrontation,
and especially by the appearance of the Palestinian commandos
as an important political force in the area, the Lebanese "nice piece of
mosaic" remains intact. Indeed, of all the countries reviewed here, Lebanon
has continued to be the most effective in containing its deep primordial
cleavages, and though harassed by economic difficulties, by the
presence of small radical groups of Left and Right (no major multisectarian
parties have yet been able to form), and by frequent outbursts of
popular violence, the Lebanese political system continues to function
about as it has since the end of World War II. Differences in view
as to the appropriate attitude to take toward the Palestine commandos
(and toward Israeli incursions into the country) have led to the fall of
cabinets, extended government crises, and some realignments among the
major sectarian groupings. In 1970, the Christian-supported president
The Integrative Revolution 297
won by only one vote over his Muslim-backed opponent, despite the unwritten
rule that the post is reserved for a Maronite. But as the cabinet
continues to be headed by a Muslim, the established arrangements persist,
and the government's authority vis-ii-vis the Palestinian commandos
and their Lebanese supporters has increased, especially since the
defeat of the commandos by the Jordanian army in September 1970.
Nothing lasts forever, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean, but to
date Lebanon continues to be a proof that although extreme primordial
diversity may make political equilibrium permanently precarious, it
does not necessarily, in and of itself, make it impossible.
MOROCCO
Across the whole of the Middle East-except for Nile-bound Egypt
-runs an ancient social contrast between, as Coon puts it, "the tame
and the insolent, the domestic and the independent"-between those
living within the political, economic, and cultural orbit of the great generative
cities and those living, if not precisely outside that orbit, along
its fringes and providing "the supply of rebels who, since the beginning
of the Bronze Age, have kept the urban civilizations refreshed and in
motion." 39 Between the central power of the shahs and sultans and the
stubborn libertarianism of the outlying tribes there existed (and to a
great extent still exists) a delicate balance. When the state was strong,
the tribes were obliged to give it at least grudging recognition and to
check their anarchic impulses; when it was weak, they ignored it, plundered
it, or-one or another of them-even overthrew it to become in
turn the carriers and defenders of the urban great tradition. For the better
part of the time, however, neither fully effective despotism nor mere
tribal rampage prevailed. Rather, an uneasy truce between center and
perimeter was maintained, tying them together in "a loose system of
give and take" under which "mountaineers and nomads come to town
freely, their fastnesses are left alone, and they let the caravans of travelers,
traders, and pilgrims cross [their territories ) without hindrance or
inconvenience over and above the normal rigors of travel." 40
In Morocco, this contrast has always been particularly strong, in part
because so much of the terrain is mountainous, in part because of the
3!1 C. Coon, Caravan (London, 1952), p. 295.
4o Ibid., pp. 264-265.
zg8 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
gradual superimposition, after the seventh century, of an Arabic culture
migrant from the East upon a relatively large indigenous Berber population,
and in part because of the country's relatively great distance
from the primary foci of Middle Eastern civilization in Egypt and Mes­
opotamia.
The complex early history of the region aside, the establishment of
the Arabized, Islamic reformist Sherifian dynasty toward the end of the
seventeenth century and the subsequent royal efforts to reduce the field
of Berber customary law in favor of Koranic law, to repress saint worship
and cultic practices, and to purify Islamic belief of local pagan accretions,
reinforced the distinction between bled a/ makhzen-" the land
of government"-and bled as siba- "the land of insolence." Claiming
direct descent from the Prophet (the meaning of the term "sherif"), the
dynasty, which rules until today, attempted to assert both spiritual and
temporal power over the more Arabized population of the Atlantic
Plain as well as over the more Berberized ones of the encircling Rif and
Atlas mountains; but though the spiritual claim-that of imamshiphas
been commonly accepted, the temporal has been more of a sometime
thing, particularly in the peripheral upland regions. Thus arose
perhaps the most striking and distinctive feature of the Moroccan political
system: the attachment of the urban and peasant populations of the
plain to the sultan as autocratic head of a rather developed patrimonial
bureaucracy (the Makhzen) of ministers, notables, soldiers, magistrates,
clerks, policemen, and tax collectors; and the attachment of the tribal
peoples to his person as "Lord of the Believers," but not to his secular
government or its representatives.
By the time of the establishment of the French and Spanish protectorates
in 19 1 2, the sultanate had become so seriously weakened by a
combination of internal corruption and external subversion that it was
unable to exert effective control not merely over the mountains but in
the plain as well. Though for a decade or so the seignoral proconsulship
of Marshal Lyautey held the tribes in check and, in a somewhat paternalistic
way, reinvigorated the Makhzen bureaucracy, after his departure
his successors initiated the so-called Berber Policy, dedicated to
drawing a sharp distinction between Arab and Berber and isolating the
latter from the influence of the Makhzen entirely. Special Berber
schools, designed to produce a "Berber elite," were set up; missionization
increased; and-most important-the symbolic supremacy of Koranic
law (and thus of the sultan as imam) was undermined by the plac-
The Integrative Revolution
ing of the mountain tribes under the French criminal code and officially
recognizing the judicial competence of customary law tribal councils in
civil disputes. Coinciding with the rise of the intense Islamic puritanism
of the Egyptian and Afghan-Parisian reformers Abduh and At-Afghani
among the notables of the Arabized towns, and particularly those
around the ancient Qarawiyin University at Fez, the Berber Policy and
its implied threat to Islam stimulated the growth of nationalism under
the banner of defending the faith against European-sponsored secularization
and Christianization. Thus-even if under rather seriously altered
conditions-the national movement in Morocco has also taken the
classic form of attempting to strengthen the integrative power of a generally
mid-Eastern urban civilization against the centrifugal tendencies
of tribal particularism.
The exile of Sultan Mohammed V by the French in 1953 and his
wildly triumphant return as a national hero in 195 5 put the cap on this
political and cultural revival of the, Makhzen, and inaugurated, after independence
was achieved, a new-state regime perhaps most aptly described
as a "modernizing autocracy." 41 With the French and the Spanish
gone, the Rabat Sultanate has become again the double-pronged
pivot of the system. The major nationalist party, the lstiqlal, its independent
power undercut by the lack, thus far, of national elections of a
genuine parliament, has become the incumbent of a somewhat modernized
but still essentially patrimonial Makhzen. Led by conservative Arabized
notables of the lowland cities and towns (and again most especially
of Fez-"Ia ville sainte de I'/slame . . . Ia metropole de
/'arabisme . . . [et] Ia vraie capitate du Maroc"),42 it has acted as the
administrative arm of the throne, a "college of viziers" dominating the
royal-appointed Councils of Government, the party-rationalized civil
bureaucracy, and the reinstated (and reformed) Islamic judicial system.
But as the attitude toward lstiqlal among the tribesmen has been, like
their attitude to earlier palace officialdoms, at best lukewarm and at
worst actively hostile, the relationship between the sultan and at least
the more intact, peripheral tribes has remained essentially personal.
Loyal to the king and resistant to his government, the tribes have been,
41 For this concept and its analytic implications, see D. Apter, The Political
Kingdom in Uganda (Princeton, N.J., 196 1), pp. 20-28.
42 Favre, "Le Maroc." (Since working in Morocco, I would now formulate
some of these matters a bit differently: see C. Geenz, Islam Observed: Religious
Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven, 1 968), esp. Chap. 3 . ]
300 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
since the transfer of sovereignty as they were before it, the main source
of primordial threats to national integration.
Since 1956, heartland-hinterland crises have come thick and fast.
The absorption into the Royal Army of the irregular military force
formed from among the tribes during the sultan's exile-the so-called
Liberation Army-has proved to be a most ticklish task leading to
open clashes; only after the king firmly removed the Royal Army from
Istiqlal influence and attached it directly to the palace under his son,
Prince Moulay Hasan, as chief of staff, was the tension in part eased.
In the fall of I956, a Berber chieftain from the Middle Atlas, an intimate
of the king, and a bitter opponent of the lstiqlal, resigned his post
as interior minister in the royal cabinet, and returned to the mountains
to preach primordialism to the tribes ("It is the tribes who have made
the glory of Morocco"), calling for the dissolution of all political parties
("It is contrary to the interests of the country to confer responsibility on
men who totally ignore the tribes") and a national rally around the
figure of Mohammed V. ("We have in this nation both weak and strong.
United on the same mountain and under the same skies, they are equal
before the king.") 43 His effort soon ceased-at least openly-evidently
upon the advice of the king; but a few months later an even more traditionalistic
Berber, the governor of the southeastern province of Tafilelt,
went into semirevolt, simultaneously refusing to obey "a party which
hinders us from living as we wish," and declaring his undying loyalty to
the sultan. The king soon secured his peaceful submission and placed
him in forced residence near the imperial palace; but in late 1 95 8 and
early 1959 sporadic uprisings also occurred in the north and northeast,
they too being contained within narrow limits largely through the
agency of the king's personal popularity, diplomatic skill, military
strength, and religious charisma.
Yet the modernizing aspect of the new Moroccan state is as real as
the autocratic, and probably more enduring. The restlessness of the
tribes does not represent merely "the past and the province against the
future and the nation," but the concern of the traditional, "land of insolence"
groups to find a secure and accepted place in that future and nation.44
The development, first clandestinely and then-as the various
parapolitical expressions of tribal dissatisfaction collapsed-openly, of
43 Quotations in this sentence from Lahcen al-Youssi and in the following
from Addi ou Bihi taken from Lacouture, Le Maroc, p. 90.
44 Ibid., p. 93.
The Integrative Revolution 301
a new national political party, the Popular Movement, as the vehicle of
rural aspirations, is but one of the more obvious signs that mere hostility
to urban culture and unbending resistance to central authority is
coming to be replaced among the outlying peoples by a fear of being
relegated to second-class citizenship within a modern civil order. Under
the leadership of the former head of the Liberation Army, Ahardane,
and with the vaguest of programs-"Moslem Socialism" and a new
union around the king as imam, not just for Morocco, but for the whole
Maghrib-the new party has at best but one foot in that order. But as a
rapid sequence of very serious political mutations-the holding of local
elections; the breakaway of the left wing of lstiqlal to form a proletarian
party; the sudden, premature death of Mohammed V, and the succession
of his less popular son-have cast a cloud of uncertainty over the
future of monarchical government in the last couple of years, the new
state may well find itself increasingly hard pressed to satisfy and contain
the subtle fusion of traditional siba sentiments and modern political ambitions
neatly summed up in Ahardane's stiff-necked slogan, "We have
not acquired independence in order to lose liberty." 45
Though it is perhaps true that in the long run the modernizing aspect
of the new Moroccan state is more enduring than the autocratic, over
the last decade it is the autocratic which has flourished. The king, Hassan
II, suspended the constitution and dissolved parliament in 1965
after riots in Casablanca led to the death, largely at the hands of government
forces, of anywhere from thirty (the official count) to several
hundred people. The king took direct control of the government, ruling
by executive fiat and systematically reducing the influence of the two
major parties-the /slamist lstiqlal and the socialist Union Nationale
des Forces Populaires-and the urban Arab masses which, for the most
part, formed their constituencies. The period was one of accelerating
neotraditionalism, as Hassan attempted to draw various sorts of local
notables, many of them Berber, and army officers, the great majority of
them Berber, into direct, personal loyalty to the throne. In 1970, the
so-called state of exception was at least nominally ended when the king
promulgated a new constitution and announced general elections. The
parties (except for the Berber-dominated Mouvement Populaire) found
the constitution insufficiently democratic and the elections insufficiently
free, however, and regarded the whole maneuver as an effort by the
45 Quoted in Ashford, Political Change, p. 322.
302 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
king to institutionalize and legitimize the throne-centered system of neotraditional
government he had evolved during his first decade of rule.
Thus, though the elections were held and the constitution approvedunder
conditions generally held to be less than honest-the pattern of
court-and-notables politics persisted. This pattern came to something of
a dramatic dissolution with the attempted army coup at the king's forty-second
birthday picnic in July of 1970, in which about a hundred of
the approximately five hundred guests (many of them foreign) were
killed. A major, five colonels, and four generals were executed almost
immediately (others, including its leader.., died in the coup attempt itself),
and a number of other officers were imprisoned. The degree to
which primordial loyalties played a role in the attack is unclear (almost
all the leaders were Berbers, most of them from the Rif; and most were
outstanding beneficiaries of the king's favors under the throne-centered
policy); but since the attack (which was followed in August 1972 by another,
which also failed) the king has moved to de-emphasize the Berber
role in the army as well as to find a basis of support among the Arabspeaking
populations of the large cities that the two major parties, now
united into a "National Action Bloc" claim to represent. Thus, whatever
the reality of the bled al makhzen/bled as siba contrast might, or
might not, ever have been (and I would now be inclined to regard it as
having never been as clear-cut or simple as European scholarship described
it), the distinction-partly cultural, partly linguistic, partly social,
partly a kind of ethnopolitical myth, a traditional, almost instinctive
way of perceiving group differences-between "Arab" atl{l
"Berber" remains an important, if elusive, factor in Moroccan national
life.
NIGERIA
The distinctive feature of Nigerian political life as it has evolved
since World War II has been what Coleman has called "the regionalization
of nationalism." 4& Whereas in most of the other new states the
final phases of the pursuit of independence saw a progressive unification
of diverse elements into an intensely solidary opposition to colonial
rule, open dissidence emerging only after devolution and the inevitable
waning of revolutionary comradeship, in Nigeria tension between var-
46 Coleman, Nigeria, pp. 3 1 9-33 1 .
The Integrative Revolution
ious primordial groups increased in the last decade of dependency.
After 1 946 the Nigerian struggle for freedom was less a matter of defying
foreign authority and more a matter of drawing boundaries, founding
capitals, and distributing powers in such a way as to dampen and
contain sharpening ethnoregional hostilities prior to the disappearance
of that authority. It was marked not so much by growing insurgency in
order to force the British to leave as by feverish negotiation, in both
Lagos and London, in order to create a modus vivendi among the Yoruba,
lbo, and Hausa-Fulani so that they could leave.
The arrangement ultimately devised (in a 240-page, fine-print constitution)
was a radically federal one, composed of three powerful constituent
regions-the Northern, the (south-) Eastern, and the (south-)
Western-each with its own capital, its own parliament, cabinet, and
high court, and its own budget. Each region was dominated by a particular
ethnic group-respectively, the Hausa, Ibo, and Yoruba; a particular
political party-the Northern People's Congress (NPC), the National
Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), and the Action
Group (AG) ; and a particular political personality-Alhaji Sir Ahmadu
Bello, the Sardauna ("Sultan") of Sokoto, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe,
and Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Perched, somewhat insecurely, on top of
these regional strongholds was the federal government at Lagos as the
arena in which the sort of two-against-one coalition politics one would
naturally expect from this type of three-person game took place and out
of whose changeful processes the authoritative leadership to fill the vacuum
at the center of the system was supposed at length to emerge.
The sort of form that leadership was to take, who was to provide it,
and how, in the working of this Swiss-clock governmental mechanism, it
was to actually be produced remained, however, entirely obscure. In
the meantime, the triangular pattern of primordial identification
crystallized in the country at large, as the tribal societies of traditional
Nigeria gradually regrouped themselves into the regional-linguistic
(and in the Moslem North, religious) folk societies of modern Nigeria.
But though increasingly important as the country's ethnic skeleton,
this pattern did not exhaust the full variety of ingrained "consciousness
of kind," because in each region there remained a large number
of smaller groups outside the core Hausa, Yoruba, and lbo areas at
least somewhat resistant to assimilation to these broader subnational
entitles. And it was in these marginal areas-the southern half of the
North, the eastern edge of the West, and the southern and eastern bor-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ders of the East-that the most vital electoral competition between
major ethnic groups tended to take place, as each party attempted, with
some success, to capitalize on minority resentments within their opponents'
strongholds. What appeared at the center as a three-way subnational
competition, and at the regional capitals as (more and more) a
one-party ethnocracy, represented in the countryside a much more complex
and diversified network of tribal alliances and oppositions.47 It
was a tiered system in which local loyalties remained mostly organized
in traditional terms, provincial ones became organized in party-political
terms, and national ones were only barely organized at all.
Thus, although the regionalization of nationalism process led to the
establishment of a party system and constitutional structure in which
Nigeria's several hundred primordial groups, ranging from the nearly
six million Hausa to tribal fragments of only a few hundred were able,
for a while, to live in at least reasonable amity, it also created a void at
the very heart of national political life and left the country more or less
acephalous.
After independence (in October, 1960), political attention consequently
turned toward the federal capital at Lagos as parties and their
leaders jockeyed for starting positions from which to launch their campaigns
to correct this condition. After an initial attempt to form a governing
alliance between the economically and politically more advanced
Eastern and Western regions against the more traditional North stumbled
over the entrenched hostility between the mobile, aggressive lbo
intelligentsia and the stolid, wealthy Yoruba business class-and between
the mercurial Dr. Azikiwe and the lofty Chief Awolowo-the
North and East formed such an alliance, isolating the West. Azikiwe resigned
the Eastern premiership to become governor general, in theory a
47 The whole picture was further complicated, not only by the fact that tribal
identifications within the three major groups had not altogether given way before
the wider ethnolinguistic loyalty, but also that not all members of such larger
units were located in their home regions, having migrated or spilled over into the
others where they sometimes formed, particularly in the towns, an important oppositional
minority. The whole problem of the allegiance of an individual l iving
outside his "home region" is an extremely ticklish one for all new states in which
integrative problems have been coped with by creating territorial substates tinged
with primordial significance, as Nehru's continual insistence that, for example, a
Bengal i living in Madras is a citizen of the state level, of Madras, not of Bengal,
and that all notions of a "national homeland" for ethnic groups living elsewhere
in India must be stamped out demonstrates. The additional fact that some such
groups are more mobile than others (in Nigeria, the lbo; in India, the Marwari
and so on) only intensifies this problem.
The Integrative Revolution
merely symbolic office, but which he hoped to make into something
more; the Sardauna of Sokoto, choosing to remain lion of the North in
his regional premiership, sent his lieutenant, Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa
Balewa, to serve in his stead as federal prime minister; and Awolowo,
odd man out in this first of what was a series of two-against-one
coalitions, resigned his post as Western premier to become leader of the
opposition in the federal parliament.
Posts taken, the maneuvering began. The federal parliament decided
to form a fourth state, the Midwest, out of the minority area of the
Western Region; Awolowo shifted from a markedly right- to a markedly
left-wing ideological position in an attempt to shake the somewhat
tory government and ride the antineocolonialism horse to power, splitting
the Action Group in the process; tensions within the NCNC between
the increasingly accommodative old guard and the still radical
Young Turks increased, and so on.
But all this more confused issues than clarified them; complicated
matters rather than simplified them. Independent (as this is written) for
less than a year, Nigeria, the newest of the new states considered here,
offers but the most unformed materials upon which to base an assessment
of its essential character and probable future. Possessed of what
would appear to be an extraordinarily unwieldy set of political institutions
hurriedly put together in the last hectic years of constitution-making
before independence, lacking a comprehensive national party, a supereminent
political leader, an overarching religious tradition or a
common cultural background, and-seemingly-of several minds about
what to do with freedom now that it has, almost as a matter of course,
received it, it has an unusually tentative, up-in-the-air quality, even for
a new state.
Nigeria was the least well-defined of the generally ill-defined states
reviewed as examples in my original essay. A t the time, its situation
seemed at once the most hopeful and the most ominous. Hopeful, because
it seemed to have escaped the usual upheavals of decolonization,
to be large enough to be economically viable, and to have inherited a
moderate, well-trained, and experienced elite; ominous, because its primordial
group tensions were both extremely great and unbelievably
complex. The sense of ominousness proved to be the prophetic one. In
January 1966 a military coup led to the death of a number of Northern
political leaders, including Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and the estab-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURESi
lishment of an lbo-led military regime. A second coup, led by a Northerner
from a minor, that is, non-Hausa, tribe, Colonel Yakubu Gowon.
eventuated in the massacre of somewhere between ten and thirty thousand
lbos living in the Hausa areas of the North, while anywhere from
two hundred thousand to a million and a half lbos fled from the North
to their Eastern region homeland. In May of 1967, Colonel Gowon assumed
emergency powers and sought to divide the Eastern region into
three states as a device to increase the power of the non-lbo Easterners
and decrease that of the lbos. The lbos, forming themselves into the
Republic of Biafra, rebelled, and, after nearly three years of some of
the most bitter warfare of modern times (perhaps more than two million
people were killed and countless others died of starvation), were suppressed
by the federal government under Gowon, now a general and
head of the country. After all this, surely one of the most dramatic examples
of the power of primordial loyalties and antipathies (though,
again, the causes of the coups and the war were not "merely" primordial,
as the involvement of the great powers demonstrates), the "tentative,"
"up-in-the-air" quality of the country remains, as does its complex,
intense, and but narrowly balanced pattern ofgroup distrust.
v
Center-and-arc regionalism and dual leadership in Indonesia,
single-party interracial alliance in Malaya, aggressive assimilationism
wrapped in constitutional legalism in Burma, a cosmopolitan central
party with provincial machines fighting a multifront war against every
sort of parochialism known to man (and a few known only to Hindus)
in India, sectarian slate-making and log-rolling in Lebanon, Janus-faced
autocratic rule in Morocco, and unfocused check-and-balance scrimmaging
in Nigeria-are these systems as merely unique as they appear?
From this array of efforts after political order, does any evidence
emerge for the claim that the integrative revolution is a general process?
Over the cases reviewed here, at least, one common developmental
tendency does stand out: the aggregation of independently defined, specifically
outlined traditional primordial groups into larger, more diffuse
units whose implicit frame of reference is not the local scene but the
The Integrative Revolution
"nation"-in the sense of the whole society encompassed by the new
civil state. The leading principle in terms of which this lumping is
mainly carried out varies-region in Indonesia, race in Malaya, language
in India, religion in Lebanon, custom in Morocco, and quasi kinship
in Nigeria. Whether it involves becoming an Outer Islander in addition
to a Minangkabau, a Kachin over and above a Duleng, a
Christian as well as a Maronite, or a Yoruba rather than only an Egba,
the process, though variously advanced, both as between countries and
within them, is general. It is a progressive extension of the sense of primordial
similarity and difference generated from the direct and protracted
encounter of culturally diverse groups in local contexts to more
broadly defined groups of a similar sort interacting within the framework
of the entire national society, an extension Freedman has described
particularly well for Malaya:
Malaya was and remains a culturally plural society. Paradoxically, from a
purely structural point of view, its plural nature is more marked today than
ever before. Nationalism and political independence in their early phases
have tended to define, on a pan-Malayan basis, ethnic blocs which in former
times were merely categories. Then the social map of Malaya was, so to
speak, made up of a kaleidoscope of small culturally defined units rearranging
themselves in accordance with local conditions. "The Malays" did not
interact with "the Chinese" and "the Indians." Some Malays interacted with
some Chinese and some Indians. But as "Malays," "Chinese" and "Indians"
come to be realized as structural entities on a nationwide scale, they can
begin to have total relations with one another.48
The emergence of a nationwide system of "ethnic blocs" engaged in
"total relations with one another" sets the stage for a direct clash between
personal identity and political integrity in the new states. By generalizing
and extending tribal, racial, linguistic, or other principles of
primordial solidarity, such a system permits the maintenance of a profoundly
rooted "consciousness of kind," and relates that consciousness
to the developing civil order. It allows one to continue to claim public
acknowledgement of one's existence and import in terms of the familiar
symbols of group uniqueness, while at the same time becoming more
and more drawn into a political society cast in a mold wholly different
from the "natural" community those symbols define. But, on the other
hand, it also simplifies and concentrates group antagonisms, raises the
specter of separatism by superimposing a comprehensive political sig-
48 Freedman, "Plural Society in Malaya."
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
nificance upon those antagonisms, and, particularly when the crystallizing
ethnic blocs outrun state boundaries, stirs international contro.
versies. The integrative revolution does not do away with ethnocentrism;
it merely modernizes it.
Yet modernizing ethnocentrism does render it more easily reconciled
to the presence of developed national political institutions. The effective
operation of such institutions does not require the simple replacement
of primordial ties and identifications by civil ones. In all probability,
such a replacement is a sheer impossibility. What it does demand is an
adjustment between them, an adjustment such that the processes of government
can proceed freely without seriously threatening the cultural
framework of personal identity, and such that whatever discontinuities
in "consciousness of kind" happen to exist in the general society do not
radically distort political functioning. At least as they have been conceived
here, primordial and civil sentiments are not ranged in direct
and implicitly evolutionary opposition to one another in the manner of
so many of the theoretical dichotomies of classical sociologyGemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft, mechanical and organic solidarity, folk
and urban society; the history of their development does not consist
simply of the expansion of the one at the expense of the other. Their
marked tendency to interfere with one another in the new states stems
not from any natural and irremovable antipathy between them but
rather from dislocations arising from the differing patterns of change intrinsic
to each of them as they respond to the disequilibrating forces of
the mid-twentieth century. Their clash is an outcome of the contrasting
sorts of transformation that traditional political institutions and traditional
modes of self-perception undergo as they move along their separate
paths toward modernity.
On the self-perception side, the nature of the modernizing process is
virtually uninvestigated; it is not usually even recognized that such a
process exists. The already mentioned aggregation of narrowly circumscribed
tribal, linguistic, religious, and so on, groups into larger more
generalized ethnic blocs set within the context of a common social
frame is certainly a crucial part of it. A simple, coherent, broadly defined
ethnic structure, such as is found in most industrial societies, is
not an undissolved residue of traditionalism but an earmark of modernity.
But how this reconstruction of the system of primordial affiliation
takes place, the stages through which it passes, the forces that advance
or retard it, the transformations in personality structure it involves, all
The Integrative Revolution
are largely unknown. The comparative sociology (or social psychology)
of ethnic change remains to be written.
With respect to the political side, it can hardly be said that the problem
is unrecognized, for the notion of a civil society, of the nature of
citizenship and the diffuse social sentiments on which it rests, has been
a central concern of political science since Aristotle. But it remains
nonetheless vague; much easier to point to than describe; much easier
to sense than to analyze. What the civic sense more than anything else
seems to involve is a definite concept of the public as a separate and
distinct body and an attendant notion of a genuine public interest,
which though not necessarily superior to, is independent of and at times
even in conflict with, both private and other sorts of collective interest.
When we talk about the changing forms of civil politics in the new
states or elsewhere, it is the vicissitudes of just this sense of the public
and the public interest, its waxings and wanings, its alterations in mode
of expression, to which we refer. Again, however, though we have at
least a general idea of the nature of civility and the range of forms
through which it is materialized in industrial states, very little is known
about the processes by which the present patterns have come to be what
they are. A genuine civil sense is often even denied-incorrectly in my
opinion-to traditional states at all. In any case, the stages through
which a modern sense of political community arises out of a traditional
one have been at best but i mpressionistically traced, and thus both the
roots and the character of civility remain obscure.
A satisfactory understanding of the reasons for the chronic tension in
the new states between the need to maintain a socially ratified personal
identity and the desire to construct a powerful national community demands,
therefore, a more circumstantial tracing of the stages through
which their relationship to one another passes as each proceeds along
the special lines of its own development. And it is in the histories of
those states as they unfold before our eyes that such a tracing is most
readily to be accomplished. The diverse constitutional, quasi-constitutional,
or simply ad hoc experiments in government that characterize at
least those new states described here represent, an:tong other things, an
attempt to establish a pattern of politics in which the looming headlong
clash of primordial and civil loyalties can be averted. Whether ethnic
differentiation is given its political expression in terms of territorial subunits,
political parties, government posts, executive leadership, or, as
is most common, one or another combination of these, the effort is
310 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE1
everywhere to find a formula that will keep the pace of modernizati�
of the nation's sense of seltbood in step with the parallel modernizatiOilj
not only of its political, but of its economic, stratificatory, domestic, and!)
so on, institutions as well. It is by watching the integrative revolution:'
happen that we shall understand it. This may seem like a mere wait.;�
and-see policy, inappropriate to the predictive ambitions of science. But'
such a policy is at least preferable, and more scientific, to waiting and·
not seeing, which has been largely the case to date.
At any rate, the success of the efforts to find a formula for balance in
the midst of change now taking place in the new states is nowhere as-'.
sured. A high degree of governmental immobilism resulting from the at.:.
tempt to reconcile divergent primordial groups is everywhere apparent.'
The mere prejudices that must be tolerated in order to effect such rec.:
onciliations are often repugnant. But as the alternatives to such attempta:
as these to construct a civil politics of primordial compromise would:
seem to be either Balkanization, Herrenvolk fanaticism, or the forcibl�:.
suppression of ethnic assertion by a leviathan state, can they be view� :
especially by members of a society that has notably failed to resolve its.
own most troublesome primordial problem, with either indifference or
contempt?
Chapter I I j
The Politics of Meaning
I
One of the things that everyone knows but no one can quite think how
to demonstrate is that a country's politics reflect the design of its culture.
At one level, the proposition is indubitable-where else could
French politics exist but France? Yet, merely to state it is to raise
doubts. Since J 945 , Indonesia has seen revolution, parliamentary democracy,
civil war, presidential autocracy, mass murder, and military
rule. Where is the design in that?
Between the stream of events that make up political life and the web
of beliefs that comprises a culture it is difficult to find a middle term.
On the one hand, everything looks like a clutter of schemes and surprises;
on the other, like a vast geometry of settled judgments. What
joins such a chaos of incident to such a cosmos of sentiment is extremely
obscure, and how to formulate it is even more so. Above all,
what the attempt to link politics and culture needs is a less breathless
view of the former and a less aesthetic view of the latter.
In the several essays which make up Culture and Politics in Indonesia,
the sort of theoretical reconstruction necessary to produce such a
change of perspective is undertaken, mainly from the cultural side by
Benedict Anderson and Taufik Abdullah, mainly from the political by
3 12 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Daniel Lev and G. William Liddle, more or less evenly from both by
Sartono Kartodirdjo. 1 Whether the subject be law or party organization,
the Javanese idea of power or the Minangkabau idea of change, ethnic
conflict or rural radicalism, the effort is the same: to render Indonesian
political life intelligible by seeing it, even at its most erratic, as informed
by a set of conceptions-ideals, hypotheses, obsessions,
judgments--derived from concerns which far transcend it, and to give
reality to those conceptions by seeing them as having their existence not
in some gauzy world of mental forms but in the concrete immediacy of
partisan struggle. Culture, here, is not cults and customs, but the structures
of meaning through which men give shape to their experience; and
politics is not coups and constitutions, but one of the principal arenas in
which such structures publicly unfold. The two being thus reframed, determining
the connection between them becomes a practicable enterprise,
though hardly a modest one.
The reason the enterprise is immodest, or anyway especially
venturesome, is that there is almost no theoretical apparatus with which
to conduct it; the whole field-what shall we call it? thematic analysis?
-is wedded to an ethic of imprecision. Most attempts to find general
cultural conceptions displayed in particular social contexts are content
to be merely evocative, to place a series of concrete observations in immediate
juxtaposition and to pull out (or read in) the pervading element
by rhetorical suggestion. Explicit argument is rare because there are, as
much by design as neglect, hardly any terms in which to cast it, and one
is left with a collection of anecdotes connected by insinuation, and with
a feeling that though much has been touched little has been grasped.2
The scholar who wishes to avoid this sort of perfected impressionism
has thus to build his theoretical scaffold at the same time that he conducts
his analysis. That is why the authors in the [Holt] book have
such diverse approaches-why Liddle moves out from group conflicts
and Anderson from art and literature; why Lev's puzzle is the politicization
of legal institutions, Sartono's the durability of popular millenarianism,
Abdullah's the fusion of social conservatism and ideological dynamism.
The unity here is neither of topic nor argument, but of
1 See C. Holt, ed., Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca, 1972), in which
the present essay first appeared as an "Afterword," pp. 3 19-336.
2 Perhaps the foremost, as well as the most uncompromising, practitioner of
this paratactic approach to relating politics to culture is Nathan Leites. See especially
his A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, Ill., 1 953), and The Rules of the
Game in Paris (Chicago, 1 969).
The Politics of Meaning 3 13
analytical style-of aim and of the methodological issues the pursuit of
such an aim entails.
These issues are multiple. involving questions of definition. verification.
causality, representativeness. objectivity, measurement, communication.
But at base they all boil down to one question: how to frame an
analysis of meaning-the conceptual structures individuals use to construe
experience-which will be at once circumstantial enough to carry
conviction and abstract enough to forward theory. These are equal necessities;
choosing one at the expense of the other yields blank descriptivism
or vacant generality. But they also, superficially at least. pull in
opposite directions, for the more one invokes details the more he is
bound to the peculiarities of the immediate case, the more one omits
them the more he loses touch with the ground on which his arguments
rest. Discovering how to escape this paradox-or more exactly. for one
never really escapes it, how to keep it at bay-is what, methodologically.
thematic analysis is all about.
And it is, consequently, what, beyond the particular findings concerning
particular subjects, the [Holt) book is about. Each study struggles
to draw broad generalizations out of special instances, to penetrate
deeply enough into detail to discover something more than detail. The
strategies adopted to accomplish this are again various. but the effort to
make parochial. bodies of material speak for more than themselves is
uniform. The scene is Indonesia; but the goal, still far enough away to
sustain ambition, is an understanding of how it is that every people gets
the politics it imagines.
II
Indonesia is an excellent place to take up such a quest. As heir to Polynesian.
Indic, Islamic, Chinese, and European traditions, it probably
has more hieratic symbols per square foot than any other large land expanse
in the world, and moreover it had in Sukamo (who it is a mistake
to think was untypical in anything but his genius) a man both
wildly anxious and supremely equipped to assemble those symbols into
a pan-doctrinal Staatsreligion for the new-formed Republic. "Socialism,
Communism, incarnations of Vishnu Murti," a newspaper call to arms
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTU
cried in 1 92 1 : "Abolish capitalism, propped up by the imperialism t�
is its slave! God grant Islam the strength that it may succeed." 3 "I am 1;
follower of Karl Marx. . . . I am also a religious man," Sukarno an-�
nounced some decades later; "I have made myself the meeting place of!,
all trends and ideologies. I have blended, blended, and blended theiQ l
until finally they became the present Sukarno."4 �l
Yet, on the other hand, the very density and variety of symbolic ref- '
erence has made of Indonesian culture a swirl of tropes and images into
'
which more than one incautious observer has merely disappeared.� With �
so much meaning lying scattered openly around it is nearly impossible .
·
to frame an argument relating political events to one or another strain�:
of it which is totally lacking in plausibility. In one sense, seeing cultural;
reflections in political activities is extremely easy in Indonesia; but thisj.
only makes the isolation of precise connections that much more dim-:'�
cult. Because in this garden of metaphors almost any hypothesis dis.. J
cerning a form of thought in a piece of action has a certain logic, devel;��
oping hypotheses that have truth as well is more a matter of resisting���
temptations than of seizing opportunities.
(�The main temptation to be resisted is jumping to conclusions and the :1
main defense against it is explicitly to trace out the sociological links .1
between cultural themes and political developments, rather than to .:1
move deductively from one to the other. Ideas-religious, moral, prac· :;
tical, aesthetic-must, as Max Weber, among others, never tired of in�_':j
sisting, be carried by powerful social groups to have powerful social ef-_j
.·..�
fects; someone must revere them, celebrate them, defend them, impose �;
them. They have to be institutionalized in order to find not just an intel- J
lectual existence in society, but, so to speak, a material one as well. The�:
ideological wars which have wracked Indonesia for the past twenty-five .}
years must be seen not, as they so often have, as clashes of opposed�
mentalities-Javanese "mysticism" versus Sumatran "pragmatismt ;
Indic "syncretism" versus Islamic "dogmatism"-but as the substance i
of a struggle to create an institutional structure for the country that .·
3 Quoted (from Utusan Hindia) in B. Dahm, Sukarno and the Struggle for In- ·
donesian Independence (Ithaca, 1 969), p. 39.
4 Quoted in L. Fischer, The Story of Indonesia (New York., 1 959), p. I 54. For.
a similar statement from a public speech of Suk.arno, see Dahm, Sukarno and the
Struggle, p. 200.
s For an example, see H. Luethy, "Indonesia Confronted," Encounter 2S
( 1 965): 80-89; 26 ( 1 966): 75-83, along with my comment "Are the Javanese
.
Mad?" and Luethy's "Reply," ibid., August 1 966, pp. 86-90.
The Politics of Meaning
enough of its citizens would find sufficiently congenial to allow it to
function.
Hundreds of thousands of political dead testify to the fact that nowhere
nearly enough citizens did so, and it is questionable how far they
do so now. Organizing a cultural hodgepodge into a workable polity is
more than a matter of inventing a promiscuous civil religion to blunt
its variety. It requires either the establishment of political institutions
within which opposing groups can safely contend, or the elimination of
all groups but one from the political stage. Neither of these has, so far,
been more than marginally effected in Indonesia; the country has been
as incapable of totalitarianism as of constitutionalism. Rather, almost
every institution in the society-army, bureaucracy, court, university,
press, party, religion, village-has been swept by great tremors of ideological
passion which seem to have neither end nor direction. If Indonesia
gives any overall impression, it is of a state manqu�. a country
which, unable to find a political form appropriate to the temper of its
people, stumbles on apprehensively from one institutional contrivance
to the next.
A great part of the problem, of course, is that the country is archipelagic
in more than geography. Insofar as it displays a pervasive temper,
it is one riven with internal contrasts and contradictions. There are the
regional differences (the rhetorical combativeness of the M inangkabau
and the reflective elusiveness of the Javanese, for example) ; there are
the faith-and-custom "ethnic" divergences among even closely related
groups, as in the East Sumatran "boiling pot"; there are the class conflicts
reflected in the nativistic movement material and the vocational
ones reflected in that of the struggle for a workable legal system. There
are racial minorities (Chinese and Papuans) ; religious minorities (Christians
and Hindus) ; local minorities (Djakarta Batak, Surabaja Madurese).
The nationalist slogan, "One People, One Country, One Language,"
is a hope, not a description.
The hope that the slogan represents, however, is not necessarily
unreasonable. Most of the larger nations of Europe grew out of a cultural
heterogeneity hardly less marked ; if Tuscans and Sicilians can live
together in the same state and conceive of themselves as natural compatriots,
so can Javanese and Minangkabau. Rather than the mere fact of
internal diversity, it has been the refusal, at all levels of the society, to
come to terms with it that has impeded Indonesia's search for effective
political form. The diversity has been denied as a colonial slander, de-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
plored as a feudal remnant, clouded over with ersatz syncretisms, tendentious
history, and utopian fantasies, while all the time the bitter
combat of groups who see in one another rivals not merely for political
and economic power, but for the right to define truth, justice, beauty,
and morality, the very nature of reality, rages on virtually unguided by
formal political institutions. By acting as though it were culturally homogeneous
like Japan or Egypt instead of heterogeneous like India or Nigeria,
Indonesia (or more exactly, I suppose, the Indonesian elite) has
managed to create anarchic politics of meaning outside the established
structures of civil government.
This politics of meaning is anarchic in the literal sense of unruled,
not the popular one of unordered. As each of the essays in the [Holt]
volume shows in its own way, what I have elsewhere called "the struggle
for the real," the attempt to impose upon the world a particular conception
of how things at bottom are and how men are therefore obliged to
act, is, for all the inability thus far to bring it to workable institutional
expression, not a mere chaos of zeal and prejudice. It has a shape,
trajectory, and force of its own.
The political processes of all nations are wider and deeper than the
formal institutions designed to regulate them; some of the most critical
decisions concerning the direction of public life are not made in parliaments
and presidiums; they are made in the unformalized realms of
what Durkheim called "the collective conscience" (or "consciousness";
the useful ambiguity of conscience is unavailable in English). But in Indonesia
the pattern of official life and the framework of popular sentiment
within which it sits have become so disjoined that the activities of
government, though centrally important, seem nevertheless almost beside
the point, mere routinisms convulsed again and again by sudden irruptions
from the screened-off (one almost wants to say, repressed) political
course along which the country is in fact moving.
The more accessible events of public life, political facts in the
narrower sense, do about as much to obscure this course as to reveal it.
Insofar as they reflect it, as of course they do, they do so obliquely and
indirectly, as dreams reflect desires or ideologies interests; discerning it
is more like interpreting a constellation of symptoms than tracing a
chain of causes. The studies in the [Holt] book therefore diagnose and
assess, rather than measure and predict. Fragmentation in the party system
bespeaks an intensification of ethnic self-consciousness; enfeeblement
of formal law, renewed commitment to conciliatory methods of
dispute settlement. Behind the moral quandaries of provincial modern-
The Politics of Meaning
izers lie complexities in traditional accounts of tribal history; behind the
explosiveness of rural protest, enthrallment with cataclysmic images of
change; behind the theatrics of Guided Democracy, archaic conceptions
of the sources of authority. Taken together, these exercises in political
exegesis begin to expose the faint outlines of what the Indonesian Revolution
in fact amounts to: an effort to construct a modern state in contact
with its citizens' conscience; a state with which they can, in both
senses of the word, come to an understanding. One of the things Sukarno
was right about, though in fact he had something rather different
in mind, was that it is, this Revolution, not over.
III
The classical problem of legitimacy-how do some men come to be
credited with the right to rule over others-is peculiarly acute in a
country in which long-term colonial domination created a political system
that was national in scope but not in complexion. For a state to do
more than administer privilege and defend itself against its own population,
its acts must seem continuous with the selves of those whose state
it pretends it is, its citizens-to be, in some stepped-up, amplified sense,
their acts. This is not a mere question of consensus. A man does not
have to agree with his government's acts to see himself as embodied in
them any more than he has to approve of his own acts to acknowledge
that he has, alas, himself performed them. It is a question of immediacy,
of experiencing what the state ..does" as proceeding naturally from
a familiar and intelligible "we." A certain amount of psychological
sleight of hand is always required on the part of government and citizenry
in this in the best of cases. But when a country has been governed
for two hundred years or so by foreigners, it is, even after they have
been displaced, a yet more difficult trick.
The political tasks that loomed so formidable as independence was
reached for-ending the domination of outside powers, creating leadership
cadres, stimulating economic growth, and sustaining a sense of national
unity-have indeed turned out to be that and more since independence
has been gained. But they have been joined by another task,
less clearly envisaged then and less consciously recognized now, that of
dispelling the aura of alienness from the institutions of modern govern-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE��
ment. Much of the symbol-mongering that went on under the Sukarno:!
regime, and which has been moderated rather than ended under its sue..
cessor, was a half-deliberate attempt to close the cultural gulf between
the state and society that, if not altogether created by colonial rule, had
been enormously widened by it. The great crescendo of slogans, move- ·
ments, monuments, and demonstrations which reached a pitch of almost
hysterical intensity in the early sixties was, in part anyway, designed to
make the nation-state seem indigenous. As it was not indigenous, disbe-·
lief and disorder spiraled upward together, and Sukarno was destroy�
along with his regime, in the collapse which ensued.
Even without the complicating factor of colonial rule, however, the
modern state would seem alien to local tradition in a country like Indonesia,
if only because such a state's conception of itself as a specialized
instrument for the coordination of all aspects of public life has no real
counterpart in such a tradition. Traditional rulers, and not only in Indo- .
nesia, may have been, when they could manage it and were so inclined;;
despotic, arbitrary, selfish, unresponsive, exploitative, or merely cruel:
(though, under the influence of the Cecil B. DeMille view of history, the�
degree to which they were has commonly been exaggerated) ; but they.
never imagined themselves, nor did their subjects imagine them, to bG
executives of an omnicompetent state. Mostly they governed to proclaim:
their status, protect (or, where possible, enlarge) their privileges, an4;
exercise their style of life; and insofar as they regulated matters beyond,
their immediate reach-which was commonly very little-they did so
only derivatively, as a reflex of concerns more stratificatory than prop-'::
erly political. The notion that the state is a machine whose function it:
to organize the general interest comes into such a context as somethiDJ:;
of a strange idea. . ,:
So far as popular reaction is concerned, the results of that strangenesa,
have been the usual ones: a degree of curiosity, a degree more of fear,.;
heightened expectancy, and a great deal of puzzlement. It was to such a:
confusion of sentiment that Sukarno's symbol-wielding was a failed re-+;
sponse; but the various matters discussed in the [Holt ] book are others,i
less concocted so less ephemeral. In them, one can see in concrete detail':
what being abruptly confronted with the prospect of an activist, co�
prehensive central government-what de Jouvenel has called "the pm.v1
er-house state"-means to a people used to masters but not �
managers.s . �
·�6 B. de Jouvenel, On Power (Boston, 1962).
The Politics of Meaning 3 1 9
Such a confrontation means that the received concepts of justice,
power, protest, authenticity, identity (as well, of course, as a host of
others these essays do not explicitly treat) are all thrown into jeopardy
by the requirements, or seeming such, of effective national existence in
the contemporary world. This conceptual dislocation-the putting into
question of the most familiar frames of moral and intellectual perception
and the vast shift of sensibility thereby set in motion-forms the
proper subject of cultural studies of new state politics. "What this country
needs," Sukarno once said, in a characteristic burst of linguistic syncretism,
"is ke-up-to-date-an." He didn't quite give it that, merely gestures
toward it, but they were gestures graphic enough to convince all
but the most provincial of Indonesians that not just the form but the nature
of government had changed and that they had, in result, some mental
adjustments to make.7
IV
This sort of social changing of the mind is a great deal easier to sense
than to document, not only because its manifestations are so various
and indirect, but because it is so hesitant, shot through with uncertainty
and contradiction. For every belief, practice, ideal, or institution that is
condemned as backward, one, often the same one and by the same people,
is celebrated as the very essence of contemporaneity; for every one
attacked as alien, one, again often the same one, is hailed as a sacred
expression of the national soul.
There is, in such matters, no simple progression from "traditional" to
"modern," but a twisting, spasmodic, unmethodical movement which
turns as often toward repossessing the emotions of the past as disowning
them. Some of Sartono's peasants read their future in medieval myths,
some in Marxist visions, some in both. Lev's lawyers waver between the
formal dispassion of Justice's scales and the sheltering paternalism of
the banyan tree. The publicist whose career Abdullah traces as an example
of his society's reaction to the challenge of modernism, editorial-
7 The quotation is from Sukarno's letters attacking traditionalist Islam, written
While he was in prison exile in Flores, Surat-surat Dari Endeh, eleventh letter,
August 1 8, 1 936. in K. Goenadi and H. M. Nasution, eds. • Dibawah Bendera Revolusi
I (Djakarta, 1 959): 340.
320 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
izes simultaneously for the restoration of "the genuine Minangkabau
adat [custom) ," and for headlong entry "unto the path of kemadjuan
[progress ] ." In Java, Anderson finds "archaic-magical" and "developed-rational"
theories of power existing side by side; in Sumatra, Liddle
finds localism and nationalism advancing pari passu.
This undeniable, commonly denied, fact-that whatever the curve of
progress may be, it fits no graceful formula-disables any analysis of
modernization which starts from the assumption that it consists of the
replacement of the indigenous and obsolescent with the imported and
up-to-date. Not just in Indonesia, but throughout the Third Worldthroughout
the world-men are increasingly drawn to a double goal: to
remain themselves and to keep pace, or more, with the twentieth century.
A tense conjunction of cultural conservatism and political radicalism
is at the nerve of new state nationalism, and nowhere more
conspicuously so than in Indonesia. What Abdullah says of the
Minangkabau-that accommodating to the contemporary world has required
"continuing revision of the meaning of modernization," involved
"new attitudes toward tradition itself and [an unending] search for a
suitable basis of modernization"-is said, in one manner or another,
throughout each of the essays. What they reveal is not a linear advance
from darkness to light, but a continuous redefinition of where "we"
(peasants, lawyers, Christians, Javanese, Indonesians . . . ) have been,
now are, and have yet to go-images of group history, character, evolution,
and destiny that have only to emerge to be fought over.
In Indonesia, such bending backward and forward at the same time
has been apparent from the beginning of the nationalist movement and
merely grown more marked since.s Sarekat Islam, the first really sizable
organization (its membership increased from approximately four
thousand in 1 9 1 2 to approximately four hundred thousand in 1 9 1 4),
appealed at once to visionary mystics, Islamic purists, Marxist radicals,
trading-class reformers, paternal aristocrats, and messianic peasants.
When this commotion disguised as a party came to pieces, as it did in
8 For the history of Indonesian nationalism, on which my remarks here are
but passing commentary, see J. M . Pluvier, Overzicht van de Ontwikkeling der
Nationalistische Beweging in lndonesie in de Jaren 1 930 tot 1942 (The Hague,
1 953); A. K. Pringgodigdo, Sedjarah Pergerakan Rakjat Indonesia (Djakarta,
1950); D. M. G. Koch, Om de Jlrijheid (Djakarta, 1 950); Dahm, Sukarno and the
Struggle; G. MeT. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca,
1952); H. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the
Japanese Occupation, 1942-1945 (The Hague, 1 958); W. F. Wertheim, Indonesian
Society in Transition (The Hague, 1956).
The Politics of Meaning 32 1
the twenties, it separated not into the "reactionary" and "progressive"
wings of revolutionary mythology, but into a whole series of factions,
movements, ideologies, clubs, conspiracies-what Indonesians call
a/iran (streams)-seeking to fasten one or another form of modernism
on to one or another strand of tradition.
"Enlightened" gentry-physicians, lawyers, schoolteachers, sons of
civil servants-attempted to marry "spiritual'' East and "dynamic"
West by fusing a sort of cultic aestheticism with an evolutionary, noblesse
oblige program of mass uplift. Rural Koranic religious teachers
sought to transform anti-Christian sentiments into anticolonial ones, and
themselves into links between urban activism and village piety. Muslim
modernists tried at once to purify popular faith of heterodox accretions
and work out a properly Islamic program of social and economic reform.
Left-wing revolutionaries sought to identify rural collectivism and
political, peasant discontent and class struggle; Eurasian half-castes to
reconcile their Dutch and Indonesian identities and provide a rationale
for multiracial independence; Western-educated intellectuals to reconnect
themselves to Indonesian reality by tapping indigenous, antifeudal
(and to some extent anti-Javanese) attitudes in the interests of democratic
socialism. Everywhere one looks, in the fevered days of the nationalist
awakening (ca. 1 9 1 2- 1 950), someone is matching advanced
ideas and familiar sentiments in order to make some variety of progress
look less disruptive and some pattern of custom less dispensable.
The heterogeneity of Indonesian culture and that of modern political
thought thus played into one another to produce an ideological situation
in which a highly generalized consensus at one level-that the country
must collectively storm the heights of modernity while clinging, also
collectively, to the essentials of its heritage-was countered on another
by an accelerating dissensus as to what direction the heights should be
stormed from and what the essentials were. After Independence, the
fragmentation of the elite and the active sectors of the population along
such lines was completed as the society regrouped into competing families
d'esprit, some huge, some minute, some in between, which were
concerned not just with governing Indonesia but with defining it.
Thus, a paralyzing incongruity grew up between the ideological
framework within which the formal institutions of the would-be powerhouse
state were constructed and operated and that within which the
overall political formation of the, also would-be, nation took shape; between
the "blended, blended, blended" integralism of Guided Democ-
322 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES]
racy, the Pantjasila, Nasakom, and the like, and the "boiling pot" com.·�
partmentalization of popular sentiment.9 The contrast was not a simple'
,
center and periphery one-integralism in Djakarta, compartmentalism .
in the provinces; but it appeared, and in not very different form, on aU .
levels of the political system. From the village coffee shops where Sartono's
peasants laid their small plans to the bureaus of Merdeka Square
where Anderson's "ministeriales" laid their larger ones, political life
proceeded in a curious kind of double-level way, in which a rivalry,
again not just for power but for the power above power-the right to
specify the terms under which direction of the state, or even mere official
existence, is granted-went on, wrapped in the generous phrases of
common struggle, historic identity, and national brotherhood.
That is, political life proceeded in this way until October I , 1 965.
The bungled coup and its savage aftermath-perhaps a quarter of a.
million dead in three or four months-brought to open view the cultural
disarray fifty years of political change had created, advanced,
dramatized, and fed upon. •o The wash of nationalist cliches soon .
• For the state ideology of the Republic until the mid-sixties, see H. Feith,
"Dynamics of Guided Democracy," in R. T. McVey, ed., Indonesia (New Haven.
1 963), pp. 309-409; for popular divisions, R. R. Jay, Religion and Politics in
Rural Central Java, Southeast Asia Studies, Cultural Reports Series no. 1 2 (New
Haven, 1 963); G. W. Skinner, ed., Local, Ethnic and National Loyalties in Village
Indonesia, Southeast Asia Studies, Cultural Report Series no. 8 (New Haven,
1 959); and R. W. Liddle, Ethnicity, Party, and National Integration (New Haven.
1970). The rather schizoid political atmosphere thus created can be sensed in the
debates of the constitutional convention of 1 957- 1 958; see Tentang Dasar Negara
Republik Indonesia Dalam Konstituante, 3 vols. [Djakarta (?), 1958(?)] .
•o The death estimate is that of John Hughes, The End of Sukarno (London,
1968), p. 1 89. Estimates range from 50,000 to a million; no one really knows,
and the killing was on so grand a scale that to debate numbers seems obtuse.
Hughes' account of the coup, the massacres, and the ascendency of Suharto,
though not very analytic, is probably as reliable and evenhanded as any. For
other discussions, from varying points of view, see R. Shaplen, Time Out of
Hand (New York, 1969); D. S. Lev, "Indonesia 1965 : The Year of the Coup,"
Asian Survey 6, no. 2 ( 1 966): 103- 1 10; W. F. Wertheim, "Indonesia Before and
After the Untung Coup," Pacific Affairs 39 ( 1 966): 1 1 5- 1 27; B. Gunawan, Kude·
ta: Staatsgreep in Djakarta (Meppel, 1 968); J. M. van der Kroef, "Interpretations
of the 1 965 Indonesian Coup: A Review of the Literature," Pacific Affairs 43, no.
4 ( 1 970- 1 97 1 ): 551-511; E. Utrecht, lndonesie's Nieuwe Orde: Ontbinding en
Herkolonisatie (Amsterdam, 1 970); H. P. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream
(New York, 1 97 1); L. Rey, "Dossier on the Indonesian Drama," New Left Re·
view ( 1 966): 26-40; A. C. Brackman, The Communist Collapse in Indonesia
(New York, 1 969). To my mind, the l iterature on the coup, right, left, and center,
has been marred by obsessive concern with the exact roles of Sukarno and of the
Indonesian Communist Party in the immediate events of the plot (not unimpor·
tant issues, but more important for understanding the moment than for under·
standing the country), at the expense of its meaning for the development of Indonesian
political consciousness.
The Politics of Meaning
clouded the scene again, for one can no more stare at the abyss than at
the sun. But there can be very few Indonesians now who do not know
that, however clouded, the abyss is there, and they are scrambling along
the edge of it, a change of awareness which may prove to be the largest
step in the direction of a modern mentality they have yet made.
v
Whatever social scientists might desire, there are some social phenomena
whose impact is immediate and profound, even decisive, but whose
significance cannot effectively be assessed until well after their occurrence;
and one of these is surely the eruption of great domestic violence.
The Third World has seen a number of these eruptions over the
twenty-five years it has been coming into being-the partition of India,
the Congo mutiny, Biafra, Jordan. But none can have been more shattering
than the Indonesian, nor more difficult to evaluate. Since the terrible
last months of 1 965, all scholars of Indonesia, and especially those
trying to penetrate the country's character, are in the uncomfortable situation
of knowing that a vast internal trauma has shaken their subject
but not knowing, more than vaguely, what its effects have been. The
sense that something has happened for which no one was prepared, and
about which no one yet quite knows what to say, haunts the essays [in
the Holt volume] , making them read, sometimes, like the agon of a play
with the crisis left out. But there is no help for this: the crisis is still
happening. • •
Of course, some of the outward effects are clear. The Indonesian
Communist Party, on its claims the third largest in the world, has been,
at least for the present, essentially destroyed. There is military rule. Sukarno
was first immobilized, then, with that controlled, relentless grace
the Javanese call halus, deposed, and has since died. The "confrontau
The fact that no one predicted the massacres has sometimes been instanced
as an example of the futility of social science. Many studies did stress the enormous
tensions and the potential for violence in Indonesian society. Moreover, anyone
who announced before the fact that a quaner of a million or so people
were about to be slaughtered in three months of rice-field carnage would have been
regarded, and rightly, as having a rather warped mind. What this says about reason
faced with unreason is a complicated matter; but what it does not say is that reason
is powerless because not clairvoyant.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tion" with Malaysia has ended. The economic situation has markedly
improved. Domestic security, at the cost of large-scale political detentions,
has come to virtually the entire country for almost the first time
since Independence. The flamboyant desperation of what now is called
the "Old Order" has been replaced by the muted desperation of the
"New Order." But the question "What has changed?" is still, when it
refers to the culture, a baffling one. Surely, so great a catastrophe, especially
as it mostly occurred in villages among villagers, can hardly have
left the country unmoved, yet how far and how permanently it has been
moved is impossible to say. Emotions surface extremely gradually, if
extremely powerfully, in Indonesia: "The crocodile is quick to sink,"
they say, "but slow to come up." Both writings on Indonesian politics
and those politics themselves are permeated right now with the inconfidence
derived from waiting for that crocodile to come up.
In the history of comparable political seizures, however (and when
one looks at the history of the modern world, they are easy enough to
find), some outcomes seem more common than others. Perhaps the most
common is a failure of nerve, a constriction of the sense of possibility.
Massive internal bloodlettings like the American or the Spanish civil
wars have often subjected political life to the sort of muffled panic we
associate with psychic trauma more generally: obsession with signs,
most of them illusory, that "it is about to happen again"; perfection of
elaborate precautions, most of them symbolic, to see that it doesn't; and
irremovable conviction, most of it visceral, that it is going to anywayall
resting, perhaps, on the half-recognized desire that it do so and to
get it over with. For a society, as for an individual, an inner catastrophe,
especially when it occurs in the process of a serious attempt to
change, can be both a subtly addictive and a profoundly rigidifying
force.
This is particularly so (and here the analogy-which, as public disasters
refract through private lives, is not entirely an analogy-with individual
response continues) when the truth of what has happened is obscured
by convenient stories, and passions are left to flourish in the
dark. Accepted for what they were, as terrible as they were, the events
of 1 965 could free the country from many of the illusions which permitted
them to happen, and most especially the illusion that the Indonesian
population is embarked as a body on a straight-line march to modernity,
or that, even guided by the Koran, the Dialectic, the Voice in
the Quiet, or Practical Reason, such a march is possible. Denied, by
The Politics of Meaning
means of another cooked-up ideological synthesis, the half-suppressed
memory of the events will perpetuate and infinitely widen the gulf between
the processes of government and the struggle for the real. At an
enormous cost, and one which need not have been paid, the Indonesians
would seem to an outsider to have now demonstrated to themselves
with convincing force the depth of their dissensus, ambivalence, and disorientation.
Whether the demonstration has in fact been convincing to
the insiders, for whom such revelations about themselves must inevitably
be terrifying, is another question ; indeed, it is the central question of
Indonesian politics at this juncture of history. For all their before-thestorm
quality, the studies in the [Holt) volume contribute, if not an
answer, at least a sense of what the probabilities are.
However great a disruptive force the massacres may (or may not)
have been, the conceptual matrix within which the country has been
moving cannot have changed radically, if only because it is deeply
embedded in the realities of Indonesian social and economic structure,
and they have not. Java is still spectacularly overcrowded, the export of
primary products is still the main source of foreign exchange, there are
still as many islands, languages, religions, and ethnic groups as there
ever were (even, now that West New Guinea has been added, a few
more), and the cities are still full of intellectuals without places, the
towns of merchants without capital, and the villages of peasants without
land. 12
Lev's lawyers, Abdullah's reformers, Liddle's politicians, Sartono's
peasants, and Anderson's functionaries, as well as the soldiers who now
police them, face the same range of problems with about the same range
of alternatives and the same stock of prejudices as they did before the
holocaust. Their frame of mind may be different-after such horrors it
is hard to believe that it is not-but the society within which they are
enclosed and the structures of meaning which inform it are largely the
same. Cultural interpretations of politics are powerful to the degree that
they can survive, in an intellectual sense, the events of politics; and
their ability to do that depends on the degree to which they are well
12 It should perhaps be remarked that the external parameters have also not
changed very much-China, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union are
still more or less where and what they were, and so, for that matter, are the
terms of trade. If so-called outside factors seem to have been slighted in favor of
so-called inside ones [in the Holt volume] , it is not because they are considered
unimportant, but because in order to have local effects they must first have local
expressions, and any attempt to trace them beyond such expressions to their
sources would, in studies of this scale, soon get out of hand.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
grounded sociologically, not on their inner coherence, their rhetorical
plausibility, or their aesthetic appeal. When they are properly anchored,
whatever happens reinforces them; when they are not, whatever happens
explodes them.
So what is written [in the Holt volume ] is, if not predictive, still testable.
The worth of these essays-the authors of which may or may not
agree with my interpretation of their findings-will, in the long run, be
determined less by their fit to the facts from which they are derived,
though it is that which recommends them to our attention in the first
place, than by whether they illumine t�e future course of Indonesian
politics. As the consequences of the last decade appear in the next, we
shall begin to see whether what has been said here about Indonesian
culture is penetrating or wrongheaded, whether it enables us to construe
what happens in terms of it or leaves us straining for understanding
against the grain of what we thought was so. Meanwhile, we can only
wait for the crocodile along with everyone else, recalling, as a bar to the
sort of moral presumptuousness that neither Americans nor Indonesians
are at this time very well positioned to affect, what Jakob Burckhardt,
who perhaps deserves to be called the founder of thematic analysis, said
in 1 860 about the dubious business ofjudging peoples:
It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of difference
among different nations, but to strike the balance of the whole is not given
to human insight. The ultimate truth with respect to the character, the conscience,
and the guilt of a people remains for ever a secret; if only for the
reason that its defects have another side, where they reappear as peculiarities
or even as virtues. We must leave those who find pleasure in passing
sweeping censures on whole nations. to do so as they like. The people of
Europe can maltreat, but happily not judge one another. A great nation, interwoven
by its civilization, its achievements, and its fortunes with the
whole life of the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and
its accusers. It lives on with or without the approval of theorists.13
13 J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York,
1954); orig. ( 1 860), p. 3 1 8.
Chapter 1 2 jPolitics Past,
Politics Present:
Some Notes on the Uses
of Anthropology in
Understanding the
New States
I
In recent years, the main meeting ground of the various branches of
learning which in some uncertain way make up the social sciences has
been the study of the so-called Third World: the forming nations and
tottering states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In this enigmatical
setting, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, economics,
psychology, as well as that oldest of our disciplines, soothsaying, have
found themselves in the unfamiliar position of dealing severally with essentially
the same body of data.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
The experience has not always been a comfortable one. The meeting
ground has often turned into a battleground, and the lines of professional
demarcation have hardened: as Englishmen abroad are often
more British than in London, so economists abroad are often more
econometrica( than at M. I.T. Then, too, a few of the more enthusiastic
have abandoned their professions almost altogether for a kind of Alexandrian
eclecticism which has produced some very strange hippogriffs
indeed: Freud, Marx, and Margaret Mead in one ungainly package.
But the general effect has certainly been salutary. The sense of intellectual
self-sufficiency, that peculiar conceptual and methodological arrogance
which comes from dealing too long and too insistently with a
pocket universe all one's own (the American business cycle; French
party politics; class mobility in Sweden; the kinship system of some upcountry
African tribe), and which is perhaps the most formidable
enemy of a general science of society, has been seriously, and I think
permanently, shaken. The closed society has been as thoroughly exploded
for most of those who have studied the new nations as it has for
most of those who live in them. It is coming at last to dawn upon even
the most isolationist-minded of such scholars that theirs is not only a
special science, but a special science which cannot even function without
a great deal of help from other special sciences previously despised.
Here, anyway, the notion that we are all members of one another has
made a certain measure of progress.
Among the more striking examples of this convergence from several
directions upon the same body of material is the revival of interest in
the structure and functioning of traditional states. In the past several
years the need to develop a general political science of preindustrial societies
in order to have, as the sociologist Frank Sutton has put it, "a
base point from which to understand the transitional societies which
crowd the present scene" has been felt with increasing intensity on a
wide variety of quarters. 1 As the quarters have been various, so too
have the responses. But Max Weber's half-century-old essay on patrimonialism
in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft is no longer the "isolated
monument" that Sutton, writing only a decade or so ago, then rightly
called it. It is now but one among a whole set of discourses, some more
monumental than others and a few too monumental altogether, on the
nature of government in, to have a word for them, peasant societies:
1 F. X. Sutton, "Representation and the Nature of Political Systems," Compar·
ative Studies in Society and History 2 ( 1 959): 1- 10.
Politics Past, Politics Present
societies with too many resemblances to our own for us to stigmatize
them as primitive and too few for us to celebrate them as modern.
To simplify, there have been four major lines of attack developing
over the last decade or so on this question of the nature of traditional
politics.
First, there has been the revival, largely in the hands of Karl Wittfogel,
of Marx's old notion of an Asiatic mode of production, now interpreted
to be hydraulic agriculture, and of a radically despotic state"total
terror, total submission, total loneliness," in Wittfogel's
broadsheet rhetoric-regarded as causally reflective of it.2
Second, there has been the work by social anthropologists, most of
them British and virtually all of them Africanists, on the so-called segmentary
states-states in which kinship groups and kinship loyalties
play a central role-and which, quite contrary to the monolithic view
of traditional states that emerges from the Wittfogel approach, sees such
states as delicate balances among scattered centers of semi-independent
power, now building up under the guidance of tribal myth and civic ritual
toward some apical point, now sliding away into clan jealousy, local
rivalry, and fraternal intrigue.a
Third, there has been a renewed emphasis on what might be called
comparative feudalism, on the question of whether feudalism is an historical
category with one, itself rather unhomogeneous, instance, the
European, or a scientific category with many at least roughly similar instances.
Here, the motive figure is beyond doubt Marc Bloch, the depth
of whose impact upon the social sciences is still not fully appreciated,
even by many of those upon whom the impact has been exercised.4 But
this interest is also, of course, the main continuation of the Weberian
tradition, and in the hands of a sociologist like Eisenstadt with his interest
in the role of bureaucracy in early empires, or of an economic
historian like Karl Polanyi with his interest in the political management
of commercial activity in such empires, it widens out beyond feudalism
proper to concern itself with the range of authority structures found in
societies in which feudalization is only one of a number, but a limited
number, of institutional possibilities.s
z K. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, 1957).
3 For a representative example of this line of thought, see A. Southall, Alur
Society (Cambridge, England, 1 954).
4 R. Coulburn, ed., Feudalism in History (Princeton, 1956), presents a useful
review of such studies. For M . Bloch, see his Feudal Society (Chicago, 196 1 ).
5 S. M . Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York, 1 963);
K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg, and H. Pearson, eds., Trade and Markets in Early Empires
(Glencoe, Ill., 1 957).
330 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
And fourth, there has been the reconsideration among prehistorians
-archeologists mostly, but some orientalists and ethnologists as wellof
the size and scope of ancient states and of the developmental stages
through which those states seem to have passed. Maya, Teotihuacan,
Indus, Angkor, Madjapahit, Inca, Mesopotamia, Egypt-all the magical
names-stand less these days for glittering bronze-age barbarisms
born adult out of Gordon Childe's "Urban Revolution" and more for
extended, gradualistic developmental cycles, some of them similar, some
of them different. Or, rather, they stand for phases, momentary ones
often, in such cycles; phases which may have been both less grandiose
than their legends proclaim or their architectural remains seem at first
glance to indicate, and more complexly related to the material conditions
upon which they rested than Marxist theorists, even revisionist
Marxist theorists, usually imagine.a
Anthropologists have been deeply involved in all four of these lines
of attack upon the nature of government in peasant societies. Two of
them-the study of segmentary states and of the developmental cycles
of prehistorical states-have been almost exclusively anthropological.
But Wittfogel's theories have had an enormous impact as well. We have
had applications of them by anthropologists to Tibet, the Valley of
Mexico, the Pueblos of the Southwestern United States, and certain
parts of Africa. The comparative-institutions approach has been less
frequently pursued, partly because Weber tends to frighten anthropologists,
but his fine Germanic hand can be seen quite clearly in a number
of recent studies of some of the more developed of black African states
-Buganda, Busoga, Fulani, Ethiopia, Ashanti.
In becoming thus involved, anthropologists have, as I have suggested,
been drawn willy-nilly into an enterprise far wider than the confines of
their own discipline and so find themselves faced with the unforeseen
question of what, qua anthropologists rather than as self-made sociologists,
historians, political scientists or whatever, they have to offer to
this wider enterprise. The easy answer to this, still preferred in certain
circles, is data, preferably anomalous data which will demolish some sociologist's
high-wrought theory. But to accept that answer is to reduce
anthropology to a kind of spiteful ethnography, capable, like some literary
censor, of disapproving of intellectual constructions but not of creating,
or perhaps even of understanding, any.
8 For a survey and examination of such work, see R. Braidwood and G. Wil·
ley, Courses toward Urban Life (New York, 1 962). See also R. M. Adams, The
Evolution of Urban Society (New York / Chicago, 1 966).
Politics Past, Politics Present 33 1
With respect to Professor Sutton's large vision of "a general comparative
political science of pre-industrial societies," I, for one, think it can
contribute more than that. And in order to indicate (certainly not, in
the space available to me here, to establish) what sort of thing that
"more" might be, I want to do two things which are quintessentially anthropological:
to discuss a curious case from a distant land; and to draw
from that case some conclusions of fact and method more far-reaching
than any such isolated example can possibly sustain.
II
The distant land is Bali; the curious case the state as it existed there
during the nineteenth century. Though in formal terms part of the Netherlands
East Indies from, I suppose you would have to say, about 1 750
on, Bali was in any realistic sense a part of the Dutch empire only after
the invasion of the Southern part of the island in 1 906. For all intents
and purposes, the Balinese state in the nineteenth century was an indigenous
structure; and although, like any social institution, it had changed
over the course of the centuries-not the least as a result of the Dutch
presence in Java, it had done so but slowly and marginally.
To simplify my description of what, in fact, totally resists simplification,
I shall first discuss the cultural foundations of the state-the beliefs
and values, for the most part religious ones, which animated it,
gave it direction, meaning, and form; and second, I shall discuss the social
structural arrangements, the political instruments, in terms of which
it attempted, with but intermittent success, to sustain such direction and
achieve such form. This separation between ideas and institutions will
later turn out not to have been so merely pragmatic as it looks, however,
but to have been the very axis of my argument.
In connection with the cultural foundations of the state, let me present
briefly three Balinese notions of what, speaking now in the ethnographic
present, supralocal politics are all about. The first of these I
shall call the doctrine of the exemplary center; the second, the concept
of sinking status; and the third, the expressive conception of politicsthe
conviction that the principal instrumentalities of rule lie less in the
techniques of administration than in the arts of the theatre.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
The doctrine of the exemplary center is in essence a theory of the nature
and basis of sovereignty. This theory holds that the court-and-capital
is at once a microcosm of supernatural order-"an image," as Robert
Heine-Geldern has put it, "of the universe on a smaller scale"-and
the material embodiment of political order.7 It is not just the nucleus,
the engine, or the pivot of the state: it is the state.
And this curious equation of the seat of rule with the dominion of
rule is more than a passing metaphor, it is a statement of a ruling political
idea: namely, that by the mere act of providing a model, a paragon,
a faultless image of civilized existence, the court shapes the world
around it into at least a rough facsimile of its own excellence. The ritual
life of the court, and in fact the life of the court generally, is thus paradigmatic,
not merely reflective of social order. What it is reflective of,
as the priests declare, is the supernatural order, "the timeless Indian
world of the gods" upon which men should, in strict proportion to their
status, seek to pattern their lives.s
The crucial task of legitimation, the reconciliation of this political
metaphysic with the actual distribution of power in classical Bali, was
effected by means of a myth; characteristically enough a colonizing
myth. In 1 343, the armies of the great East Javanese kingdom of Madjapahit
were supposed to have defeated, near a place called Gelgel,
those of "the king of Bali," a supernatural monster with the head of a
pig-a surpassing event in which the Balinese see the source of virtually
their entire civilization, even (as, with but a handful of exceptions,
they regard themselves as descendents of the Javanese invaders,
not the ur-Balinese defenders) of themselves. Like the myth of "The
Founding Fathers" in the United States, the myth of "The Madjapahit
Conquest" became the origin tale by means of which actual relations of
command and obedience were explained and justified.
Whatever scattered elements of genuine historicity this legend may
have aside (and I have in any case given only the most schematized
summary of what is a very involved and multiversioned tale indeed), it
expresses in the concrete images of a just-so story the Balinese view of
their political development. In Balinese eyes, the foundation of a Javanese
court at Gelgel (where, it is held, the palace was designed to
7 R. Heine-Geldern, "Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia,"
Far Eastern Quarterly 2 ( 1 942): I 5-30.
8 J. L. Swellengrebel, Introduction in J. L. Swellengrebel et at., Bali: Life,
Thought and Ritual (The Hague I Bandung, 1 960).
Politics Past, Politics Present 333
mirror in exact detail the palace of that most exemplary of exemplary
centers, Madjapahit itself) created not just a center of power-that had
existed before-but a standard of civilization. The Madjapahit Conquest
was considered the great watershed of Balinese history because it
cut off the ancient Bali of animal barbarism from the renascent Bali of
aesthetic elegance and liturgical splendor. The transfer of the capital
(and the dispatch of a Javanese noble, draped with magical paraphernalia,
to inhabit it) was the transfer of a civilization, the establishment of
a court which in the very act of reflecting divine order generated human
order.
This reflection and this ordering were not, however, conceived to
have maintained their purity and their force until the nineteenth century,
but rather to have clouded and weakened as time passed. Despite
the fact that they are both in a sense "colonial" myths, beginning with
settlement from more cultured foreign shores, the Balinese conception
of their political history does not, like the American, present a picture
of the forging of unity out of an original diversity, but the dissolution of
an original unity into a growing diversity; not a relentless progress toward
the good society, but a gradual fading from view of a classic
model of perfection.
This fading is conceived to have taken place both over space and
through time. The notion, certainly incorrect, is that during the Gelgel
period (from about 1 300 to about 1 700) Bali was ruled from a single
capital, but that after that period a series of revolts and fissions took
place leading to the establishment of capitals in each of the major regions
as lesser members of the royal house fled to them to set up shop
as exemplary rulers on their own. In turn, splinters from these splinters
led to tertiary capitals in the regions of the various secondary capitals,
and so on, if not quite ad infinitum, very nearly so.
Details aside, the final (that is, nineteenth century) result was an acrobat's
pyramid of "kingdoms" of varying degrees of substantial autonomy
and effective power, the main lords of Bali holding the paramount
lord upon their shoulders and standing in turn upon the shoulders of the
lords whose status was derivative for their own as theirs was from him,
and so on down the line. The exemplary center among exemplary centers
was still Gelgel, or rather its direct heir, Klungkung, its radiance
dimming, naturally, as it diffused through this progressively coarser me­
dium.
More than that, however, its own luster weakened as its pristine con-
334 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
centration of charisma, brought over as a package from Java, diffused
out into these lesser centers. The general picture is one of an overall decline
in status and spiritual power, not only of peripheral lines as they
move away from the core of the ruling class, but of the core itself as the
peripheral lines move away from it. Through the course of its development
the exemplary force of the once unitary Balinese state weakened
at its heart as it thinned at its edges. Or so the Balinese think; and it is
this dying-fire view of history, which permeates actually into the very
corners of Balinese society, that I refer to as the concept of sinking sta­
tus.
Yet this was not felt to be an inevitable deterioration, a predestined
decline from a golden age. For the Balinese, the decline was the way
history had happened to happen, not the way it had had to happen. And
the efforts of men, and especially of their spiritual and political leaders,
ought consequently to be directed neither toward reversing it (which as
events are incorrigible is impossible) nor celebrating it (which as it
amounted to a series of retreats from an ideal would be pointless) but
rather toward nullifying it, toward re-expressing directly, immediately,
and with the greatest possible force and vividness the cultural paradigm
by which the men of Gelgel and Madjapahit had in their time guided
their lives. As Gregory Bateson has pointed out, the Balinese view of
the past is not, in the proper sense of the term, really historical at all.
For all their explanatory myth-making, the Balinese search the past not
so much for the causes of the present as for the standard by which to
judge it, for the unchanging pattern upon which the present ought properly
to be modeled but, which through accident, ignorance, indiscipline,
or neglect, it so often fails to follow.
This almost aesthetic correction of the present on the basis of what
the past had at one point been, the lords sought to effect through the
holding of great ceremonial tableaux. From the most petty to the most
high they were continuously trying to establish, each at his own level, a
more truly exemplary center, which if it could not match or even approach
Gelgel in brilliance (and a few of the more ambitious hoped
even for that) could at least seek to imitate it ritually and so re-create,
to some degree, the radiant image of civilization the classic state had
embodied and postclassic history had obscured.
The expressive nature of the Balinese state, and of the political life it
supported, was apparent through the whole of its known history, for it
was always pointed, not toward tyranny, whose systematic concentration
of power it was hopelessly incompetent to effect, not even very method-
Politics Past, Politics Present 335
ically toward government, which it pursued indifferently and even hesitantly,
but rather toward spectacle, toward ceremony, toward the public
dramatization of the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality
and status pride. It was a theatre-state in which the kings and
princes were the impresarios, the priests the directors, the peasantry the
supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. The stupendous cremations,
teeth-filings, temple dedications, the pilgrimages and blood sacrifices,
mobilizing hundreds, even thousands of people and great quantities of
wealth, were not means to political ends, they were the ends themselves,
they were what the state was for. Court ceremonialism was the driving
force of court politics. Mass ritual was not a device to shore up the
state; the state was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. To govern
was not so much to choose as to perform. Ceremony was not form but
substance. Power served pomp, not pomp power.
Turning to the social framework which was designed to support this
effort but in fact acted more to undercut it, I shall have to be even more
ruthless in reducing facts to their shadows, for classical Balinese political
institutions were about as complicated as such institutions can get
and still function. But the main point to grasp about the Balinese state
as a concrete structure of authority is that, far from conducing toward
the centralization of power, it conduced, and mightily, toward its dispersion.
Very few political elites can have as intensely sought loyalty by
means so ingeniously designed to produce treachery as did the Balinese.
In the first place, the elite itself was, as I have indicated, not an organized
ruling class, but a crowd of intensely competitive sovereigns, or
rather would-be sovereigns. Even noble lineages, the various royal
houses which formed the various courts, were not solidary units but
were faction-ridden factions, collections of sublineages and sub-sublineages
each intent on weakening the others to its own profit.
In the second place, most effective government in the proper sense of
the term was local. Hamlets not only had written constitutions, popular
councils, and executive arms, but they resisted, quite effectively, court
participation in local affairs. Irrigation was in the hands of a separate,
also local, corporate body, of which there were hundreds over the countryside;
and rather than leading to the development of a centralized bureaucracy
to manage waterworks this system effectively precluded the
emergence of such a bureaucracy. Local lineages, temple congregations,
voluntary groups were equally autonomous, equally jealous of their
rights vis-it-vis both one another and the state.
In the third place, the structural ties between the state (that is, any
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
particular court) and this complex of local institutions (the "village," if
you will) were themselves multiple and noncoordinate. The three main
obligations laid by the gentry on the peasantry-military-ritual support,
land rent, and taxation-were not fused but distributed among three
different sorts of ties. A man might well owe ritual and military support
to one lord, render rent to a second, and pay taxes to yet a third. Even
worse, such ties were not, for the most part, territorially concentrated,
so a man and his neighbor, who might well be his brother, could, and
often did, owe political allegiance to different lords.
But to break this off before we disappear into the enchanted woods
altogether, the point is that supralocal political organization in Bali did
not consist in a neat set of hierarchically organized sovereign states,
sharply demarcated from one another and engaged in "foreign relations"
across well-drawn frontiers. Still less did it consist in any overall
domination by a "single-centered apparatus state" under an absolute
despot, "hydraulic" or otherwise. What it consisted in was an extended
field of highly dissimilar political ties, thickening into nodes of varying
size and solidity at strategic points on the landscape and then thinning
out again to connect, in a marvelously convolute way, virtually everything
with everything else.
The struggle at each point in this diverse and mobile field was more
for men, for their deference, their support and their personal loyalty,
than it was for land. Political power was embodied less in property than
in people, was more a matter of the accumulation of prestige than of
territory. The disagreements among the various princedoms were virtually
never concerned with border problems but with delicate questions
of mutual status and most especially with right to mobilize particular
bodies of men, even particular men, for state ritual and (what was really
the same thing) warfare.
Korn relates an anecdote concerning South Celebes, where political
arrangements approximated those of Bali, which makes this point with
the grave irony of traditional wit.9 The Dutch, who wanted, for the
usual administrative reasons, to get the boundary between two petty
princedoms straight once and for all, called in the princes concerned
and asked them where indeed the borders lay. Both agreed that the border
of princedom A lay at the furthest point from which a man could
still see the swamps, while the border of princedom B lay at the furthest
point from which a man could still see the sea. Had they, then, never
9 V. E. Korn, Het Adatrecht van Bali (The Hague, 1 932), p. 440.
Politics Past, Politics Present 337
fought over the land in between, from which one could see neither
swamp nor sea? "Mijnheer," one of the old princes replied, "we had
much better reasons to fight with one another than these shabby hills."
In sum, nineteenth century Balinese politics can be seen as stretched
taut between two opposing forces; the centripetal one of state ritual and
the centrifugal one of state structure. On the one hand, there was the
unifying effect of mass ceremonial under the leadership of this or that
lord; on the other there was the intrinsically dispersive, segmental character
of the polity considered as a concrete social institution, a power
system, composed as it was of dozens of independent, semi-independent,
and quarter-independent rulers.
The first, the cultural element, came from the top down, the center
outward; the second, the power element, came from the bottom up and
from the periphery inward. As a result, the broader the scope to which
exemplary leadership aspired, the more fragile the political structure
supporting it, for the more it was forced to rest on alliance, intrigue, cajolery
and bluff. The lords, pulled on by the cultural ideal of the consummately
expressive state, strove constantly to extend their ability to
mobilize men and material so as to hold larger and more splendid ceremonies
and larger and more splendid temples and palaces in which to
hold them.
In so doing they were working directly against a form of political organization
whose natural tendency, especially under intensified pressures
for unification, was toward progressive fragmentation. But, against
the grain or not, they struggled with this paradox of cultural megalomania
and organizational pluralism to the very end, and not always
without some degree of temporary success. Had not the modern world,
in the form of Dutch battalions, at length caught up with them, they
would, no doubt, be struggling with it still.
III
To redeem, now, my promise to generalize beyond the data, let me
make two points in conclusion about the contribution of anthropology
to a general comparative political science of peasant societies.
The first is that distinguishing the cultural ambitions of traditional
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
states on the one hand and the social institutions in terms of which
these cultural ambitions were, usually quite incompletely, realized on
the other, makes for what we may call sociological realism. Professor
Sutton's "base point" for understanding more recent developments becomes
less a kind of retrospective ideal type, a model constructed to account
for what its designer takes to be the more interesting features of
the present, and more a historical reality rooted in its own time and
place; the sort of thing out of which presents in the world, rather than
merely in books, grow.
And second, this increase in sociological realism makes it possible to
approach the central question in this area-what in fact are the relationships
between the way in which New State polities behave and the
way in which traditional ones behaved-without succumbing to either
of two equally misleading (and, at the moment, equally popular) propositions:
that contemporary states are the mere captives of their pasts,
re-enactments in thinly modern dress of archaic dramas; or that such
states have completely escaped their pasts, are absolute products of an
age which owes nothing to anything but itself.
On the first point, it is apparent that the Balinese data, if they are as
I say they are, support much better the segmentary state concept of traditional
polities as consisting of unstable pyramids of power wreathed
in symbols of a grandeur more wished for than achieved, than they do
the ••oespotic Power-Total and not Benevolent" vision of Wittfogel.
But the question is not whether Wittfogel (who has been uncautious
enough to quote Bali in support of his arguments) has given us a viable
theory or not. I myself think not; but I don't want to try to counter assertions
about China with facts about Bali. My argument is merely that
in separating, as any close ethnographic study of actual traditional polities
inevitably must separate, the ambitions of rulers, the ideas and ideals
which pull them on toward some consummating end, from the social
instrumentalities by means of which those ends are sought, anthropology
contributes to the realization that, in traditional states as in modern
ones, the reach of a politician is not quite the same thing as his grasp.
Thus stated, my message may seem the usual negative one for which
anthropology is justly famous: "Not on Easter Island." In fact, I think
the work on segmentary states, as well as that of the developmental archeologists,
promises to make, has already made, an important contribution
to a more just image of traditional polities, and along precisely
the lines I have indicated. What Evans-Pritchard did for the Shilluk di-
Politics Past, Politics Present 339
vine king (disentangled his ritual role from his political and thus dissolved
at least one African despotism into its true fragility) and a host
of scholars have done for the Maya (distinguished the splendid religious
edifice of the society from the rather more ordinary sort of shifting cultivation
community which underlay it, and thus resolved the paradox of
Byzantium in a jungle) is going to be done, I am sure, for more and
more traditional states with results which not only will not be negative
but will transform our whole conception of the sources of power, the
nature of authority, and the techniques of administration in such
states. 10
But, so far as the politics past, politics present question is concerned,
my second point is the more significant. The conceptual separation of the
ideas of order by which the actors in any polity are guided and the institutional
context within which they act makes it possible to approach
the issue of the relations between what once was and what now is with
more than reversible truisms-"There is nothing in the present but the
past"; "The past is a bucket of ashes"-to assist one. More specifically,
it makes it possible to distinguish the ideological contribution to a contemporary
state of the cultural traditions to which it is heir from the organizational
contribution to such a state of the systems of government
which preceded it, and to see that the former, the ideological contribution,
is, with some exceptions, of much greater significance than the latter.
As concrete governmental structures, today's Ghana, today's Indonesia,
or even today's Morocco, have but the most distant of relations
with the institutions of the Ashanti Confederation, the Javano-Balinese
theatre-state, or that motley collection of bodyguards and tax farmers,
the Magrebine Makhzen. But as embodiments of one or another view of
what government and politics are all about, the relation between traditional
states and transitional ones may be a great deal less distant
than the borrowed vocabularies within which Third World ideologies
are usually stated might lead one to believe.
As the cultural apparatus of a traditional state-the detailed myths,
the elaborate rituals, the high-wrought politesse-dissolves, as it has in
the majority of Third World states and doubtless will shortly in most of
the rest, it comes to be replaced by a rather more abstract, rather more
JO On the Shilluk, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk
of the Nilotic Sudan (Oxford, 1 948). The Maya discussion is more scattered and
still developing, but for a useful summary, see G. Willey, "Mesoamerica," in
Braidwood and Willey, Courses toward Urban Life, pp. 84- 1 0 1 .
340 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
willed, and, in the formal sense of the term anyway, rather more reasoned
set of notions concerning the nature and purpose of politics.
Whether written down in a formal constitution, built into a new set of
governmental institutions, or puffed up into a universal creed (or, as is
not uncommon, all three), these notions, which I would call ideology in
the proper sense of the term, play a similar role to the less-tutored,
preideological ones they have succeeded. That is to say, they provide a
guide for political activity; an image by which to grasp it, a theory by
which to explain it, and a standard by which to judge it. This carrying
forward into a more self-conscious, or anyway more explicit dimension,
of what were once but established attitudes and received conventions is
one of the central features of what we have come to call, half wistfully,
half worriedly, "nation building."
All this is not to say that the ideological frameworks within which
the Third World states operate are merely updated versions of the ideas
and ideals of the past. Their elites have clearly learned much from
other, quite nontraditional sources. Sukarno's close-up observation of
the Japanese in action was probably the most revelatory experience of
his career; we can assume that Nkrumah read at least some of those
tracts his successors so demonstratively burned; and one has only to
glance at the political publics of either India or Algeria to see that neither
Harold Laski nor Jean-Patil Sartre have labored entirely in vain.
It is in fact just this confusion of the more recognizable voices of the
present with the stranger, but no less insistent voices of the past which
makes it so difficult to determine just what the politicians, civilian or
military, of any particular Third World state think they are up to. At one
moment they seem Jacobin beyond compare; at the next haunted by
ghosts as ancient and unshakable as the furies. At one moment they
seem to be so many self-taught Madisons and Jeffersons building ingenious
political contrivances such as have never before been seen on land
or sea; at the next, so many preening Mussolinis erecting inferior imitations
of the more comic-opera examples of European Fascism. At one
moment they seem confident possessors of a settled sense of direction,
full of hope and high purpose; at the next frantic opportunists, swept by
confusion, fear, and boundless self-hatred.
It will not do, however, either to plump for one or another side of
these several antinomies or merely to announce sagely that they are antinomies,
that both sides are indeed present and the situation is complex.
The mingled voices must be distinguished so that we can hear
Politics Past, Politics Present 34 1
what each of them is saying and assess the ideological climate, if not
with very great assurance at least with some definiteness and circum­
stantiality.
In such an effort, the precise determination of the ideological contribution
of politics past to politics present-in the case at hand, of exemplary
leadership, waning charisma, and dramaturgical statecraft-is an
essential element. And for the providing of this element, anthropology,
to give one last rap on my drum, is ideally placed. At least it is if it can
now remember what, on a Pacific island, it was so easy to forget: that it
is not alone in the world.
PA R T V
Chapter 1 3/
The Cerebral Savage:
On the Work
of Claude Levi-Strauss
Today I sometimes wonder if I was not attracted to anthropology,
however unwittingly, by a structural affinity
between the civilisations which are its subject matter
and my own thought processes. My intelligence is neo­
lithic.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
I
What, after all, is one to make of savages? Even now, after three centuries
of debate on the matter-whether they are noble, bestial, or even
as you and I; whether they reason as we do, are sunk in a demented
mysticism, or possessors of higher forms of truth we have in our avarice
lost; whether their customs, from cannibalism to matriliny, are mere alternatives,
no better and no worse, to our own, or crude precursors of
our own now outmoded, or simply passing strange, impenetrable exotica
amusing to collect; whether they are bound and we are free, or we
are bound and they are free-after all this we still don't know. For the
anthropologist, whose profession it is to study other cultures, the puzzle
is always with him. His personal relationship to his object of study is,
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
perhaps more than for any other scientist, inevitably problematic. Know
what he thinks a savage is and you have the key to his work. You know
what he thinks he himself is and, knowing what he thinks he himself is,
you know in general what sort of thing he is going to say about whatever
tribe he happens to be studying. All ethnography is part philosophy,
and a good deal of the rest is confession.
In the case of Claude Uvi-Strauss, Professor of Social Anthropology
in the College de France and the center right now of a degree of general
attention which men who spend their lives studying far-off peoples do
not usually get, sorting out the spiritual elements from the descriptive is
particularly difficult. On the other hand, no anthropologist has been
more insistent on the fact that the practice of his profession has consisted
of a personal quest, driven by a personal vision, and directed toward
a personal salvation:
I owe myself to mankind just as much as to knowledge. History. politics, the
social and economic universe, the physical world, even the sky. all surround
me in concentric circles and I can only escape from those circles in thought
if I concede to each of them some part of my being. Like the pebble which
marks the surface of the wave with circles as it passes through it, I must
throw myself into the water if I am to plumb the depths.
On the other hand, no anthropologist has made greater claims for
ethnology as a positive science:
The ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve
him. The critical importance of ethnology is that it represents the first
step in a process which includes others. Ethnographic analysis tries to arrive
at invariants beyond the empirical diversity of societies. . . . This initial enterprise
opens the way for others . . . which are incumbent on the natural
sciences: the reintegration of culture into nature and generally of life into
the whole of its physico-chemical conditions. . . . One can understand,
therefore, why I find in ethnology the principle of all research.
In L�vi-Strauss' work the two faces of anthropology-as a way of
going at the world and as a method for uncovering lawful relations
among empirical facts-are turned in toward one another so as to force
a direct confrontation between them rather than (as is more common
among ethnologists) out away from one another so as to avoid such a
confrontation and the inward stresses which go with it. This accounts
both for the power of his work and for its general appeal. It rings with
boldness and a kind of reckless candor. But it also accounts for the
more intraprofessional suspicion that what is presented as High Science
The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Levi- Strauss 347
may really be an ingenious and somewhat roundabout attempt to defend
a metaphysical position, advance an ideological argument, and serve a
moral cause.
There is, perhaps, nothing so terribly wrong about this, but, as with
Marx, it is well to keep it in mind, lest an attitude toward life be taken
for a simple description of it. Every man has a right to create his own
savage for his own purposes. Perhaps every man does. But to demonstrate
that such a constructed savage corresponds to Australian Aborigines,
African Tribesmen, or Brazilian Indians is another matter alto­
gether.
The spiritual dimensions of Levi-Strauss' encounter with his object of
study, what trafficking with savages has meant to him personally, are
particularly easy to discover, for he has recorded them with figured eloquence
in a work which, though it is very far from being a great anthropology
book, or even an especially good one, is surely one of the finest
books ever written by an anthropologist: Tristes Tropiques. 1 Its design
is in the form of the standard legend of the Heroic Quest-the precipitate
departure from ancestral shores grown familiar, stultifying, and in
some uncertain way menacing (a philosophy post at a provincial lycte
in Le Brun's France); the journey into another, darker world, a magical
realm full of surprises, tests, and revelations (the Brazilian jungles of
the Cuduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib); and the return,
resigned and exhausted, to ordinary existence ("farewell to savages,
then, farewell to journeying") with a deepened knowledge of reality and
the obligation to communicate what one has learned to those who, less
adventurous, have stayed behind. The book is a combination autobiography,
traveler's tale, philosophical treatise, ethnographic report, colonial
history, and prophetic myth.
For what, after all, have I learnt from the masters I have listened to, the
philosophers I have read, the societies I have investigated and that very Science
in which the West takes a pride? Simply a fragmentary lesson or two
which, if laid end to end would reconstitute the meditations of [Buddha] at
the foot of his tree.
The sea journey was uneventful, a prelude. Reflecting upon it twenty
years later he compares his position to that of the classical navigators.
They were sailing toward an unknown world, one hardly touched by
mankind, a Garden of Eden "spared the agitations of 'history' for some
1 Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955), translated minus several chapters into English
by John Russell (New York, 1964).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ten or twenty millennia." He was sailing toward a spoiled world, one
which these navigators (and the colonists who followed them) had destroyed
in their greed, their cultural arrogance, and their rage for progress.
Nothing was left of the terrestrial Garden but remnants. Its very
nature had been transformed and had become "historical where it once
was eternal, and social where it once was metaphysical." Once the traveler
found civilizations radically different from his own awaiting him at
the end of his journey. Now he finds impoverished imitations of his
own, set off here and there by the relics of a discarded past. It is not
surprising that he finds Rio disappointing. The proportions are all
wrong. Sugar Loaf Mountain is too small, the bay is placed the wrong
way round, the tropical moon seems overblown with only shanties and
bungalows to set it off. He arrived as a delayed Columbus to make a
flattening discovery: "The tropics are not so much exotic as out of
date."
Ashore, the descent into the depths begins. The plot thickens, grows
phantasmagoria!, and arrives at a d�nouement wholly unforeseen. There
are no Indians in the outskirts of Sao Paulo as he had been promised in
Paris by, of all people, the head of the Ecole Normale. Where in 1 9 1 8
two-thirds of the state was marked on the map as "unexplored territory,
inhabited only by Indians," not a single native Indian was left by 1 935,
when, in search of "a human society reduced to its basic expression,"
he took up his post as Professor of Sociology in the new university
there. The nearest were several hundred miles away on a reservation;
but they were not very satisfying. Neither true Indians nor true savages,
"they were a perfect example of that social predicament which is becoming
ever more widespread in the second half of the 20th century:
they were 'former savages,' that is to say [ones] on whom civilisation
had been abruptly forced; and, as soon as they were no longer 'a danger
to society,' civilisation took no further interest in them." Nonetheless,
the encounter was instructive, as all initiations are, for they disabused
him of "the ingenuous and poetical notion of what is in store for us that
is common to all novices in anthropology,'' and so prepared him to confront
with more objectivity the less "contaminated" Indians with whom
he was to have to do later.
There were four groups of these, each a little farther into the jungle,
a little more untouched, a little more promising of final illumination.
The Caduveo in the middle Paraguay intrigued him for their body tattoos
in whose elaborate designs he thought he could see a formal repre-
The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Levi-Strauss 349
sentation of their aboriginal social organization, by then largely decayed.
The Bororo, deeper into the forest, were rather more intact.
Their numbers had been radically reduced by disease and exploitation,
but they still lived in the old village pattern and struggled to maintain
both their clan system and their religion. Deeper yet, the childlike Nambikwara
were so simple that he could find in their political organization
-a matter of small, constantly re-forming nomadic bands led by temporary
chiefs-support for Rousseau's theory of the social contract.
And finally, near the Bolivian border, in "Crusoe country," gnosis appeared
at last at hand in the form of the Tupi-Kawahib, who were not
only uncontaminated, but, the savant's dream, unstudied:
Nothing is more exciting for an anthropologist than the prospect of being
the first white man to penetrate a native community. . . . In my journey I
was to relive the experience of the travellers of old; at the same time I
should be faced with that moment, so crucial to modern thought, at which a
community, which had thought itself complete, perfected, and self-sufficient,
is made to realise that it is nothing of the kind. . . . The counter-revelation
in short: the fact that it is not alone in the world, that it is but part of a
vast human ensemble, and that to know itself it must first look at the unrecognisable
image of itself in that mirror of which one long-forgotten splinter
was about to give out, for myself alone, its first and last reflection.
With such great expectations it came then as a distinct disappointment
that rather than providing a purified vision of primitivity these ultimate
savages proved intellectually inaccessible, beyond his grasp. He,
quite literally, could not communicate with them.
I had wanted to pursue "the Primitive" to its furthest point. Surely my wish
has been gratified by these delightful people whom no white man had seen
before me, and none would ever see again? My journey had been enthralling
and, at the end of it, I had come upon "my" savages. But alas-they were
all too savage. . . . There they were, all ready to teach me their customs
and beliefs and I knew nothing of their language. They were as close to me
as an image seen in a looking-glass. I could touch, but not understand them.
I had at one and the same time my reward and my punishment, for did not
my mistake, and that of my profession, lie in the belief that men are not always
men? That some are more deserving of our interest and our attention
because there is something astonishing to us in their manners. . . . No
sooner are such people known, or guessed at, than their strangeness drops
away, and one might as well have stayed in one's own village. Or if, as in
the present case, their strangeness remained intact, then it was no good to
me, for I could not even begin to analyse it. Between these two extremes,
what are the equivocal cases which afford us [anthropologists] the excuses
350 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
by which we live? Who is, in the end, the one most defrauded by the disquiet
we arouse in the reader? Our remarks must be pushed a certain distance
if we are to make them intelligible. and yet they must be cut off halfway,
since the people whom they astonish are very like those for whom the
customs in question are a matter of course. Is it the reader who is deceived
by his belief in us? Or ourselves, who have not the right to be satisfied before
we have completely dissolved that residuum which gave our vanity its
pretext?
At the end of the Quest there waited thus not a revelation but a riddle.
The anthropologist seems condemned either to journey among men
whom he can understand precisely because his own culture has already
contaminated them, covered them with "the filth, our filth, that we have
thrown in the face of humanity," or among those who, not so contaminated,
are for that reason largely unintelligible to him. Either he is a
wanderer among true savages (of whom there are precious few left in
any case) whose very otherness isolates his life from theirs or he is a
nostalgic tourist "hastening in search of a vanished reality . . . an archaeologist
of space, trying in vain to repiece together the idea of the
exotic with the help of a particle here and a fragment of debris there."
Confronted with looking-glass men he can touch but not grasp, and with
half-ruined men "pulverised by the development of Western civilisation,"
L�vi-Strauss compares himself to the Indian in the legend who
had been to the world's end and there asked questions of peoples and
things and was disappointed in what he heard. "I am the victim of a
double infirmity: what I see is an affliction to me; what I do not see a
reproach."
Must the anthropologist therefore despair? Are we never to know
savages at all? No, because there is another avenue of approach to their
world than personal involvement in it-namely, the construction out of
the particles and fragments of debris it is still possible to collect (or
which have already been collected) of a theoretical model of society
which, though it corresponds to none which can be observed in reality
will nonetheless help us towards an understanding of the basic foundations
of human existence. And this is possible because despite the surface
strangeness of primitive men and their societies they are, at a
deeper level, a psychological level, not alien at all. The mind of man is,
at bottom, everywhere the same: so that what could not be accomplished
by a drawing near, by an attempt to enter bodily into the world
of particular savage tribes, can be accomplished instead by a standing
The Cerebral Savage : On the Work of Claude I.kvi-Strauss 35 1
back, by the development of a general, closed, abstract, formalistic science
of thought, a universal grammar of the intellect. It is not by storming
the citadels of savage life directly, seeking to penetrate their mental
life phenomenologically (a sheer impossibility) that a valid anthropology
can be written. It is by intellectually reconstituting the shape of that
life out of its filth-covered "archaeological" remains, reconstructing the
conceptual systems that, from deep beneath its surface, animated it and
gave it form.
What a journey to the heart of darkness could not produce, an immersion
in structural linguistics, communication theory, cybernetics,
and mathematical logic can. Out of the disappointed romanticism of
Tristes Tropiques arose the exultant sciencism of Uvi-Strauss' other
major work, La Pens�e Sauvage ( 1 962).2
II
lA Pensee Sauvage actually departs from an idea first set forth in
Tristes Tropiques with respect to the Caduveo and their sociological
tattoos: namely, that the totality of a people's customs always forms an
ordered whole, a system. The number of these systems is limited.
Human societies, like individual human beings, never create out of
whole cloth but merely choose certain combinations from a repertory of
ideas anteriorly available to them. Stock themes are endlessly arranged
and rearranged into different patterns: variant expressions of an underlying
ideational structure which it should be possible, given enough ingenuity,
to reconstitute. The job of the ethnologist is to describe the surface
patterns as best he can, to reconstitute the deeper structures out of
which they are built, and to classify those structures, once reconstituted,
into an analytical scheme-rather like Mendeleev's periodic table of the
elements. After that "all that would remain for us to do would be to re-
2 An English translation (also not integral) has appeared as The Savage Mind
(London, 1 966). However, the translation (mercifully unattributed) is, unlike Russell's
sensitive rendering of Tristes Tropiques, execrable, and I have for the most pan
made my own English versions rather than quote from it. Levi-Strauss' collection of
essays, Anthropologie Structurale, in which many of the themes of his more recent
work first appeared, has been translated as Structural Anthropology (New York,
1 963); his Le Totemisme Alfiourd'hui (Paris, 1 962), a sort of dry run for La Pensee
Sauvage, as Totemism (Boston, 1 963).
352. THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
cognise those [structures ] which [particular] societies had in fact
adopted." Anthropology is only apparently the study of customs, beliefs,
or institutions. Fundamentally it is the study of thought.
In La Pens�e Sauvage this governing notion-that the universe of
conceptual tools available to the savage is closed and he must make do
with it to build whatever cultural forms he builds-reappears in the
guise of what Levi-Strauss calls "the science of the concrete." Savages
build models of reality-of the natural world, of the self, of society.
But they do so not as modern scientists do by integrating abstract propositions
into a framework of formal theory, sacrificing the vividness of
perceived particulars for the explanatory power of generalized conceptual
systems, but by ordering perceived particulars into immediately intelligible
wholes. The science of the concrete arranges directly sensed
realities-the unmistakable differences between kangaroos and ostriches,
the seasonal advance and retreat of flood waters, the progress of
the sun or the phases of the moon. These become structural models representing
the underlying order of reality as it were analogically. "Savage
thought extends its grasp by means of imagines mundi. It fashions mental
constructions which render the world intelligible to the degree that
they contrive to resemble it."
This uncanonical science ("which we prefer to call 'primary' rather
than 'primitive' ") puts a philosophy of finitude into practice. The elements
of the conceptual world are given, prefabricated as it were, and
thinking consists in fiddling with the elements. Savage logic works like a
kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns while remaining
unchanged in quantity, form, or color. The number of patterns
producible in this way may be large if the chips are numerous and varied
enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns consist in the disposition
of the chips vis-a-vis one another (that is, they are a function of the relationships
among the chips rather than their individual properties considered
separately). And their range of possible transformations is
strictly determined by the construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner
law which governs its operation. And so it is too with savage thought.
Both anecdotal and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of "the
odds and ends left over from psychological or historical process."
These odds and ends, the chips of the kaleidoscope, are images
drawn from myth, ritual, magic, and empirical lore. (How, precisely,
they have come into being in the first place is one of the points on
which Levi-Strauss is not too explicit, referring to them vaguely as the
The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Levi-Strauss 353
"residue of events . . . fossil remains of the history of an individual or
a society.") Such images are inevitably embodied in larger structuresin
myths, ceremonies, folk taxonomies, and so on-for, as in a kaleidoscope,
one always sees the chips distributed in some pattern, however
ill-formed or irregular. But, as in a kaleidoscope, they are detachable
from these structures and arrangeable into different ones of a similar
sort. Quoting Franz Boas that "it would seem that mythological worlds
have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds
were built from the fragments," Uvi-Strauss generalizes this permutational
view of thinking to savage thought in general. It is all a matter of
shuffling discrete (and concrete) images-totem animals, sacred colors,
wind directions, sun deities, or whatever-so as to produce symbolic
structures capable of formulating and communicating objective (which
is not to say accurate) analyses of the social and physical worlds.
Consider totemism. Long regarded as an autonomous, unitary institution,
a kind of primitive nature worship to be explained in terms of mechanical
theories of one sort or another-evolutionist, functionalist,
psychoanalytic, utilitarian-it is for L�vi-Strauss only a special case of
this overall tendency to build conceptual schemes out of particular im­
ages.
In totemism, a logical parallel is (quite subconsciously) postulated between
two series, one natural and one cultural. The order of differences
between the terms on one side of the parallel is isomorphic with the
order of differences between the terms on the other side. In the simplest
case, the apparent physical differences between animal species-bear,
eagle, turtle, and so forth-are put into correspondence with the sociological
differences between social groups--clans A, 8, C, and so on. It
is not the specific characteristics of bear, eagle, and turt!e as such which
are critical-fox, rabbit, and crow would have served as well-but the
sensible contrast between any pair of them. It is upon this that the savage
seizes to represent intellectually to himself and to others the structure
of his clan system. When he says that the members of his clan are
descended from bear but those of his neighbor's from eagle, he is not
giving forth with a bit of illiterate biology. He is saying, in a concrete
metaphorical way, that the relationship between his clan and his neighbors
is analogous to the perceived relationship between species. Considered
term by term, totemic beliefs are simply arbitrary. "History"
has cast them up and "history" may ultimately destroy them, alter their
role, or replace them with others. But seen as an ordered set they be-
354 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
come coherent, for they are able then to represent symbolically another
sort of set similarly ordered: allied, exogamous, patrilineal clans. And
the point is general. The relationship between a symbolic structure and
its referent, the basis of its meaning, is fundamentally "logical," a coincidence
of form-not affective, not historical, not functional. Savage
thought is frozen reason and anthropology is, like music and mathematics,
"one of the few true vocations."
Or like linguistics. For in language too the constituent unitsphonemes,
morphemes, words-are, from a semantic point of view, arbitrary.
Why the French call a certain kind of animal "chien" and the
English call it "dog," or why English forms its plurals by adding "s"
and Malay forms its by doubling roots are not the sorts of questions
linguists-structural linguists, at any rate-any longer consider it profitable
to ask except in historical terms. It is only when language is ordered,
by the rules of grammar and syntax, into utterances-strings of
speech embodying propositions-that significance emerges and communication
is possible. And in language too this guiding order, this ur-system
of forms in terms of which discrete units are shuffled in such a way
as to turn sound into speech, is subconscious. It is a deep structure
which a linguist reconstitutes from its surface manifestations. One can
become conscious of one's grammatical categories by reading linguistic
treatises just as one can become conscious of one's cultural categories
by reading ethnological ones. But, as acts, both speaking and behaving
are spontaneous performances fed from underground springs. Finally,
and most important, linguistic study (and, along with it, information
theory and class logic) also defines its basic units, its constituent elements,
not in terms of their common properties but their differences,
that is, by contrasting them in pairs. Binary opposition-that dialectical
chasm between plus and minus which computer technology has rendered
the lingua franca of modern science-forms the basis of savage thought
as it does of language. And indeed it is this which makes them essentially
variant forms of the same thing: communications systems.
With this door open all things are possible. Not just the logic of totemic
classifications but of any classificatory scheme at all-plant taxonomies,
personal names, sacred geographies, cosmologies, hair styles
among the Omaha Indians, or design motifs on Australian bull-roarers
-can, en principe, be exposed. For they always trace down to an underlying
opposition of paired terms-high and low, right and left, peace
and war, and so on-expressed in concrete images, palpable concepts,
"beyond which it is, for intrinsic reasons, both useless and impossible to
The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude I...evi-Strauss 355
go." Further, once certain of these schemas, or structures, are determined,
they can then be related to one another-that is, reduced to a
more general, and "deeper," structure embracing them both. They are
shown to be mutually derivable from each other by logical operations
-inversion, transposition, substitution : all sorts of systematic
permutations-just as one transforms an English sentence into the dots
and dashes of Morse code or turns a mathematical expression into its
complement by changing all the signs. One can even move between different
levels of social reality-the exchange of women in marriage, the
exchange of gifts in trade, the exchange of symbols in ritual-by demonstrating
that the logical structures of these various institutions are,
when considered as communication schemes, isomorphic.
Some of these essays in "socio-logic" are, like the analysis of totemism,
persuasive and enlightening as far as they go. (Inasmuch as any
metaphysical content or affective aura these beliefs may have is vigorously
excluded from attention, this is not really so very far.) Others,
like the attempt to show that totemism and caste are capable ("by
means of a very simple transformation") of being reduced to variant expressions
of the same general underlying structure are at least intriguing
if not precisely convincing. And others, like the attempts to show that
the different ways in which horses, dogs, birds, and cattle are named
form a coherent three-dimensional system of complementary images
cross-cut by relations of inverted symmetry, are triumphs of self-parody.
They are exercises in "depth interpretation" farfetched enough to
make even a psychoanalyst blush. It is all terribly ingenious. If a model
of society which is "eternal and universal" can be built up out of the
debris of dead and dying societies-a model which reflects neither time,
nor place, nor circumstance but (this from Totemism) "a direct expression
of the structure of the mind (and behind the mind, probably of the
brain)"-then this may well be the way to build it.
III
For what Levi-Strauss has made for himself is an infernal culture machine.
It annuls history, reduces sentiment to a shadow of the intellect,
and replaces the particular minds of particular savages in particular jungles
with the Savage Mind immanent in us all. It has made it possible
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
for him to circumvent the impasse to which his Brazilian expedition led
-physical closeness and intellectual distance-by what perhaps he always
really wanted-intellectual closeness and physical distance. "I
stood out against the new tendencies in metaphysical thinking which
were then [i.e. • in 1 934) beginning to take shape." he wrote in Tristes
Tropiques, explaining his dissatisfaction with academic philosophy and
his turn towards anthropology.
Phenomenology I found unacceptable, in so far as it postulated a continuity
between experience and reality. That one enveloped and explained the other
I was quite willing to agree. but I had learnt . . . that there is no continuity
in the passage between the two and that to reach reality we must first repudiate
experience, even though we may later reintegrate it into an objective
synthesis in which sentimentality plays no part.
As for the trend of thought which was to find fulfilment in existentialism,
it seemed to me to be the exact opposite of true thought, by reason of its indulgent
attitude toward the illusions of subjectivity. To promote private
preoccupations to the rank of philosophical problems is dangerous . . . excusable
as an element in teaching procedure, but perilous in the extreme if
it leads the philosopher to turn his back on his mission. That mission (he
holds it only until science is strong enough to take over from philosophy) is
to understand Being in relation to itself, and not in relation to oneself.
The High Science of La Pensee Sauvage and the Heroic Quest of
Tristes Tropiques are. at base. but "very simple transformations" of one
another. They are variant expressions of the same deep underlying
structure: the universal rationalism of the French Enlightenment. For
all the apostrophes to structural linguistics, information theory, class
logic, cybernetics, game theory. and other advanced doctrines, it is not
de Saussure, or Shannon, or Boole, or Weiner, or von Neumann who is
Levi-Strauss• real guru (nor, despite the ritual invocation of them for
dramatic effect, Marx or Buddha)-but Rousseau.
Rousseau is our master and our brother. . . . For there is only one way in
which we can escape the contradiction inherent in the notion of the position
of the anthropologist, and that is by reformulating, on our own account,
the intellectual procedures which allowed Rousseau to move forward
from the ruins left by the Discours sur fOrigine de Nnegalite to the ample
design of the Social Contract, of which Emile reveals the secret. He it is
who showed us how, after we have destroyed every existing order, we can
still discover the principles which allow us to erect a new order in their
stead.
Like Rousseau, Levi-Strauss' search is not after all for men, whom he
doesn't much care for, but for Man, with whom he is enthralled. It is,
The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Levi-Strauss 357
as much in La Penst!e Sauvage as in Tristes Tropiques, the jewel in the
lotus he is after. The "unshakable basis of human society" is not really
social at all but psychological-a rational, universal, eternal, and thus
(in the great tradition of French moralism) virtuous mind.
Rousseau ("of all the philosophes the nearest to being an anthropologist")
demonstrates the method by which the paradox of the anthropological
traveler-who comes either too late to find savagery or too
early to appreciate it--can at last be solved. We must, as he did, develop
the ability to penetrate the savage mind by employing (to provide
Uvi-Strauss with what he perhaps least needs, another expression)
what might be called epistemological empathy. The bridge between our
world and that of our subjects (extinct, opaque, or merely tattered) lies
not in personal confrontation-which, so far as it occurs, corrupts both
them and us. It lies in a kind of experimental mind reading. And Rousseau,
"trying on [himself] modes of thought taken from elsewhere or
merely imagined" (in order to demonstrate "that every human mind is a
locus of virtual experience where what goes on in the minds of men,
however remote they may be, can be investigated"), was the first to undertake
it. One understands the thought of savages neither by mere introspection
nor by mere observation, but by attempting to think as they
think and with their materials. What one needs, aside from obsessively
detailed ethnography, is a neolithic intelligence.
The philosophical conclusions which for Levi-Strauss follow from
this postulate-that savages can only be understood by reenacting their
thought processes with .the debris of their cultures-add up, in turn, to
a technically reconditioned version of Rousseauian moralism.
Savage ("wild," "undomesticated") modes of thought are primary in
human mentality. They are what we all have in common. The civilized
("tamed," "domesticated") thought patterns of modern science and
scholarship are specialized productions of our own society. They are
secondary, derived, and, though not unuseful, artificial. Although these
primary modes of thought (and thus the foundations of human social
life) are "undomesticated" like the "wild pansy"-that spectacularly
untranslatable pun which gives La Penst!e Sauvage its title-they are
essentially intellectual, rational, logical, not emotional, instinctive, or
mystical. The best-but in no sense perfect-time for man was the
neolithic (i.e., postagricultural, preurban) age: what Rousseau (who,
contrary to the usual stereotype of him, was not a primitivist) called socit!te
naissante. For it was then that this mentality flourished, producing,
out of its "science of the concrete," those arts of civilization-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, food conservation and
preparation, and so on-which still provide the foundations of our exis­
tence.
It would have been better for man had he kept to this "middle
ground between the indolence of the primitive state and the questing activity
to which we are prompted by our armour propre"-instead of
abandoning it, by some unhappy chance, for the restless ambitiousness,
the pride and egoism, of mechanical civilization. But he has left it. The
task of social reform consists in turning us again toward that middle
state, not by drawing us back into the neolithic but by presenting us
with compelling reminders of its human achievements, its sociological
grace, so as to draw us forward into a rational future where its ideals
-the balancing of self-regard with general sympathy-will be even
more fully realized. And it is a scientifically enriched anthropology
("legitimizing the principles of savage thought and restoring them to
their rightful place") which is the appropriate agency of such reform.
Progress toward humanness-that gradual unfolding of the higher intellectual
faculties Rousseau called perfectibilitt-was destroyed by
cultural parochialism, armed with a half-grown science. Cultural universalism,
armed with a mature science, will once more set it in motion.
If [the human] race has so far concentrated on one task, and one alonethat
of building a society in which Man can live-then the sources of
strength on which our remote ancestors drew are present also in ourselves.
All the stakes are still on the board, and we can take them up at any time
we please. Whatever was done, and done badly, can be begun all over again:
"The golden age [wrote Rousseau] which blind superstition situated behind
or ahead of us is in us." Human brotherhood acquires a palpable significance
when we find our image of it confirmed in the poorest of tribes, and
when that tribe offers us an experience which, when joined with many
hundreds of others, has a lesson to teach us.
IV
But perhaps more interesting than this modernized profession of a
classical faith in (to use Hooker's phrase) "the perpetual and general
voice of men" is what the fate of such an attempt to set King Reason
back upon his throne in the guise of the Cerebral Savage will be in to-
The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude l..kvi-Strauss 359
day's world. However much it is set round with symbolic logic, matrix
algebra, or structural linguistics, can we-after all that has happened
since 1 762-still believe in the sovereignty of the intellect?
After a century-and-a-half of investigations into the depths of human
consciousness which have uncovered vested interests, infantile emotions,
or a chaos of animal appetites, we now have one which finds there the
pure light of natural wisdom that shines in all alike. It will doubtless be
greeted, in some quarters, with a degree of welcome, not to say relief.
Yet that such an investigation should have been launched from an anthropological
base seems distinctly surprising. For anthropologists are
forever being tempted-as Levi-Strauss himself once was-out of libraries
and lecture halls, where it is hard to remember that the mind of man
is no dry light, into "the field," where it is impossible to forget it. Even
if there are not many "true savages" out there any more, there are
enough vividly peculiar human individuals around to make any doctrine
of man which sees him as the bearer of changeless truths of reason-an
"original logic" proceeding from "the structure of the mind"-seem
merely quaint, an academic curiosity.
That Levi-Strauss should have been able to transmute the romantic
passion of Tristes Tropiques into the hypermodern intellectualism of LA
Pensee Sauvage is surely a startling achievement. But there remain the
questions one cannot help but ask. Is this transmutation science or alchemy?
Is the "very simple transformation" which produced a general
theory out of a personal disappointment real or a sleight of hand? Is it
a genuine demolition of the walls which seem to separate mind from
mind by showing that the walls are surface structures only, or is it an
elaborately disguised evasion necessitated by a failure to breach them
when they were directly encountered? Is Levi-Strauss writing, as he
seems to be claiming in the confident pages of LA Pensee Sauvage, a
prolegomenon to all future anthropology? Or is he, like some uprooted
neolithic intelligence cast away on a reservation, shuffling the debris of
old traditions in a vain attempt to revivify a primitive faith whose moral
beauty is still apparent but from which both relevance and credibility
have long since departed?
Chapter I 4jPerson,
Time, and Conduct in Bali
The Social Nature of Thought
Human thought is consummately social: social in its origins, social in its
functions, social in its forms, social in its applications. At base, thinking
is a public activity-its natural habitat is the houseyard, the marketplace,
and the town square. The implications of this fact for the anthropological
analysis of culture, my concern here, are enormous,
subtle, and insufficiently appreciated.
I want to draw out some of these implications by means of what
might seem at first glance an excessively special, even a somewhat esoteric
inquiry: an examination of the cultural apparatus in terms of
which the people of Bali define, perceive, and react to-that is, think
about-individual persons. Such an investigation is, however, special
and esoteric only in the descriptive sense. The facts, as facts, are of little
immediate interest beyond the confines of ethnography, and I shall
summarize them as briefly as I can. But when seen against the background
of a general theoretical aim-to determine what follows for the
analysis of culture from the proposition that human thinking is essentially
a social activity-the Balinese data take on a peculiar impor­
tance.
Not only are Balinese ideas in this area unusually well developed, but
they are, from a Western perspective, odd enough to bring to light some
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
general relationships between different orders of cultural conceptualization
that are hidden from us when we look only at our own
all-too-familiar framework for the identification, classification, and handling
of human and quasi-human individuals. In particular, they point
up some unobvious connections between the way in which a people perceive
themselves and others, the way in which they experience time, and
the affective tone of their collective life-connections that have an import
not just for the understanding of Balinese society but human society
generally.
The Study of Culture
A great deal of recent social scientific theorizing has turned upon an
attempt to distinguish and specify two major analytical concepts: culture
and social structure. • The impetus for this effort has sprung from a desire
to take account of ideational factors in social processes without succumbing
to either the Hegelian or the Marxist forms of reductionism. In
order to avoid having to regard ideas, concepts, values, and expressive
forms either as shadows cast by the organization of society upon the
hard surfaces of history or as the soul of history whose progress is but a
working out of their internal dialectic, it has proved necessary to regard
them as independent but not self-sufficient forces-as acting and having
their impact only within specific social contexts to which they adapt, by
which they are stimulated, but upon which they have, to a greater or
lesser degree, a determining influence. "Do you really expect," Marc
Bloch wrote in his little book on The Historian's Craft, "to know the
great merchants of Renaissance Europe, vendors of cloth or spices, monopolists
in copper, mercury or alum, bankers of Kings and the Em-
1 The most systematic and extensive discussions are to be found in T. Parsons
and E. Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1 959);
and T. Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 195 1 ). Within anthropology,
some of the more notable treatments, not all of them in agreement, include: S. F.
Nadel, Theory of Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill., 1 957); E. Leach, Political Systems
of Highland Burma (Cambridge, Mass., 1 954); E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Social
Anthropology (Glencoe, Ill., 1 95 I); R. Redfield, The Primitive World and Its
Transformations (Ithaca, 1953); C. Levi-Strauss, "Social Structure," in his Structural
Anthropology (New York, 1 963), pp. 277-323; R. Firth, Elements of Social
Organization (New York, 195 1); and M . Singer, "CUlture," in lnterfUltional
Encyclopedia ofthe Social Sciences, vol. 3 (New York, 1 968), p. 527.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
peror, by knowing their merchandise alone? Bear in mind that they
were painted by Holbein, that they read Erasmus and Luther. To understand
the attitude of the medieval vassal to his seigneur you must inform
yourself about his attitude to his God as well." Both the organization
of social activity, its institutional forms, and the systems of ideas
which animate it must be understood, as must the nature of the relations
obtaining between them. It is to this end that the attempt to clarify the
concepts of social structure and of culture has been directed.
There is little doubt, however, that within this two-sided development
it has been the cultural side which has proved the more refractory and
remains the more retarded. In the very nature of the case, ideas are
more difficult to handle scientifically than the economic, political, and
social relations among individuals and groups which those ideas inform.
And this is all the more true when the ideas involved are not the explicit
doctrines of a Luther or an Erasmus, or the articulate images of a
Holbein, but the half-formed, taken-for-granted, indifferently systematized
notions that guide the normal activities of ordinary men in everyday
life. If the scientific study of culture has lagged, bogged down most
often in mere descriptivism, it has been in large part because its very
subject matter is elusive. The initial problem of any science-defining
its object of study in such a manner as to render it susceptible of
analysis-has here turned out to be unusually hard to solve.
It is at this point that the conception of thinking as basically a social
act, taking place in the same public world in which other social acts
occur, can play its most constructive role. The view that thought does
not consist of mysterious processes located in what Gilbert Ryle has
called a secret grotto in the head but of a traffic in significant symbols
-objects in experience (rituals and tools ; graven idols and water holes;
gestures, markings, images, and sounds) upon which men have impressed
meaning-makes of the study of culture a positive science like
any other.2 The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought,
embody are often elusive, vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but they
are, in principle, as capable of being discovered through systematic empirical
investigation-especially if the people who perceive them will
2 G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York, 1 949). I have dealt with some of
the philosophical issues, here passed over in silence, raised by the "extrinsic
theory of thought," above, Chapter 3, pp. 55-61, and need now only re-emphasize
that this theory does not involve a commitment to behaviorism, in either its methodological
or epistemological forms; nor yet again to any disputation of the brute
fact that it is individuals, not collectivities, who think.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
cooperate a little-as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of
the adrenal glands. It is through culture patterns, ordered clusters of
significant symbols, that man makes sense of the events through which
he lives. The study of culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns,
is thus the study of the machinery individuals and groups of individuals
employ to orient themselves in a world otherwise opaque.
In any particular society, the number of generally accepted and frequently
used culture patterns is extremely large, so that sorting out even
the most important ones and tracing whatever relationships they might
have to one another is a staggering analytical task. The task is somewhat
lightened, however, by the fact that certain sorts of patterns and
certain sorts of relationships among patterns recur from society to society,
for the simple reason that the orientational requirements they
serve are generically human. The problems, being existential, are universal
; their solutions, being human, are diverse. It is, however, through
the circumstantial understanding of these unique solutions, and in my
opinion only in that way, that the nature of the underlying problems to
which they are a comparable response can be truly comprehended.
Here, as in so many branches of knowledge, the road to the grand abstractions
of science winds through a thicket of singular facts.
One of these pervasive orientational necessities is surely the characterization
of individual human bei ngs. Peoples everywhere have developed
symbolic structures in terms of which persons are perceived not
baldly as such, as mere unadorned members of the human race, but as
representatives of certain distinct categories of persons, specific sorts of
individuals. In any given case, there are inevitably a plurality of such
structures. Some, for example kinship terminologies, are ego-centered:
that is, they define the status of an individual in terms of his relationship
to a specific social actor. Others are centered on one or another
subsystem or aspect of society and are invariant with respect to the
perspectives of individual actors: noble ranks, age-group statuses, occupational
categories. Some-personal names and sobriquets-are informal
and particularizing; others-bureaucratic titles and caste designations-are
formal and standardizing. The everyday world in which
the members of any community move, their taken-for-granted field
of social action, is populated not by anybodies, faceless men without
qualities, but by somebodies, concrete classes of determinate persons
positively characterized and appropriately labeled. And the symbol
systems which define these classes are not given in the nature of things
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
-they are historically constructed, socially maintained, and individually
applied.
Even a reduction of the task of cultural analysis to a concern only
with those patterns having something to do with the characterization of
individual persons renders it only slightly less formidable, however.
This is because there does not yet exist a perfected theoretical framework
within which to carry it out. What is called structural analysis in
sociology and social anthropology can ferret out the functional implications
for a society of a particular system of person-categories, and at
times even predict how such a system might change under the impact of
certain social processes; but only if the system-the categories, their
meanings, and their logical relationships--can be taken as already
known. Personality theory in social-psychology can uncover the motivational
dynamics underlying the formation and the use of such systems
and can assess their effect upon the character structures of individuals
actually employing them ; but also only if, in a sense, they are already
given, if how the individuals in question see themselves and others has
been somehow determined. What is needed is some systematic, rather
than merely literary or impressionistic, way to discover what is given,
what the conceptual structure embodied in the symbolic forms through
which persons are perceived actually is. What we want and do not yet
have is a developed method of describing and analyzing the meaningful
structure of experience (here, the experience of persons) as it is apprehended
by representative members of a particular society at a particular
point in time-in a word, a scientific phenomenology of culture.
Predecessors, Contemporaries, Consociates,
and Successors
There have been, however, a few scattered and rather abstract ventures
in cultural analysis thus conceived, from the results of which it is possible
to draw some useful leads into our more focused inquiry. Among
the more interesting of such forays are those which were carried out by
the late philosopher-cum-sociologist Alfred Schutz, whose work represents
a somewhat heroic, yet not unsuccessful, attempt to fuse inftuences
stemming from Scheler, Weber, and Husserl on the one side with ones
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
stemming from James, Mead, and Dewey on the other.3 Schutz covered
a multitude of topics-almost none of them in terms of any extended or
systematic consideration of specific social processes-seeking always to
uncover the meaningful structure of what he regarded as "the paramount
reality" in human experience: the world of daily life as men confront
it, act in it, and live through it. For our own purposes, one of his
exercises in speculative social phenomenology-the disaggregation of
the blanket notion of "fellowmen" into "predecessors," "contemporaries,"
"consociates," and "successors"-provides an especially valuable
starting point. Viewing the cluster of culture patterns Balinese use
to characterize individuals in terms of this breakdown brings out, in a
most suggestive way, the relationships between conceptions of personal
identity, conceptions of temporal order, and conceptions of behavioral
style which, as we shall see, are implicit in them.
The distinctions themselves are not abstruse, but the fact that the
classes they define overlap and interpenetrate makes it difficult to formulate
them with the decisive sharpness analytical categories demand.
"Consociates" are individuals who actually meet, persons who encounter
one another somewhere in the course of daily life. They thus share,
however briefly or superficially, not only a community of time but also
of space. They are "involved in one another's biography" at least minimally;
they "grow older together" at least momentarily, interacting directly
and personally as egos, subjects, selves. Lovers, so long as love
lasts, are consociates, as are spouses until they separate or friends until
they fall out. So also are members of orchestras, players at games,
strangers chatting on a train, hagglers in a market, or inhabitants of a
village : any set of persons who have an immediate, face-to-face relationship.
It is, however, persons having such relations more or less continuously
and to some enduring purpose, rather than merely sporadically
or incidentally, who form the heart of the category. The others
shade over into being the second sort of fellowmen : "contemporaries."
Contemporaries are persons who share a community of time but not
of space: they live at (more or less) the same period of history and
have, often very attenuated, social relationships with one another, but
they do not-at least in the normal course of things-meet. They are
linked not by direct social interaction but through a generalized set of
symbolically formulated (that is, cultural) assumptions about each otha
For an introduction to Schutz's work in this field, see his The Problem of
Social Reality, Collected Papers, I , ed. M . Natanson (The Hague, 1 962).
366 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
er's typical modes of behavior. Further, the level of generalization involved
is a matter of degree, so that the graduation of personal involvement
in consociate relations from lovers through chance acquaintances
-relations also culturally governed, of course-here continues until
social ties slip off into a thoroughgoing anonymity, standardization, and
interchangeability :
Thinking of my absent friend A., I form an ideal type of his personality and
behavior based on my past experience of A. as my consociate. Putting a letter
in a mailbox, I expect that unknown people, called postmen, will act in a
typical way, not quite intelligible to me, with the result that my letter will
reach the addressee within typically reasonable time. Without ever having
met a Frenchman or a German, I understand "Why France fears the rearmament
of Germany." Complying with a rule of English grammar, I follow
[in my writings] a socially-approved behavior pattern of contemporary English-speaking
fellow-men to which I have to adjust to make myself understandable.
And, finally. any artifact or utensil refers to the anonymous fellow-man
who produced it to be used by other anonymous fellow-men for
attaining typical goals by typical means. These are just a few of the examples
but they are arranged according to the degree of increasing anonymity
involved and therewith of the construct needed to grasp the Other and his
behavior.4
Finally, "predecessors" and "successors" are individuals who do not
share even a community of time and so, by definition, cannot interact;
and, as such, they form something of a single class over against both
consociates and contemporaries, who can and do. But from the point of
view of any particular actor they do not have quite the same significance.
Predecessors, having already lived, can be known or, more accurately,
known about, and their accomplished acts can have an influence
upon the lives of those for whom they are predecessors (that is, their
successors), though the reverse is, in the nature of the case, not possible.
Successors, on the other hand, cannot be known, or even known
about, for they are the unborn occupants of an unarrived future ; and
though their lives can be influenced by the accomplished acts of those
whose successors they are (that is, their predecessors), the reverse is
again not possible. s
4 Ibid., pp. 17- 1 8. Brackets added, paragraphing altered.
' Where "ancestor worship" on the one side or "ghost beliefs" on the other are
present, successors may be regarded as (ritually) capable of interacting with their
predecessors, or predecessors of (mystically) interacting with their successors. But
in such cases the "persons" involved are, while the interaction is conceived to be
occurring, phenomenologically not predecessors and successors, but contemporaries,
or even consociates. It should be kept clearly in mind that, both here and
in the discussion tc follow, distinctions are formulated from the actor's point of
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
For empirical purposes, however, it is more useful to formulate these
distinctions less strictly also, and to emphasize that, like those setting
off consociates from contemporaries, they are relative and far from
clear-cut in everyday experience. With some exceptions, our older consociates
and contemporaries do not drop suddenly into the past, but
fade more or less gradually into being our predecessors as they age and
die, during which period of apprentice ancestorhood we may have some
effect upon them, as children so often shape the closing phases of their
parents' lives. And our younger consociates and contemporaries grow
gradually into becoming our successors, so that those of us who live
long enough often have the dubious privilege of knowing who is to replace
us and even occasionally having some glancing influence upon the
direction of his growth. "Consociates," "contemporaries," "predecessors,"
and "successors" are best seen not as pigeonholes into which individuals
distribute one another for classificatory purposes, but as indicating
certain general and not altogether distinct, matter-of-fact
relationships which individuals conceive to obtain between themselves
and others.
But again, these relationships are not perceived purely as such ; they
are grasped only through the agency of cultural formulations of them.
And, being culturally formulated, their precise character differs from
society to society as the inventory of available culture patterns differs;
from situation to situation within a single society as different patterns
among the plurality of those which are available are deemed appropriate
for application ; and from actor to actor within similar situations as
idiosyncratic habits, preferences, and interpretations come into play.
There are, at least beyond infancy, no neat social experiences of any
importance in human life. Everything is tinged with imposed significance,
and fellowmen, like social groups, moral obligations, political institutions,
or ecological conditions are apprehended only through a
screen of significant symbols which are the vehicles of their objectification,
a screen that is therefore very far from being neutral with respect
to their "real" nature. Consociates, contemporaries, predecessors, and
successors are as much made as born.6
view, not from that of an outside, third-person observer. For the place of actororiented
(sometimes miscalled "subjective") constructs in the social sciences, see,
T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Ill., 1 937), especially the
chapters on Max Weber's methodological writings.
6 It is in this regard that the consociate-contemporary-predecessor�uccessor
formulation differs critically from at least some versions of the umwelt-mitweltvorwelt-vogelwelt
formulation from which it derives, for there is no question here
368 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Balinese Orders of Person-Definition
In Bali,7 there are six sorts of labels which one person can apply to another
in order to identify him as a unique individual and which I want
to consider against this general conceptual background: ( I ) personal
names; (2) birth order names; (3) kinship terms; (4) teknonyms; (5) status
titles (usually called "caste names" in the literature on Bali) ; and (6)
public titles, by which I mean quasi-occupational titles borne by chiefs,
rulers, priests, and gods. These various labels are not, in most cases,
employed simultaneously, but alternatively, depending upon the situation
and sometimes the individual. They are not, also, all the sorts of
such labels ever used ; but they are the only ones which are generally
recognized and regularly applied. And as each sort consists not of a
mere collection of useful tags but of a distinct and bounded terminological
system, I shall refer to them as "symbolic orders of person-definition"
and consider them first serially, only later as a more or less coherent
cluster.
PERSONAL NAMES
The symbolic order defined by personal names is the simplest to
describe because it is in formal terms the least complex and in social
ones the least important. All Balinese have personal names, but they
of apodictic deliverances of "transcendental subjectivity" a Ia Husser! but rather
of socio-psychologically developed and h istorically transmitted "forms of understanding"
a Ia Weber. For an extended, if somewhat indecisive, discussion of this
contrast, see M . Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," in
his The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, 1 964), pp. 43-55.
7 In the following discussion, I shall be forced to schematize Balinese practices
severely and to represent them as being much more homogeneous and rather
more consistent than they really are. In particular, categorical statements, of either
a positive or negative variety ("All Balinese . . ."; "No Balinese . . ."),
must be read as having attached to them the implicit qualification ". . . so far
as my knowledge goes." and even sometimes as riding roughshod over exceptions
deemed to be "abnormal." Ethnographically fuller presentations of some of the
data here summarized can be found in H. and C. Geertz, "Teknonymy in Bali:
Parenthood, Age-Grading, and Genealogical Amnesia," Journal of the Royal Anthropological
lnslilule 94 (part 2) ( 1 964):94-1 08; C. Geertz, "Tihingan: A Balinese
Village," Bijdragen tot de taa/-, land- en volkenkunde, 1 20 ( 1 964): 1 -33;
and C. Geertz, "Form and Variation in Balinese Village Structure," American
Anthropologist 6 1 ( 1 959):99 1 - 1012.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
rarely use them, either to refer to themselves or others or in addressing
anyone. (With respect to one's forebears, including one's parents, it is in
fact sacrilegious to use them.) Children are more often referred to and
on occasion even addressed by their personal names. Such names are
therefore sometimes called "child" or "little" names, though once they
are ritually bestowed I 05 days after birth, they are maintained unchanged
through the whole course of a man's life. In general, personal
names are seldom heard and play very little public role.
Yet, despite this social marginality, the personal-naming system has
some characteristics which, in a rather left-handed way, are extremely
significant for an understanding of Balinese ideas of personhood. First,
personal names are, at least among the commoners (some 90 percent of
the population), arbitrarily coined nonsense syllables. They are not
drawn from any established pool of names which might lend to them
any secondary significance as being "common" or ''unusual," as reflecting
someone's being named "after" someone-an ancestor, a friend of
the parents, a famous personage-or as being propitious, suitable, characteristic
of a group or region, indicating a kinship relation, and so
forth.s Second, the duplication of personal names within a single
community-that is, a politically unified, nucleated settlement-is studiously
avoided. Such a settlement (called a bandjar, or "hamlet") is the
primary face-to-face group outside the purely domestic realm of the
family, and in some respects is even more intimate. Usually highly endogamous
and always h ighly corporate, the hamlet is the Balinese world
of consociates par excellence; and, within it, every person possesses,
however unstressed on the social level, at least the rudiments of a completely
unique cultural identity. Third, personal names are monomials,
and so do not indicate familial connections, or in fact membership in
any sort of group whatsoever. And, finally, there are (a few rare, and in
any case only partial, exceptions aside) no nicknames, no epithets of the
"Richard-the-Lion-Hearted" or "Ivan-the-Terrible" sort among the no-
8 While personal names of commoners are mere inventions, meaningless in
themselves, those of the gentry are often drawn from Sanskrit sources and
"mean" something, usually something rather high-flown, like "virtuous warrior"
or "courageous scholar." But this meaning is ornamental rather than denotative,
and in most cases what the meaning of the name is (as opposed to the simple fact
that it has one) is not actually known. This contrast between mere babble among
the peasantry and empty grandiloquence among the gentry is not without cultural
significance, but its significance l ies mainly in the area of the expression and perception
of social inequality, not ofpersonal identity.
370 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
bility, not even any diminutives for children or pet names for lovers,
spouses, and so on.
Thus, whatever role the symbolic order of person-definition marked
out by the personal-naming system plays in setting Balinese off from
one another or in ordering Balinese social relations is essentially residual
in nature. One's name is what remains to one when all the other socially
much more salient cultural labels attached to one's person are removed.
As the virtually religious avoidance of its direct use indicates, a
personal name is an intensely private matter. Indeed, toward the end of
a man's life, when he is but a step away from being the deity he will become
after his death and cremation, only he (or he and a few equally
aged friends) may any longer know what in fact it is; when he disappears
it disappears with him. In the well-lit world of everyday life, the
purely personal part of an individual's cultural definition, that which in
the context of the immediate consociate community is most fully and
completely his, and his alone, is highly muted. And with it are muted
the more idiosyncratic, merely biographical, and, consequently, transient
aspects of his existence as a human being (what, in our more
egoistic framework, we call his "personality") in favor of some rather
more typical, highly conventionalized, and, consequently, enduring
ones.
BIRTH ORDER NAMES
The most elementary of such more standardized labels are those automatically
bestowed upon a child, even a stillborn one, at the instant of
its birth, according to whether it is the first, second, third, fourth, etc.,
member of a sibling set. There is some local and status-group variation
in usage here, but the most common system is to use Wayan for the first
child, Njoman for the second, Made (or Nengah) for the third, and Ktut
for the fourth, beginning the cycle over again with Wayan for the fifth,
Njoman for the sixth, and so on.
These birth order names are the most frequently used terms of both
address and reference within the hamlet for children and for young men
and women who have not yet produced offspring. Vocatively, they are
almost always used simply, that is, without the addition of the personal
name: "Wayan, give me the hoe," and so forth. Referentially, they may
be supplemented by the personal name, especially when no other way is
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 37 1
convenient to get across which of the dozens of Wayans or Njomans in
the hamlet is meant: "No, not Wayan Rugrug, Wayan Kepig," and so
on. Parents address their own children and childless siblings address
one another almost exclusively by these names, rather than by either
personal names or kin terms. For persons who have had children, however,
they are never used either inside the family or out, teknonyms
being employed, as we shall see, instead, so that, in cultural terms, Balinese
who grow to maturity without producing children (a small minority)
remain themselves children-that is, are symbolically pictured as
such-a fact commonly of great shame to them and embarrassment to
their consociates, who often attempt to avoid having to use vocatives to
them altogether.11
The birth order system of person-definition represents, therefore, a
kind of plus t;a change approach to the denomination of individuals. It
distinguishes them according to four completely contentless appellations,
which neither define genuine classes (for there is no conceptual or
social reality whatsoever to the class of all Wayans or all Ktuts in a
community), nor express any concrete characteristics of the individuals
to whom they are applied (for there is no notion that Wayans have any
special psychological or spiritual traits in common against Njomans or
Ktuts). These names, which have no literal meaning in themselves (they
are not numerals or derivatives of numerals) do not, in fact, even indicate
sibling position or rank in any realistic or reliable way . 1 o A Wayan
may be a fifth (or ninth !) child as well as a first; and, given a traditional
peasant demographic structure-great fertility plus a high rate of stillbirths
and deaths in infancy and childhood-a Made or a Ktut may actually
be the oldest of a long string of siblings and a Wayan the
youngest. What they do suggest is that, for all procreating couples,
births form a circular succession of Wayans, Njomans, Mades, Ktuts,
and once again Wayans, an endless four-stage replication of an imperishable
form. Physically men come and go as the ephemerae they are,
• This is, of course, not to say that such people are reduced in sociological
(much less psychological) terms to playing the role of a child, for they are accepted
as adults, if incomplete ones, by their consociates. The failure to have
children is, however, a distinct handicap for anyone desiring much local power or
prestige, and I have for my part never known a childfess man who carried much
weight in hamlet councils, or for that matter who was not socially marginal in
general.
10 From a merely etymological point of view, they do have a certain aura of
meaning, for they derive from obsolete roots indicating "leading," "medial," and
"following"; but these gossamery meanings have no genuine everyday currency
and are, if at all, but very peripherally perceived.
372 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
but socially the dramatis personae remain eternally the same as new
Wayans and Ktuts emerge from the timeless world of the gods (for infants,
too, are but a step away from divinity) to replace those who dissolve
once more into it.
KINSHIP TERM S
Formally, Balinese kinship terminology is quite simple in type, being
of the variety known technically as "Hawaiian" or "Generational." In·
this sort of system, an individual classifies his relatives primarily according
to the generation they occupy with respect to his own. That is
to say, siblings, half-siblings, and cousins (and their spouses' siblings,
and so forth) are grouped together under the same term ; all uncles and
aunts on either side are terminologically classed with mother and father;
all children of brothers, sisters, cousins, and so on (that is, nephews of
one sort or another) are identified with own children ; and so on, downward
through the grandchild, great-grandchild, etc., generations, and
upward through the grandparent, great-grandparent, etc., ones. For any
given actor, the general picture is a layer-cake arrangement of relatives,
each layer consisting of a different generation of kin-that of actor's
parents or his children, of his grandparents or his grandchildren, and so
on, with his own layer, the one from which the calculations are made,
located exactly halfway up the cake. 1 1
Given the existence of this sort of system, the most significant (and
rather unusual) fact about the way it operates in Bali is that the terms it
contains are almost never used vocatively, but only referentially, and
then not very frequently. With rare exceptions, one does not actually
call one's father (or uncle) "father," one's child (or nephew / niece)
"child," one's brother (or cousin) "brother," and so on. For relatives genealogically
junior to oneself vocative forms do not even exist; for relatives
senior they exist but, as with personal names, it is felt to demonstrate
a lack of respect for one's elders to use them. In fact, even the
referential forms are used only when specifically needed to convey some
kinship information as such, almost never as general means of identifying
people.
11 In point of fact, the Balinese system (or, in all probability, any other system)
is not purely generational; but the intent here is merely to convey the general
form of the system, not its precise structure. For the full terminological system,
see H. and C. Geertz, "Teknonymy in Bali ...
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 373
Kinship terms appear in public discourse only in response to some
question, or in describing some event which has taken place or is expected
to take place, with respect to which the existence of the kin tie is
felt to be a relevant piece of information. ("Are you going to Fatherof-Regreg's
tooth-filing?" "Yes, he is my 'brother.' ") Thus, too, modes
of address and reference within the family are no more (or not much
more) intimate or expressive of kin ties in quality than those within the
hamlet generally. As soon as a child is old enough to be capable of
doing so (say, six years, though this naturally varies) he calls his mother
and father by the same term-a teknonym, status group title, or public
title-that everyone else who is acquainted with them uses toward
them, and is called in turn Wayan, Ktut, or whatever, by them. And,
with even more certainty, he will refer to them, whether in their hearing
or outside of it, by this popular, extradomestic term as well.
In short, the Balinese system of kinship terminology defines individuals
in a primarily taxonomic, not a face-to-face idiom, as occupants of
regions in a social field, not partners in social interaction. It functions
almost entirely as a cultural map upon which certain persons can be located
and certain others, not features of the landscape mapped, cannot.
Of course, some notions of appropriate interpersonal behavior follow
once such determinations are made, once a person's place in the structure
is ascertained. But the critical point is that, in concrete practice,
kin terminology is employed virtually exclusively in service of ascertainment,
not behavior, With respect to whose patterning other symbolic
appliances are dominant. 12 The social norms associated with kinship,
though real enough, are habitually overridden, even within kinship-type
groups themselves (families, households, lineages) by culturally better
armed norms associated with religion, politics, and, most fundamentally
of all, social stratification.
Yet in spite of the rather secondary role it plays in shaping the moment-to-moment
flow of social intercourse, the system of kinship terminology,
like the personal-naming system, contributes importantly, if indirectly,
to the Balinese notion of personhood. For, as a system of
significant symbols, it too embodies a conceptual structure under whose
agency individuals, one's self as well as others, are apprehended; a conceptual
structure which is, moreover; in striking congruence with those
12 For a distinction, similar to the one drawn here, between the "ordering"
and the "role-designating" aspects of kin terminologies, see D. Schneider and G.
Homans, "Kinship Terminology and the American Kinship System," American
Anthropologist 51 ( 1 955): 1 195- 1 208.
374 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
embodied in the other, differently constructed and variantly oriented,
orders of person-definition. Here, also, the leading motif is the immobilization
of time through the iteration of form.
This iteration is accomplished by a feature of Balinese kin terminology
I have yet to mention: in the third generation above and below the
actor's own, terms become completely reciprocal. That is to say, the
term for "great-grandparent" and "great-grandchild" is the same:
kumpi. The two generations, and the individuals who comprise them,
are culturally identified. Symbolically, a man is equated upwardly with
the most distant ascendant, downwardly with the most distant descendant,
he is ever likely to interact with as a living person.
Actually, this sort of reciprocal terminology proceeds on through the
fourth generation, and even beyond. But as it is only extremely rarely
that the lives of a man and his great-great-grandparent (or great-greatgrandchild)
overlap, this continuation is of only theoretical interest, and
most people don't even know the terms involved. It is the four-generation
span (i.e., the actor's own, plus three ascending or descending)
which is considered the attainable ideal, the image, like our threescore-and-ten,
of a fully completed life, and around which the kumpikumpi
terminology puts, as it were, an emphatic cultural parenthesis.
This parenthesis is accentuated further by the rituals surrounding
death. At a person's funeral, all his relatives who are generationally junior
to him must make homage to his lingering spirit in the Hindu
palms-to-forehead fashion, both before his bier and, later, at the graveside.
But this virtually absolute obligation, the sacramental heart of the
funeral ceremony, stops short with the third descending generation, that
of his "grandchildren." His "great-grandchildren" are his kumpi, as he
is theirs, and so, the Balinese say, they are not really junior to him at
all but rather "the same age." As such, they are not only not required
to show homage to his spirit, but they are expressly forbidden to do so.
A man prays only to the gods and, what is the same thing, his seniors,
not to his equals or juniors. 1 3
Balinese kinship terminology thus not only divides human beings into
generational layers with respect to a given Pctor, it bends these layers
into a continuous surface which joins the "lowest" with the "highest" so
that, rather than a layer-cake image, a cylinder marked off into six parallel
bands called "own," "parent," "grandparent," "kumpi," "grand-
13 Old men of the same generation as the deceased do not pray to him either,
of course, for the same reason.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 375
child," and "child" is perhaps more exact. l 4 What at first glance seems a
very diachronic formulation, stressing the ceaseless progression of generations
is, in fact, an assertion of the essential unreality-or anyway
the unimportance-of such a progression. The sense of sequence, of
sets of collaterals following one another through time, is an illusion generated
by looking at the terminological system as though it were used to
formulate the changing quality of face-to-face interactions between a
man and his kinsmen as he ages and dies-as indeed many, if not most
such systems are used. When one looks at it, as the Balinese primarily
do, as a common-sense taxonomy of the possible types of familial relationships
human beings may have, a classification of kinsmen into natural
groups, it is clear that what the bands on the cylinder are used to
represent is the genealogical order of seniority among living people and
nothing more. They depict the spiritual (and what is the same thing,
structural) relations among coexisting generations, not the location of
successive generations in an unrepeating historical process.
TEKNONYMS
If personal names are treated as though they were military secrets,
birth order names applied mainly to children and young adolescents,
and kinship terms invoked at best sporadically, and then only for purposes
of secondary specification, how, then, do most Balinese address
and refer to one another? For the great mass of the peasantry, the answer
is: by teknonyms. ts
As soon as a couple's first child is named, people begin to address and
14 It might seem that the continuation of terms beyond the kumpi level would
argue against this view. But in fact it supports it. For, in the rare case where a
man has a ("real" or "classificatory") great-great-grandchild (kelab) old enough to
worship him at his death, the child is, again, forbidden to do so. But here not because
he is "the same age" as the deceased but because he is "(a generation)
older"-i.e., equivalent to the dead man's "father." Similarly, an old man who
lives long enough to have a great-great-grandchild kelab who has passed infancy
and then died will worship-alone-at the child's grave, for the child is (one
generation) senior to him. In principle, the same pattern holds in more d istant
generations, when, as the Balinese do not use kin terms to refer to the dead or the
unborn, the problem becomes entirely theoretical: "That's what we'd call them
and how we would treat them if we had any, which we never do."
15 Personal pronouns are another possibility and might indeed be considered as
a separate symbolic order of person-definition. But, in fact, their use also tends to
be avoided whenever possible, often at the expense of some awkwardness of ex­
pression.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
refer to them as "Father-of" and " Mother-of" Regreg, Pula, or whatever
the child's name happens to be. They will continue to be so called
(and to call themselves) until their first grandchild is born, at which
time they will begin to be addressed and referred to as "Grandfatherof"
and "Grandmother-of" Suda, Lilir, or whomever; and a similar
transition occurs if they live to see their first great-grandchild . 1 6 Thus,
over the "natural" four-generation kumpi-to-kumpi life span, the term
by which an individual is known will change three times, as first he,
then at least one of his children, and finally at least one of his grandchildren
produce offspring.
Of course, many if not most people neither live so long nor prove so
fortunate in the fertility of their descendants. Also, a wide variety of
other factors enter in to complicate this simplified picture. But, subtleties
aside, the point is that we have here a culturally exceptionally well
developed and socially exceptionally influential system of teknonymy.
What impact does it have upon the individual Balinese's perceptions of
himself and his acquaintances?
Its first effect is to identify the husband and wife pair, rather as the
bride's taking on of her husband's surname does in our society ; except
that here it is not the act of marriage which brings about the identification
but of procreation. Symbolically, the link between husband and
wife is expressed in terms of their common relation to their children,
grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, not in terms of the wife's incorporation
into her husband's "family" (which, as marriage is highly endogamous,
she usually belongs to anyway) .
This husband-wife-or, more accurately, father-mother-pair has
very great economic, political, and spiritual importance. It is, in fact,
the fundamental social building block. Single men cannot participate in
the hamlet council, where seats are awarded by married couple ; and,
16 This use of a descendant's personal name as part of a teknonym in no way
contradicts my earlier statements about the lack of public currency of such
names. The "name·· here is part of the appellation of the person bearing the tek·
nonym, not, even derivatively, of the eponymous child, whose name is taken
purely as a reference point and is without-so far as I can tell-any independent
symbolic value at all. If the child d ies, even in infancy, the teknonym is usually
maintained unchanged; the eponymous child addresses and refers to his father
and mother by the teknonym which i ncludes his own name quite unself-con·
sciously; there is no notion that the child whose name is embraced in his par·
ents', grandparents', or great-grandparents' teknonyms is, on that account, any
way different from or privileged over his siblings whose names are not; there is
no shifting of teknonyms to include the names of favored or more able offspring,
and so on.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 377
with rare exceptions, only men with children carry any weight there. (In
fact, in some hamlets men are not even awarded seats until they have a
child.) The same is true for descent groups, voluntary organizations, irrigation
societies, temple congregations, and so on. In virtually all local
activities, from the religious to the agricultural, the parental couple participates
as a unit, the male performing certain tasks, the female certain
complementary ones. By linking a man and a wife through an incorporation
of the name of one of their direct descendants into their own, teknonymy
underscores both the importance of the marital pair in local society
and the enormous value which is placed upon procreation . J 7
This value also appears, in a more explicit way, in the second
cultural consequence of the pervasive use of teknonyms: the classification
of individuals into what, for want of a better term, may be called
procreational strata. From the point of view of any actor, his hamletmates
are divided into childless people, called Wayan, Made, and so on ;
people with children, called "Father ( Mother)-of"; people with grandchildren,
called "Grandfather (Grandmother)-of"; and people with greatgrandchildren,
called "Great-grandparent-of." And to this ranking is
attached a general image of the nature of social hierarchy: childless
people are dependent minors; fathers-of are active citizens directing community
life; grandfathers-of are respected elders giving sage advice from
behind the scenes ; and great-grandfathers-of are senior dependents, already
half-returned to the world of the gods. In any given case, various
mechanisms have to be employed to adjust this rather too-schematic
formula to practical realities in such a way as to allow it to mark out a
workable social ladder. But, with these adjustments, it does, indeed,
mark one out, and as a result a man's "procreative status" is a major element
in his social identity, both in his own eyes and those of everyone
else. In Bali, the stages of human life are not conceived in terms of the
processes of biological aging, to which little cultural attention is given,
but of those of social regenesis.
Thus, it is not sheer reproductive power as such, how many children
one can oneself produce, that is critical. A couple with ten children
is no more honored than a couple with five ; and a couple with but
a single child who has in turn but a single child outranks them both.
n It also underscores another theme which runs through all the orders of person-definition
discussed here: the minimization of the difference between the
sexes which are represented as being virtually interchangeable so far as most social
roles are concerned. For an intriguing discussion of this theme, see J. Belo,
Rangda and Barong (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1 949).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CU LTURES
What counts is reproductive continuity, the preservation of the community's
ability to perpetuate itself just as it is, a fact which the third result
of teknonymy, the designation of procreative chains, brings out
most clearly.
The way in which Balinese teknonymy outlines such chains can be
seen from the model diagram (Figure I ). For simplicity, I have shown
only the male teknonyms and have used English names for the referent
generation. I have also arranged the model so as to stress the fact that
teknonymous usage reflects the absolute age not the genealogical order
(or the sex) of the eponymous descendants.
As Figure I indicates, teknonymy outlines not only procreative sta-
A
/ \
/
\/ \
/
/
\
/ "
/ "
/ Great-grand- \
( father-of- '�\\
T ,\
/
I
\ \ 1
"
\/
\
\
\
( Grand- \
\
'- G d
\
\ father-of- \ \ fath��-of- \
\ Malry
'\
\
J
o
le \
\
/ /\>, \ \\
">/ I '
\
\ I \
" \
/
( Father- \ \ Father· '- '- Father- /
of- \ \ of- \.
\
of- /
\
Don
)
Mary
\.) 'Joe
/
\ I \
\ I " I '7 / I
\
\
Don
/
/ \Mary
/
/ \ Joe
/
/ Jane
v \/
\ /
\/
FIGURE I
Balinese Teknonymy
NOTE: M ary is older than Don; Joe is older than Mary, Jane, and Don. The
relative ages of all other people, save of course as they are ascendants and descendants,
are irrelevant so far as teknonymy is concerned.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 379
tuses but specific sequences of such statuses, two, three, or four (very,
very occasionally, five) generations deep. Which particular sequences
are marked out is largely accidental : had Mary been born before Joe, or
Don before Mary, the whole alignment would have been altered. But
though the particular individuals who are taken as referents, and hence
the particular sequences of filiation which receive symbolic recognition,
is an arbitrary and not very consequential matter, the fact that such sequences
are marked out stresses an important fact about personal identity
among the Balinese: an individual is not perceived in the context of
who his ancestors were (that, given the cultural veil which slips over the
dead, is not even known), but rather in the context of whom he is ancestral
to. One is not defined, as in so many societies of the world, in
terms of who produced one, some more or less distant, more or less
grand founder of one's line, but in terms of whom one has produced, a
specific, in most cases still living, half-formed individual who is one's
child, grandchild, or great-grandchild, and to whom one traces one's
connection through a particular set of procreative links. 1 8 What links
"Great-grandfather-of-Joe," "Grandfather-of-Joe," and "Father-of-Joe"
is the fact that, in a sense, they have cooperated to produce Joe-that
is, to sustain the social metabolism of the Balinese people in general
and their hamlet in particular. Again, what looks like a celebration of a
temporal process is in fact a celebration of the maintenance of what,
borrowing a term from physics, Gregory Bateson has aptly called a
"steady state." 19 In this sort of teknonymous regime, the entire population
is classified in terms of its relation to and representation in that
subclass of the population in whose hands social regenesis now most instantly
lies-the oncoming cohort of prospective parents. Under its aspect
even that most time-saturated of human conditions, great-grandparenthood,
appears as but an ingredient in an unperishing present.
18 In this sense, birth order terms could, in a more elegant analysis, be defined
as "zero teknonyms" and included in this symbolic order: a person called Wayan,
Njoman, etc., is a person who has produced no one, who has, as yet anyway, no
descendants.
19 G. Bateson, "Bali: The Value System of a Steady State," in M. Fortes, ed.,
Social Structure: Studies Presented to Radcliffe-Brown (New York, 1 963), pp.
35-53. Bateson was the first to point out, if somewhat obliquely, the peculiar
achronic nature of Balinese thought, and my more narrowly focused analysis has
been much stimulated by his general views. See also his "An Old Temple and a
New Myth," Djawa (Jogjakarta) 1 7 ( 1 937):2 19-307. [These have now been reprinted
in J. Belo, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture (New York, 1 970), pp.
384-402; 1 1 1 - 1 36. )
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
STATUS TITLES
In theory, everyone (or nearly everyone) in Bali bears one or another
title- Ida Bagus, Gusti, Pasek, Dauh, and so forth-which places him
on a particular rung in an all-Bali status ladder; each title represents a
specific degree of cultural superiority or inferiority with respect to each
and every other one, so that the whole population is sorted out into a
set of uniformly graded castes. In fact, as those who have tried to analyze
the system in such terms have discovered, the situation is much
more complex.
It is not simply that a few low-ranking villagers claim that they (or
their parents) have somehow "forgotten" what their titles are; nor that
there are marked inconsistencies in the ranking of titles from place to
place, at times even from informant to informant; nor that, in spite of
their hereditary basis, there are nevertheless ways to change titles.
These are but (not uninteresting) details concerning the day-to-day
working of the system. What is critical is that status titles are not attached
to groups at all, but only to individuals.2o
Status in Bali, or at least that sort determined by titles, is a personal
characteristic ; it is independent of any social structural factors whatsoever.
It has, of course, important practical consequences, and those
consequences are shaped by and expressed through a wide variety of social
arrangements, from kinship groups to governmental institutions.
But to be a Dewa, a Pulosari, a Pring, or a Maspadan is at base only to
have inherited the right to bear that title and to demand the public tokens
of deference associated with it. It is not to play any particular role,
to belong to any particular group, or to occupy any particular economic,
political, or sacerdotal position.
The status title system is a pure prestige system. From a man's title
you know, given your own title, exactly what demeanor you ought to
display toward him and he toward you in practically every context of
public life, irrespective of whatever other social ties obtain between you
20 Neither how many different titles are found in Bali (though there must be
well over a hundred) nor how many individuals bear each title is known, for
there has never been a census taken in these terms. In four hamlets I studied intensively
in southeastern Bali a total of thirty-two different titles were repre·
sented, the largest of which was carried by nearly two hundred and fifty individuals,
the smallest by one, with the modal figure running around fifty or sixty. See C. Geertz,
"Tihingan: A Balinese Village."
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
and whatever you may happen to think of him as a man. Balinese politesse
is very highly developed and it rigorously controls the outer surface
of social behavior over virtually the entire range of daily life.
Speech style, posture, dress, eating, marriage, even house-construction,
place of burial, and mode of cremation are patterned in terms of a precise
code of manners which grows less out of a passion for social grace
as such as out of some rather far-reaching metaphysical considerations.
The sort of human inequality embodied in the status title system and
the system of etiquette which expresses it is neither moral, nor economic,
nor political-it is religious. It is the reflection in everyday interaction
of the divine order upon which such interaction, from this
point of view a form of ritual, is supposed to be modeled. A man's title
does not signal his wealth, his power, or even his moral reputation, it
signals his spiritual composition ; and the incongruity between this and
his secular position may be enormous. Some of the greatest movers and
shakers in Bali are the most rudely approached, some of the most delicately
handled the least respected. It would be difficult to conceive of
anything further from the Balinese spirit than Machiavelli's comment
that titles do not reflect honor upon men, but rather men upon their ti­
tles.
In theory, Balinese theory, all titles come from the gods. Each has
been passed along, not always without alteration, from father to child,
like some sacred heirloom, the difference in prestige value of the different
titles being an outcome of the varying degree to which the men who
have had care of them have observed the spiritual stipulations embodied
in them. To bear a title is to agree, implicitly at least, to meet divine
standards of action, or at least approach them, and not all men have
been able to do this to the same extent. The result is the existing discrepancy
in the rank of titles and of those who bear them. Cultural status,
as opposed to social position, is here once again a reflection of distance
from divinity.
Associated with virtually every title there are one or a series of
legendary events, very concrete in nature, involving some spiritually significant
misstep by one or another holder of the title. These offensesone
can hardly call them sins-are regarded as specifying the degree to
which the title has declined in value, the distance which it has fallen
from a fully transcendent status, and thus as fixing, in a general way at
least, its position in the overall scale of prestige. Particular (if mythic)
geographical migrations, cross-title marriages, military failures, breaches
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
of mourning etiquette, ritual lapses, and the like are regarded as having
debased the title to a greater or lesser extent: greater for the lower titles,
lesser for the higher.
Yet, despite appearances, this uneven deterioration is, in its essence,
neither a moral nor an historical phenomenon. It is not moral because
the incidents conceived to have occasioned it are not, for the most part,
those against which negative ethical judgments would, in Bali any more
than elsewhere, ordinarily be brought, while genuine moral faults (cruelty,
treachery, dishonesty, profligacy) damage only reputations, which
pass from the scene with their owners, not titles which remain. It is not
historical because these incidents, disjunct occurrences in a once-upona-time,
are not invoked as the causes of present realities but as statements
of their nature. The important fact about title-debasing events is
not that they happened in the past, or even that they happened at all,
but that they are debasing. They are formulations not of the processes
which have brought the existing state of affairs into being, nor yet of
moral judgments upon it (in neither of which intellectual exercises the
Balinese show much interest): they are images of the underlying relationship
between the form of human society and the divine pattern of
which it is, in the nature of things, an imperfect expression-more imperfect
at some points than at others.
But if, after all that has been said about the autonomy of the title system,
such a relationship between cosmic patterns and social forms is
conceived to exist, exactly how is it understood? How is the title system,
based solely on religious conceptions, on theories of inherent differences
in spiritual worth among individual men, connected up with
what, looking at the society from the outside, we would call the "realities"
of power, influence, wealth, reputation, and so on, implicit in the
social division of labor? How, in short, is the actual order of social
command fitted into a system of prestige ranking wholly independent of
it so as to account for and, indeed, sustain the loose and general correlation
between them which in fact obtains? The answer is: through performing,
quite ingeniously, a kind of hat trick, a cer:tain sleight of hand,
with a famous cultural institution imported from India and adapted to
local tastes-the Varna System. By means of the Varna System the Balinese
inform a very disorderly collection of status pigeonholes with a
simple shape which is represented as growing naturally out of it but
which in fact is arbitrarily imposed upon it.
As in India, the Varna System consists of four gross categories-
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
Brahmana, Satria, Wesia, and Sudra-ranked in descending order of
prestige, and with the first three (called in Bali, Triwangsa-"the three
peoples") defining a spiritual patriciate over against the plebeian fourth.
But in Bali the Varna System is not in itself a cultural device for making
status discriminations but for correlating those already made by the
title system. It summarizes the literally countless fine comparisons implicit
in that system in a neat (from some points of view all-too-neat)
separation of sheep from goats, and first-quality sheep from second, second
from third.21 Men do not perceive one another as Satrias or Sudras
but as, say, Dewas or Kebun Tubuhs, merely using the Satria-Sudra
distinction to express generally, and for social organizational
purposes, the order of contrast which is involved by identifying Dewa
as a Satria title and Kebun Tubuh as a Sudra one. Varna categories are
labels applied not to men, but to the titles they bear-they formulate
the structure of the prestige system; titles, on the other hand, are labels
applied to individual men-they place persons within that structure. To
the degree that the Varna classification of titles is congruent with the
actual distribution of power, wealth, and esteem in the society-that is,
with the system of social stratification-the society is considered to be
well ordered. The right sort of men are in the right sort of places: spiritual
worth and social standing coincide.
This difference in function between title and Varna is clear from the
way in which the symbolic forms associated with them are actually
used. Among the Triwangsa gentry, where, some exceptions aside, teknonymy
is not employed, an individual's title is used as his or her main
term of address and reference. One calls a man Ida Bagus, Njakan, or
Gusi (not Brahmana, Satria, or Wesia) and refers to him by the same
terms, sometimes adding a birth order name for more exact specification
( Ida Bagus Made, Njakan Njoman, and so forth) . Among the Sudras,
titles are used only referentially, never in address, and then mainly
with respect to members of other hamlets than one's own, where the person's
teknonym may not be known, or, if known, considered to be too
familiar in tone to be used for someone not a hamletmate. Within the
hamlet, the referential use of Sudra titles occurs only when prestige status
information is considered relevant ("Father-of-Joe is a Kedisan, and
2 1 Varna categories are often subdivided, especially by high-status persons, into
three ranked classes-superior (utama), med ium (madia), and inferior
(nista)-the various titles in the overall category being appropriately subgrouped.
A full analysis of the Balinese system of social stratification-as much Polynesian
as Indian in type-cannot be given here.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
thus 'lower' than we Pande," and so on), while address is, of course, in
terms of teknonyms. Across hamlet lines, where, except between close
friends, teknonyms fall aside, the most common term of address is
Djero. Literally, this means "inside" or "insider," thus a member of the
Triwangsa, who are considered to be "inside," as against the Sudras,
who are "outside" (Djaba); but in this context it has the effect of saying,
"In order to be polite, I am addressing you as though you were a
Triwangsa, which you are not (if you were, I would call you by your
proper title), and I expect the same pretense from you in return." As
for Varna terms, they are used, by Triwangsa and Sudra alike, only in
conceptualizing the overall prestige hierarchy in general terms, a need
which usually appears in connection with transhamlet political, sacerdotal,
or stratificatory matters: "The kings of Klungkung are Satrias, but
those of Tabanan only Wesias," or "There are lots of rich Brahmanas
in Sanur, which is why the Sudras there have so little to say about hamlet
affairs," and so on.
The Varna System thus does two things. It connects up a series of
what appear to be ad hoc and arbitrary prestige distinctions, the titles,
with Hinduism, or the Balinese version of Hinduism, thus rooting them
in a general world view. And it interprets the implications of that world
view, and therefore the titles, for social organization: the prestige gradients
implicit in the title system ought to be reflected in the actual distribution
of wealth, power, and esteem in society, and, in fact, be completely
coincident with it. The degree to which this coincidence actually
obtains is, of course, moderate at best. But, however many exceptions
there may be to the rule-Sudras with enormous power, Satrias working
as tenant farmers, Brahmanas neither esteemed nor estimable-it is
the rule and not the exceptions that the Balinese regard as truly illuminating
the human condition. The Varna System orders the title system
in such a way as to make it possible to view social life under the aspect
of a general set of cosmological notions: notions in which the diversity
of human talent and the workings of historical process are regarded as
superficial phenomena when compared with the location of persons in
a system of standardized status categories, as blind to individual character
as they are immortal.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
PUBLIC TITLES
This final symbolic order of person-definition is, on the surface, the
most reminiscent of one of the more prominent of our own ways of
identifying and characterizing individuals.22 We, too, often (all too
often, perhaps) see people through a screen of occupational categories
-as not just practicing this vocation or that, but as almost physically
infused with the quality of being a postman, teamster, politician, or
salesman. Social function serves as the symbolic vehicle through which
personal identity is perceived; men are what they do.
The resemblance is only apparent, however. Set amid a different
cluster of ideas about what selfhood consists in, placed against a different
religio-philosophical conception of what the world consists in, and
expressed in terms of a different set of cultural devices-public titles
-for portraying it, the Balinese view of the relation between social role
and personal identity gives a quite different slant to the ideographic significance
of what we call occupation but the Balinese call linggih"seat,"
"place," "berth."
This notion of "seat" rests on the existence in Balinese thought and
practice of an extremely sharp distinction between the civic and domestic
sectors of society. The boundary between the public and private domains
of life is very clearly drawn both conceptually and institutionally.
At every level, from the hamlet to the royal palace, matters of general
concern are sharply distinguished and carefully insulated from matters
of individual or familial concern, rather than bei ng allowed to interpenetrate
as they do in so many other societies. The Balinese sense of the
public as a corporate body, having interests and purposes of its own, is
very highly developed. To be charged, at any level, with special responsibilities
with respect to those interests and purposes is to be set aside
from the run of one's fellowmen who are not so charged, and it is this
special status that public titles express.
At the same time, though the Balinese conceive the public sector of
society as bounded and autonomous, they do not look upon it as form-
22 The existence of one other order, that having to do with sex markers (Ni
for women, I for men) ought at least to be mentioned. In ordinary life, these titles
are affixed only to personal names (most of which are themselves sexually
neutral) or to personal names plus birth order name, and then only infrequently.
As a result, they are, from the point of view of person-definition, of but incidental
importance, and I have felt justified in omitting explicit consideration of them.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ing a seamless whole, or even a whole at all. Rather they see it as consisting
of a number of separate, discontinuous, and at times even competitive
realms, each self-sufficient, self-contained, jealous of its rights,
and based on its own principles of organization. The most salient of
such realms include: the hamlet as a corporate political community; the
local temple as a corporate religious body, a congregation; the irrigation
society as a corporate agricultural body ; and, above these, the structures
of regional-that is, suprahamlet-government and worship, centering
on the nobility and the high priesthood.
A description of these various public realms or sectors would involve
an extensive analysis of Balinese social structure inappropriate in the
present context.23 The point to be made here is that, associated with
each of them, there are responsible officers-stewards is perhaps a better
term-who as a result bear particular titles: Klian, Perbekel, Pekaseh,
Pemangku, Anak Agung, Tjakorda, Dewa Agung, Pedanda, and so
on up to perhaps a half a hundred or more. And these men (a very
small proportion of the total population) are addressed and referred to
by these official titles-sometimes in combination with birth order
names, status titles, or, in the case of Sudras, teknonyms for purposes of
secondary specification.24 The various "village chiefs" and "folk
priests" on the Sudra level, and, on the Triwangsa, the host of "kings,..
"princes," "lords," and "high priests" do not merely occupy a role.
They become, in the eyes of themselves and those around "them, absorbed
into it. They are truly public men, men for whom other aspects
of personhood-individual character, birth order, kinship relations,
procreative status, and prestige rank take, symbolically at least, a secondary
position. We, focusing upon psychological traits as the heart of
personal identity, would say they have sacrificed their true selves to
their role; they, focusing on social position, say that their role is of the
essence of their true selves.
Access to these public-title-bearing roles is closely connected with
the system of status titles and its organization into Varna categories, a
connection effected by what may be called "the doctrine of spiritual eli-
23 For an essay in this direction, see C. Geertz, "Form and Variation in Balinese
Village Structure."
24 Place names associated with the function the title expresses are perhaps
even more common as secondary specification: "Klian Pau," "Pau" being the
name of the hamlet of which the person is klian (chief, elder); "Anak Agung Kaleran,"
"Kaleran"-literally "north" or "northern"
-being the name (and the location)
of the lord's palace.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
gibility." This doctrine asserts that political and religious "seats" of
translocal-regional or Bali-wide-significance are to be manned only
by Triwangsas, while those of local significance ought properly to be in
the hands of Sudras. At the upper levels the doctrine is strict: only
Satrias-that is, men bearing titles deemed of Satria rank-may be
kings or paramount princes, only Wesias or Satrias lords or lesser
princes, only Brahmanas high priests, and so on. At the lower levels, it
is less strict; but the sense that hamlet chiefs, irrigation society heads,
and folk priests should be Sudras, that Triwangsas should keep their
place, is quite strong. In either case, however, the overwhelming majority
of persons bearing status titles of the Varna category or categories
theoretically eligible for the stewardship roles to which the public titles
are attached do not have such roles and are not likely to get them. On
the Triwangsa level, access is largely hereditary, primogenitural even,
and a sharp distinction is made between that handful of individuals who
"own power" and the vast remainder of the gentry who do not. On the
Sudra level, access to public office is more often elective, but the number
of men who have the opportunity to serve is still fairly limited.
Prestige status decides what sort of public role one can presume to occupy;
whether or not one occupies such a role is another question alto­
gether.
Yet, because of the general correlation between prestige status and
public office the doctrine of spiritual eligibility brings about, the order
of political and ecclesiastical authority in the society is hooked in with
the general notion that social order reflects dimly, and ought to reflect
clearly, metaphysical order; and, beyond that, that personal identity is
to be defined not in terms of such superficial, because merely human,
matters as age, sex, talent, temperament, or achievement-that is, biographically,
but in terms of location in a general spiritual hierarchythat
is, typologically. Like all the other symbolic orders of person-definition,
that stemming from public titles consists of a formulation, with
respect to different social contexts, of an underlying assumption: it is
not what a man is as a man (as we would phrase it) that matters, but
where he fits in a set of cultural categories which not only do not
change but, being transhuman, cannot.
And, here too, these categories ascend toward divinity (or with equal
accuracy, descend from it), their power to submerge character and nullify
time increasing as they go. Not only do the higher level public titles
borne by human beings blend gradually into those borne by the gods,
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
becoming at the apex identical with them, but at the level of the gods
there is literally nothing left of identity but the title itself. All gods and
goddesses are addressed and referred to either as Dewa (f. Dewi) or, for
the higher ranking ones, Betara (f. Betari). In a few cases, these general
appellations are followed by particularizing ones: Betara Guru, Dewi
Sri, and so forth. But even such specifically named divinities are not
conceived as possessing distinctive personalities: they are merely
thought to be administratively responsible, so to speak, for regulating
certain matters of cosmic significance: fertility, power, knowledge,
death, and so on. In most cases, Balinese do not know, and do not want
to know, which gods and goddesses are those worshipped in their various
temples (there is always a pair, one male, one female), but merely
call them "Dewa (Dewi) Pura Such-and-Such"-god (goddess) of temple
such-and-such. Unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans, the average
Balinese shows little interest in the detailed doings of particular gods,
nor in their motivations, their personalities, or their individual histories.
The same circumspection and propriety is maintained with respect to
such matters as is maintained with respect to similar matters concerning
elders and superiors generally.2�
The world of the gods is, in short, but another public realm, transcending
all the others and imbued with an ethos which those others
seek, so far as they are able, to embody in themselves. The concerns of
this realm lie on the cosmic level rather than the political, the economic,
or the ceremonial (that is, the human) and its stewards are men
without features, individuals with respect to whom the usual indices of
perishing humanity have no significance. The nearly faceless, thoroughly
conventionalized, never-changing icons by which nameless gods known
only by their public titles are, year after year, represented in the thousands
of temple festivals across the island comprise the purest expres-
25 Traditional texts, some of them fairly extensive, relating certain activities of
the gods, do exist and fragments of the stories are known. But not only do these
myths also reflect the typological view of personhood, the static view of time, and
the ceremonialized style of interaction I am seeking to characterize, but the gen·
eral reticence to discuss or think about the divine means that the stories they re·
late enter but slightly into Balinese attempts to understand and adapt to "the
world." The difference between the Greeks and the Balinese lies not so much in
the sort of lives their gods lead, scandalous in both cases, as in their attitude to·
ward those lives. For the Greeks, the private doings of Zeus and his associates
were conceived to illuminate the all-too-similar doings of men, and so gossip
about them had philosophical import. For the Balinese, the private lives of Be·
tara Guru and his associates are just that, private, and gossip about them is
unmannerly-even, given their place in the prestige hierarchy, impertinent.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
sion of the Balinese concept of personhood. Genuflecting to them (or,
more precisely, to the gods for the moment resident in them) the Balinese
are not just acknowledging divine power. They are also confronting
the image of what they consider themselves at bottom to be; an
image which the biological, psychological, and sociological concomitants
of being alive, the mere materialities of historical time, tend only
to obscure from sight.
A Cultural Triangle of Forces
There are many ways in which men are made aware, or rather make
themselves aware, of the passage of time-by marking the changing of
the seasons, the alterations of the moon, or the progress of plant life; by
the measured cycling of rites, or agricultural work, or household activities;
by the preparation and · scheduling of projected acts and the memory
and assessment of accomplished ones; by the preservation of genealogies,
the recital of legends, or the framing of prophecies. But surely
among the most important is by the recognition in oneself and in one's
fellowmen of the process of biological aging, the appearance, maturation,
decay, and disappearance of concrete individuals. How one views
this process affects, therefore, and affects profoundly, how one experiences
time. Between a people's conception of what it is to be a person
and their conception of the structure of history there is an unbreakable
internal link.
Now, as I have been stressing, the most striking thing about the culture
patterns in which Balinese notions of personal identity are embodied
is the degree to which they depict virtually everyone-friends, relatives,
neighbors, and strangers; elders and youths; superiors and
inferiors; men and women; chiefs, kings, priests, and gods; even the
dead and the unborn-as stereotyped contemporaries, abstract and
anonymous fellowmen. Each of the symbolic orders of person-definition,
from concealed names to flaunted titles, acts to stress and
strengthen the standardization, idealization, and generalization implicit
in the relation between individuals whose main connection consists in
the accident of their being alive at the same time and to mute or gloss
over those implicit in the relation between consociates, men intimately
390 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
involved in one another's biographies, or between predecessors and successors,
men who stand to one another as blind testator and unwitting
heir. Of course, people in Bali are directly, and sometimes deeply, involved
in one another's lives; they do feel their world to have been shaped
by the actions of those who came before them and orient their actions
toward shaping the world of those who will come after them. But it is
not these aspects of their existence as persons-their immediacy and individuality,
or their special, never-to-be-repeated, impact upon the
stream of historical events-which are culturally played up, symbolically
emphasized: it is their social placement, their particular location
within a persisting, indeed an eternal, metaphysical order.26 The illuminating
paradox of Balinese formulations of personhood is that they are
-in our terms anyway-depersonalizing.
In this way, the Balinese blunt, though of course they cannot efface,
three of the most important sources of a sense of temporality: the apprehension
of one's comrades (and thus oneself with them) as perpetually
perishing; the awareness of the heaviness with which the completed
lives of the dead weigh upon the uncompleted lives of the living; and
the appreciation of the potential impact upon the unborn of actions just
now being undertaken.
Consociates, as they meet, confront and grasp one another in an immediate
present, a synoptic "now" ; and in so doing they experience the
elusiveness and ephemerality of such a now as it slips by iri the ongoing
stream of face-to-face interaction. "For each partner [in a consociate
relationship ] the other's body, his gestures, his gait and facial expressions,
are immediately observable, not merely as things or events of the
outer world but in their physiognomical significance, that is as [expressions
) of the other's thoughts. . . . Each partner participates in the onrolling
life of the other, can grasp in a vivid present the other's thoughts
as they are built up step by step. They may thus share one another's anZ6
It is the overall order which is conceived to be fixed, not the individual's
location within it, which is movable, though more along certain axes than others.
(Along some, e.g., binh order, it is not movable at all.) But the point
·
is that this
movement is not, or anyway not primarily, conceived in what we would reprd
to be temporal terms: when a "father-of" becomes a "grandfather-of," the altera·
tion is perceived as being less one of aging than a change in social (and what is
here the same thing, cosmic) coordinates, a directed movement through a particular
son of unchanging attribute, space. Also, within some symbolic orders of per·
son-definition, location is not conceived as an absolute quality because coordi·
nates are origin-dependent: in Bali, as elsewhere, one man's brother is another
man's uncle.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 39 1
ticipations of the future as plans, or hopes, or anxieties. [They) are
mutually involved in one another's biography ; they are growing older
together. . . ." 27 As for predecessors and successors, separated by a
material gulf, they perceive one another in terms of origins and outcomes,
and in so doing experience the inherent chronologicality of
events, the linear progress of standard, transpersonal time-the sort
whose passage can be measured with clocks and calendars.2s
In minimizing, culturally, all three of these experiences-that of the
evanescing present consociate intimacy evokes; that of the determining
past contemplation of predecessors evokes; and that of the moldable future
anticipation of successors evokes-in favor of the sense of pure simultaneity
generated by the anonymized encounter of sheer contemporaries,
the Balinese produce yet a second paradox. Linked to their
depersonalizing conception of personhood is a detemporalizing (again
from our point of view) conception of time.
TAXONOM IC CALENDARS AND PUNCTUAL TIME
Balinese calendrical notions-their cultural machinery for demarcating
temporal units-reflect this clearly; for they are largely used not to
measure the elapse of time, nor yet to accent the uniqueness and irrecoverability
of the passing moment, but to mark and classify the qualitative
modalities in terms of which time manifests itself in human experience.
The Balinese calendar (or, rather, calendars; as we shall see
there are two of them) cuts time up into bounded units not in order to
count and total them but to describe and characterize them, to formulate
their differential social, intellectual, and religious significance;29
27 Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, pp. 1 6- 1 7. Brackets added.
28 Ibid., pp. 22 1 -222.
29 As a preface to the following, and an appendix to the preceding, discussion,
it should be remarked that, just as the Balinese do have consociate relations with
one another and do have some sense of the material connection between ancestors
and descendants, so too they do have some, as we would put it, "true" calendrical
concepts-absolute dates in the so-called Caka system, Hinduistic notions
of successive epochs, as well as, indeed, access to the Gregorian calendar.
But these are (ca. 1 958) unstressed and of distinctly secondary importance in the
ordinary course of everyday life; variant patterns applied in restricted contexts
for specific purposes by certain sorts of persons on sporadic occasions. A complete
analysis of Balinese culture-so far as such a thing is possible-would indeed
have to take account of them; and from certain points of view they are not
without theoretical significance. The point, here and elsewhere, in this quite in-
392 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
The two calendars which the Balinese employ are a lunar-solar one
and one built around the interaction of independent cycles of daynames,
which I shall call "permutational." The permutational calendar
is by far the most important. It consists of ten different cycles of daynames.
These cycles are of varying lengths. The longest contains ten
day-names, following one another in a fixed order, after which the first
day-name reappears and the cycle starts over. Similarly, there are nine,
eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and even-the ultimate of a
"contemporized" view of time-one day-name cycles. The names in
each cycle are also different, and the cycles run concurrently. That is to
say, any given day has, at least in theory, ten different names simultaneously
applied to it, one from each of the ten cycles. Of the ten cycles
only those containing five, six, and seven day-names are of major cultural
significance, however, although the three-name cycle is used to define
the market week and plays a role in fixing certain minor rituals,
such as the personal-naming ceremony referred to earlier.
Now, the interaction of these three main cycles-the five, the six,
and the seven-means that a given trinomially designated day (that is,
one with a particular combination of names from all three cycles) will
appear once in every two hundred and ten days, the simple product of
five, six, and seven. Similar interactions between the five- and sevenname
cycles produce binomially designated days which turn up every
thirty-five days, between the six- and seven-name cycles binomially designated
days which occur every forty-two days, and between the fiveand
six-name cycles binomially designated days appearing at thirty-day
intervals. The conjunctions that each of these four periodicities, supercycles
as it were, define (but not the periodicities themselves) are considered
not only to be socially significant but to reflect, in one fashion
or another, the very structure of reality.
The outcome of all this wheels-within-wheels computation is a view
of time as consisting of ordered sets of thirty, thirty-five, forty-two, or
two hundred and ten quantum units ("days"), each of which units has
a particular qualitative significance of some sort indexed by its trinomial
or binomial name: rather like our notion of the unluckiness of
complete analysis, however, is not that the Balinese are, as the Hungarians are
reputed to be, immigrants from another planet entirely unlike ourselves, but
merely that the m�Uor thrust of their thought concerning certain matters of critical
social importance lies, at least for the moment, in a markedly d ifferent direction
from ours.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 393
Friday-the-Thirteenth. To identify a day in the forty-two-day set-and
thus assess its practical and/or religious significance-one needs to
determine its place, that is, its name, in the six-name cycle (say, Ariang)
and in the seven- (say, Boda): the day is Boda-Ariang, and one shapes
one's actions accordingly. To identify a day in the thirty-five-day set,
one needs its place and name in the five-name cycle (for example, Klion)
and in the seven-: for example, Boda-Kiion-this is rainan, the day on
which one must set out small offerings at various points to "feed" the
gods. For the two hundred and ten-day set, unique determination demands
names from all three weeks: for example, Boda-Ariang-Kiion,
which, it so happens, is the day on which the most important Balinese
holiday, Galungan, is celebrated.ao
Details aside, the nature of time-reckoning this sort of calendar facilitates
is clearly not durational but punctual. That is, it is not used (and
could only with much awkwardness and the addition of some ancillary
devices be used) to measure the rate at which time passes, the amount
which has passed since the occurrence of some event, or the amount
which remains within which to complete some project: it is adapted to
and used for distinguishing and classifying discrete, self-subsistent particles
of iime-"days." The cycles and supercycles are endless, unanchored,
uncountable, and, as their internal order has no significance,
without climax. They do not accumulate, they do not build, and they
are not consumed. They don't tell you what time it is; they tell you
what kind of time it is.at
30 Because the thirty-seven-name cycles (uku) which make up the two hundred
and ten-day supercycle are also named, they can be, and commonly are, used in conjunction
with five- and seven-day names, so eliminating the need to invoke names
from the six-name cycle. But this is merely a notational matter: the result is exactly
the same, though the days of the thirty- and forty-two-day supercycles are thus
obscured. Balinese devices-charts, lists, numerical calculation, mnemonics-for
making calendrical determinations and assessing their meaning are both complex
and various, and there are differences in technique and interpretation between individuals,
villages, and regions of the island. Printed calendars in Bali (a still not
very widespread innovation) contrive to show at once the uku; the day in each of
the ten permutating cycles (including the one that never changes!); the day and
month in the lunar-solar system; the day, the month, and year in the Gregorian
and Islamic calendars; and the day, month, year, and year-name in the Chinese
calendar-complete with notations of all the important holidays from Christmas
to Galungan these various systems define. For fuller discussions of Balinese calendrical
ideas and their socioreligious meaning, see R. Goris, "Holidays and Holy
Days," in J. L. Swellengrebel, ed., Bali (The Hague, 1 960), pp. 1 1 5-129, together
with the references cited there.
at More accurately: the days they define tell you what kind of time it is.
Though the cycles and supercycles, being cycles, are recurrent, it is not this fact
about them which is attended to or to which significance is attached. The thirty-,
394 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
The uses of the permutational calendar extend to virtually all aspects
of Balinese life. In the first instance, it determines (with one exception)
all the holidays-that is, general community celebrations-of which
Goris lists some thirty-two in all, or on the average about one day out
of every seven.32 These do not appear, however, in any discernible
overall rhythm. If we begin, arbitrarily, with Radite- Tungleh-Paing as
"one," holidays apJ)ear on days numbering: I , 2, 3, 4, 1 4, 1 5 , 24, 49,
5 1 , 68, 69, 7 1 , 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 8 1 , 83, 84, 85, 1 09, 1 1 9, 1 25,
1 54, 1 83, 1 89, 1 93, 1 96, 205, 2 1 0.33 The result of this sort of spasmodic
occurrence of festivals, large and small, is a perception of time
-that is, of days-as falling broadly into two very general varieties,
"full" and "empty": days on which something of importance goes on
and others on which nothing, or at least nothing much, goes on, the
former often being called "times" or "junctures" and the latter "holes."
All of the other applications of the calendar merely reinforce and refine
this general perception.
Of these other applications, the most important is the determination
thirty-five-, forty-two-, and two hundred and ten-day periodicities, and thus the
intervals they demarcate, are not, or are only very peripherally, perceived as such;
nor are the intervals implicit in the elementary periodicities, the cycles proper,
which generate them-a fact which has sometimes been obscured by caJiing the former
"months" and "years" and the latter "weeks." It is--one cannot stress it too
strongly--only the "days" which really matter, and the Balinese sense of time is not
much more cyclical than it is durative: it is particulate. Within individual days there
is a certain amount of short-range, not very carefully calibrated, durative measurement,
by the public beating of slit-gongs at various points (morning, midday, sundown,
and so on) of the diurnal cycle, and for certain collective labor tasks where
individual contributions have to be roughly balanced, by water-clocks. But even this
is of little importance: in contrast to their calendrical apparatus, Balinese horological
concepts and devices are very undeveloped.
32 Goris, "Holidays and Holy Days," p. 1 2 1 . Not all of these holidays are
m�or, of course. Many of them are celebrated simply within the family and quite
routinely. What makes them holidays is that they are identical for all Balinese,
something not the case for other sorts of celebrations.
33 Ibid. There are, of course, subrhythms resulting from the workings of the
cycles: thus every thirty-fifth day is a holiday because it is determined by the interaction
of the five- and seven-name cycles, but in terms of the sheer succession
of days there is none, though there is some clustering here and there. Goris regards
Radite-Tungleh-Paing as the "first day of the . . . Balinese (permutational
] year" (and thus those days as the first days of their respective cycles); but
though there may (or may not: Goris doesn't say) be some textual basis for this, I
could find no evidence that the Balinese in fact so perceive it. In fact, if any day
is regarded as something of what we would regard as a temporal milestone it
would be Galungan (number seventy-four in the above reckoning). But even this
idea is very weakly developed at best; like other holidays, Galungan merely happens.
To present the Balinese calendar, even partially, in terms of Western ftowof-time
ideas is, in my opinion, inevitably to misrender it phenomenologically.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 395
of temple celebrations. No one knows how many temples there are on
Bali, though Swellengrebel has estimated that there are more than 20,-
000.34 Each of these temples-family temples, descent-group temples,
agricultural temples, death temples, settlement temples, associational
temples, "caste" temples, state temples, and so on-has its own day of
celebration, called odalan, a term which though commonly, and misleadingly,
translated as "birthday" or, worse yet, "anniversary," literally
means "coming out," "emergence," "appearance"-that is, not the day
on which the temple was built but the day on which it is (and since it
has been in existence always has been) "activated," on which the gods
come down from the heavens to inhabit it. In between odalans it is
quiescent, uninhabited, empty ; and, aside from a few offerings prepared
by its priest on certain days, nothing happens there.
For the great majority of the temples, the odalan is determined according
to the permutational calendar (for the remainder, odalans are
determined by the lunar-solar calendar, which as we shall see, comes to
about the same thing so far as modes of time-perception are concerned),
again in terms of the interaction of the five-, six-, and seven-name cycles.
What this means is that temple ceremonies-which range from the
incredibly elaborate to the almost invisibly simple-are of, to put it
mildly, frequent occurrence in Bali, though here too there are certain
days on which many such celebrations fall and others on which, for essentially
metaphysical reasons, none do.3=>
Balinese life is thus not only irregularly punctuated by frequent holidays,
which everyone celebrates, but by even more frequent temple celebrations
which involve only those who are, usually by birth, members
of the temple. As most Balinese belong to a half-dozen temples or
more, this makes for a fairly busy, not to say frenetic, ritual life, though
again one which alternates, unrhythmically, between hyperactivity and
quiescence.
In addition to these more religious matters of holidays and temple
festivals, the permutational calendar invades and encompasses the more
34 Swellengrebel, Bali, p. 12. These temples are of all sizes and degrees of significance,
and Swellengrebel notes that the Bureau of Religious Affairs on Bali
gave a (suspiciously precise) figure, ca. 1 953, of 4,66 1 "large and important" temples
for the island, which, it should be remembered, is, at 2, 1 70 square miles,
about the size of Delaware.
35 For a description of a full-blown odalan (most of which last three days rather
than just one), see J. Belo, Balinese Temple Festival (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1 953).
Again, odalans are most commonly computed by the use of the uku rather than
the six-name cycle, together with the five and seven-name cycles. See note 30.
3g6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
secular ones of everyday life as well.36 There are good and bad days on
which to build a house, launch a business enterprise, change residence,
go on a trip, harvest crops, sharpen cock spurs, hold a puppet show, or
(in the old days) start a war, or conclude a peace. The day on which
one was born, which again is not a birthday in our sense (when you ask
a Balinese when he was born his reply comes to the equivalent of
"Thursday, the ninth," which is not of much help in determining his
age) but his odalan, is conceived to control or, more accurately, to indicate
much of his destiny.37 Men born on this day are liable to suicide,
on that to become thieves, on this to be rich, on that to be poor; on this
to be well, or long-lived, or happy, on that to be sickly, or short-lived,
or unhappy. Temperament is similarly assessed, and so is talent. The
diagnosis and treatment of disease is complexly integrated with calendrical
determinations, which may involve the odalans of both the patient
and the curer, the day on which he fell ill, as well as days metaphysically
associated with the symptoms and with the medicine. Before marriages
are contracted, the odalans of the individuals are compared to see
if their conjunction is · auspicious, and if not there will be-at least if
the parties, as is almost always the case, are prudent-no marriage.
There is a time to bury and a time to cremate, a time to marry and a
time to divorce, a time-to shift from the Hebraic to the Balinese
idiom-for the mountain top and a time for the market, for social withdrawal
and social participation. Meetings of village council, irrigation
societies, voluntary associations are all fixed in terms of the permutational
(or, more rarely, the lunar-solar) calendar; and so are periods for
sitting quietly at home and trying to keep out of trouble.
The lunar-solar calendar, though constructed on a different basis, actually
embodies the same punctual conception of time as the permutational.
Its main distinction and, for certain purposes, advantage is that
it is more or less anchored; it does not drift with respect to the seasons.
This calendar consists of twelve numbered months which run from
36 There are also various metaphysical conceptions associated with days bearing
different nam�onstellations of gods, demons, natural objects (trees, birds,
beasts), virtues and vices (love, hate . . .), and so on-which explain "why" it
has the character it has-but these need not be pursued here. In this area, as well
as in the associated "fortune telling" operations described in the text, theories and
interpretations are less standardized and computation is not confined to the five-,
six-, and seven-name cycles, but extended to various permutations of the others. a
fact which makes the possibilities virtually limitless.
37 With respect to individuals the term applied is more often otonan than odalan,
but the root meaning is just the same: "emerging," "appearance," "coming
out."
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 397
new moon to new moon.3K These months are then divided into two sorts
of (also numbered) days: lunar (tithi) and solar (diwasa). There are always
thirty lunar days in a month, but, given the discrepancy between
the lunar and solar years, there are sometimes thirty solar days in a
month and sometimes twenty-nine. In the latter case, two lunar days are
considered to fall on one solar day-that is, one lunar day is skipped.
This occurs every sixty-three days; but, although this calculation is astronomically
quite accurate, the actual determination is not made on the
basis of astronomical observation and theory, for which the Balinese do
not have the necessary cultural equipment (to say nothing of the interest);
it is determined by the use of the permutational calendar. The calculation
was of course originally arrived at astronomically; but it was
arrived at by the Hindus from whom the Balinese, in the most distant
past, imported the calendar. For the Balinese, the double lunar daythe
day on which it is two days at once-is just one more special kind
of day thrown up by the workings of the cycles and supercycles of the
permutational calendar-a priori, not a posteriori, knowledge.
In any case, this correction still leaves a nine-eleven-day deviation
from the true solar year, and this is compensated for by the interpolation
of a leap-month every thirty months, an operation which though
again originally a result of Hindu astronomical observation and calculation
is here simply mechanical. Despite the fact that the lunar-solar calendar
looks astronomical, and thus seems to be based on some perceptions
of natural temporal processes, celestial clocks, this is an illusion
arising from attending to its origins rather than its uses. Its uses are as
divorced from observation of the heavens-or from any other experience
of passing time-as are those of the permutational calendar by
which it is so rigorously paced. As with the permutational calendar, it
is the system, automatic, particulate, fundamentally not metrical but
classificatory, which tells you what day (or what kind of day) it is, not
the appearance of the moon, which, as one looks casually up at it, is experienced
not as a determinant of the calendar but as a reflex of it.
What is "really real" is the name-or, in this case, the (two-place)
number-of the day, its place in the transempirical taxonomy of days,
not its epiphenomenal reflection in the sky.a9
38 The names of the last two months-borrowed from Sanskrit-are not
strictly speaking numbers as are those of the other ten; but in terms of Balinese
perceptions they "mean" eleventh and twelfth.
39 In fact, as another Indic borrowing, the years are numbered too, butoutside
of priestly circles where familiarity with it is more a matter of scholarly
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
In practice, the lunar-solar calendar is used in the same way for the
same sorts of things as the permutational. The fact that it is (loosely)
anchored makes it rather more handy in agricultural contexts, so that
planting, weeding, harvesting, and the like are usually regulated in
terms of it, and some temples having a symbolic connection with agriculture
or fertility celebrate their reception of the gods according to it.
This means that such receptions appear only about every 355 (in leap
years, about 385 ) rather than 2 10 days. But otherwise the pattern is un­
changed.
In addition, there is one major holiday, Njepi ("to make quiet"),
which is celebrated according to the lunar-solar calendar. Often called,
by Western scholars, "the Balinese New Year," even though it falls at
the beginning (that is, the new moon) of not the first but the tenth
month and is concerned not with renewal or rededication but with an
accentuated fear of demons and an attempt to render one's emotions
tranquil. Njepi is observed by an eerie day of silence: no one goes out
on the streets, no work is conducted, no light or fire is lit, while conversation
even within houseyards is muted. The lunar-solar system is not
much used for "fortune telling" purposes, though the new moon and full
moon days are considered to have certain qualitative characteristics,
sinister in the first case, auspicious in the second. In general, the lunarsolar
calendar is more a supplement to the permutational than an alternative
to it. It makes possible the employment of a classificatory, fulland-empty,
"detemporalized" conception of time in contexts where the
fact that natural conditions vary periodically has to be at least minimally
acknowledged.
CEREMONY, STAGE FRIGHT, AND ABSENCE OF CLIMAX
The anonymization of persons and the immobilization of time are
thus but two sides of the same cultural process: the symbolic de-emphasis,
in the everyday life of the Balinese, of the perception of fellowmen
prestige, a cultural ornament, than anything else-year enumeration plays virtually
no role in the actual use of the calendar, and lunar-solar dates are almost
always given without the year, which is, with the rarest of exceptions, neither
known nor cared about. Ancient texts and inscriptions sometimes indicate the
year, but in the ordinary course of life the Balinese never "date'' anything, in our
sense of the term, except perhaps to say that some event-a volcanic eruption, a
war, and so forth-happened "when I was small,"' "when the Dutch were here,"
or, the Balinese illo tempore, "in Madjapahit times," and so on.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 399
as consociates, successors, or predecessors in favor of the perception of
them as contemporaries. As the various symbolic orders of person-definition
conceal the biological, psychological, and historical foundation of
that changing pattern of gifts and inclinations we call personality behind
a dense screen of ready-made identities, iconic selves, so the calendar,
or rather the application of the calendar, blunts the sense of dissolving
days and evaporating years that those foundations and that pattern inevitably
suggest by pulverizing the flow of time into disconnected, dimensionless,
motionless particles. A sheer contemporary needs an absolute
present in which to live ; an absolute present can be inhabited only by a
contemporized man. Yet, there is a third side to this same process
which transforms it from a pair of complementary prepossessions into a
triangle of mutually reinforcing cultural forces: the ceremonialization of
social intercourse.
To maintain the (relative) anonymization of individuals with whom
one is in daily contact, to dampen the intimacy implicit in face-to-face
relationships-in a word, to render consociates contemporaries-it is
necessary to formalize relations with them to a fairly high degree, to
confront them in a sociological middle distance where they are close
enough to be identified but not so close as to be grasped: quasi strangers,
quasi friends. The ceremoniousness of so much of Balinese daily
life, the extent (and the intensity) to which interpersonal relations are
controlled by a developed system of conventions and proprieties, is thus
a logical correlate of a thoroughgoing attempt to block the more creatural
aspects of the human condition-individuality, spontaneity, perishability,
emotionality, vulnerability-from sight. This attempt is, like
its counterparts, only very partially successful, and the ceremonialization
of Balinese social interaction is no closer to being complete than
is the anonymization of persons or the immobilization of time. But the
degree to which its success is wished for, the degree to which it is an
obsessing ideal, accounts for the degree to which the ceremonialization
obtains, for the fact that in Bali manners are not a mere matter of practical
convenience or incidental decoration but are of deep spiritual concern.
Calculated politesse, outward form pure and simple, has there a
normative value that we, who regard it as pretentious or comic when we
don't regard it as hypocritical, can scarcely, now that Jane Austen is
about as far from us as Bali, any longer appreciate.
Such an appreciation is rendered even more difficult by the presence
within this industrious polishing of the surfaces of social life of a pecu-
400 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
liar note, a stylistic nuance, we would not, I think, expect to be there.
Being stylistic and being a nuance (though an altogether pervasive one),
it is very difficult to communicate to someone who has not himself experienced
it. "Playful theatricality" perhaps hits near it, if it is understood
that the playfulness is not lighthearted but almost grave and the
theatricality not spontaneous but almost forced. Balinese social relations
are at once a solemn game and a studied drama.
This is most clearly seen in their ritual and (what is the same thing)
artistic life, much of which is in fact but a portrait of and a mold for
their social life. Daily interaction is so ritualistic and religious activity
so civic that it is difficult to tell where the one leaves off and the other
begins; and both are but expressions of what is justly Bali's most famous
cultural attribute: her artistic genius. The elaborate temple pageants;
the grandiloquent operas, equilibristic ballets, and stilted shadow
plays; the circuitous speech and apologetic gestures-all these are of a
piece. Etiquette is a kind of dance, dance a kind of ritual, and worship
a form of etiquette. Art, religion, and politesse all exalt the outward,
the contrived, the well-wrought appearance of things. They celebrate the
forms; and it is the tireless manipulation of these forms-what they call
"playing"-that gives to Balinese life its settled haze of ceremony.
The mannered cast of Balinese interpersonal relations, the fusion of
rite, craft, and courtesy, thus leads into a recognition of the most fundamental
and most distinctive quality of their particular brand of sociality:
its radical aestheticism. Social acts, all social acts, are first and foremost
designed to please-to please the gods, to please the audience, to
please the other, to please the self; but to please as beauty pleases, not as
virtue pleases. Like temple offerings or gamelan concerts, acts of courtesy
are works of art, and as such they demonstrate, and are meant to
demonstrate, not rectitude (or what we would call rectitude) but sensi­
bility.
Now, from all this-that daily life is markedly ceremonious; that this
ceremoniousness takes the form of an earnest, even sedulous, kind of
"playing" with public forms; that religion, art, and etiquette are then
but differently directed manifestations of an overall cultural fascination
with the worked-up semblance of things; and that morality here is consequently
aesthetic at base-it is possible to attain a more exact understanding
of two of the most marked (and most remarked) features of the
affective tone of Balinese life: the importance of the emotion of what
has been (wrongly) called "shame" in interpersonal relations, and the
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali 40 1
failure of collective activity-religious, artistic, political, economic-to
build toward the definable consummations, what has been (acutely)
called its "absence of climax."4o One of these themes, the first, leads directly
back toward conceptions of personhood, the other, no less directly,
toward conceptions of time, so securing the vertices of our metaphorical
triangle connecting the Balinese behavioral style with the
ideational environment in which it moves.
The concept of "shame," together with its moral and emotional
cousin "guilt," has been much discussed in the literature, entire cultures
sometimes being designated as "shame cultures" because of the presumed
prominence in them of an intense concern with "honor," "reputation,"
and the like, at the expense of a concern, conceived to be dominant
in "guilt cultures," with "sin," "inner worth," and so forth.41 The
usefulness of such an overall categorization and the complex problems
of comparative psychological dynamics involved aside, it has proven
difficult in such studies to divest the term "shame" of what is after all
its most common meaning in English-"consciousness of guilt"-and
so to disconnect it very completely from guilt as such-"the fact or
feeling of having done something reprehensible." Usually, the contrast
has been turned upon the fact that "shame" tends to be applied (although,
actually, far from exclusively) to situations in which wrongdoing
is publicly exposed, and "guilt" (though equally far from exclusively)
to situations in which it is not. Shame is the feeling of disgrace and humiliation
which follows upon a transgression found out; guilt is the feeling
of secret badness attendant upon one not, or not yet, found out.
Thus, though shame and guilt are not precisely the same thing in our
ethical and psychological vocabulary, they are of the same family; the
one is a surfacing of the other, the other a concealment of the one.
But Balinese "shame," or what has been translated as such (/ek), has
nothing to do with transgressions, exposed or unexposed, acknowledged
or hidden, merely imagined or actually performed. This is not to say
that Balinese feel neither guilt nor shame, are without either conscience
or pride, anymore than they are unaware that time passes or that men
are unique individuals. It is to say that neither guilt nor shame is of cardinal
importance as affective regulators of their interpersonal conduct,
40 On the "shame" theme in Balinese culture, see M. Covarrubias, The Island
of Bali (New York, 1 956); on "absence of climax,'" G. Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese
Character (New York, 1 942).
41 For a comprehensive critical review, see G. Piers and M. Singer, Shame and
Guilt (Springfield, Ill., 1 953).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
and that /ek, which is far and away the most important of such regulators,
culturally the most intensely emphasized, ought therefore not to be
translated as "shame," but rather, to follow out our theatrical image, as
"stage fright." It is neither the sense that one has transgressed nor the
sense of humiliation that follows upon some uncovered transgression,
both rather lightly felt and quickly effaced in Bali, that is the controlling
emotion in Balinese face-to-face encounters. It is, on the contrary,
a diffuse, usually mild, though in certain situations virtually paralyzing,
nervousness before the prospect (and the fact) of social interaction, a
chronic, mostly low-grade worry that one will not be able to bring it off
with the required finesse.42
Whatever its deeper causes, stage fright consists in a fear that, for
want of skill or self-control, or perhaps by mere accident, an aesthetic
illusion will not be maintained, that the actor will show through his part
and the part thus dissolve into the actor. Aesthetic distance collapses,
the audience (and the actor) loses sight of Hamlet and gains it, uncomfortably
for all concerned, of bumbling John Smith painfully miscast as
the Prince of Denmark. In Bali, the case is the same, if the drama more
humble. What is feared-mildly in most cases, intensely in a few-is
that the public performance that is etiquette will be botched, that the
social distance etiquette maintains will consequently collapse, and that
the personality of the individual will then break through to dissolve his
standardized public identity. When this occurs, as it sometimes does,
our triangle falls apart: ceremony evaporates, the immediacy of the moment
is felt with an excruciating intensity, and men become unwilling
consociates locked in mutual embarrassment, as though they had inadvertently
intruded upon one another's privacy. Lek is at once the awareness
of the ever-present possibility of such an interpersonal disaster
and, like stage fright, a motivating force toward avoiding it. It is the
fear of faux pas-rendered only that much more probable by an elaborated
politesse-that keeps social intercourse on its deliberately narrowed
rails. It is /ek, more than anything else, that protects Balinese
42 Again, I am concerned here with cultural phenomenology, not psychological
dynamics. It is, of course, quite possible, though I do not think the evidence is
available either to prove or disprove it, that Balinese "stage fright" is connected
with unconscious guilt feelings of some sort or another. My only point is that to
translate lek as either "guilt" or "shame" is, given the usual sense of these terms
in English, to misrender it, and that our word "stage fright"-"nervousness felt
at appearing before an audience," to resort to Websters again-gives a much
better, if still imperfect, idea of what the Balinese are in fact talking about when
they speak, as they do almost constantly, of lek.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
concepts of personhood from the individualizing force of face-to-face
encounters.
"Absence of climax," the other outstanding quality of Balinese social
behavior, is so peculiarly distinctive and so distinctively odd that only
extended description of concrete events could properly evoke it. It
amounts to the fact that social activities do not build, or are not permitted
to build, toward definitive consummations. Quarrels appear and disappear,
on occasion they even persist, but they hardly ever come to a
head. Issues are not sharpened for decision, they are blunted and softened
in the hope that the mere evolution of circumstances will resolve
them, or better yet, that they will simply evaporate. Daily life consists
of self-contained, monadic encounters in which something either happens
or does not-an intention is realized or it is not, a task accomplished
or not. When the thing doesn't happen-the intention is frustrated,
the task unaccomplished-the effort may be made again from
the beginning at some other time; or it may simply be abandoned. Artistic
performances start, go on (often for very extended periods when
one does not attend continually but drifts away and back, chatters for a
while, sleeps for a while, watches rapt for a while), and stop; they are
as uncentered as a parade, as directionless as a pageant. Ritual often
seems, as in the temple celebrations, to consist largely of getting ready
and cleaning up. The heart of the ceremony, the obeisance to the gods
come down onto their altars, is deliberately muted to the point where it
sometimes seems almost an afterthought, a glancing, hesitant confrontation
of anonymous persons brought physically very close and kept socially
very distant. It is all welcoming and bidding farewell, foretaste
and aftertaste, with but the most ceremonially buffered, ritually insulated
sort of actual encounter with the sacred presences themselves.
Even in such a dramatically more heightened ceremony as the RangdaBarong,
fearful witch and foolish dragon combat ends in a state of complete
irresolution, a mystical, metaphysical, and moral standoff leaving
everything precisely as it was, and the observer-or anyway the foreign
observer-with the feeling that something decisive was on the verge of
happening but never quite did.43
In short, events happen like holidays. They appear, vanish, and
reappear-each discrete, sufficient unto itself, a particular manifesta-
43 For a description of the Rangda-Barong combat, see J. Belo, Rangda and
Barong; for a brilliant evocation of its mood, G. Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese
Character. See also above, pp. 1 14-1 1 8.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tion of the fixed order of things. Social activities are separate performances;
they do not march toward some destination, gather toward
some denouement. As time is punctual, so life is. Not orderless, but
qualitatively ordered, like the days themselves, into a limited number of
established kinds. Balinese social life lacks climax because it takes place
in a motionless present, a vectorless now. Or, equally true, Balinese
time lacks motion because Balinese social life lacks climax. The two
imply one another, and both together imply and are implied by the Balinese
contemporization of persons. The perception of fellowmen, the
experience of history, and the temper of collective life-what has sometimes
been called ethos-are hooked together by a definable logic. But
the logic is not syllogistic; it is social.
Cultural Integration,
Cultural Conflict,
Cultural Change
Referring as it does both to formal principles of reasoning and to rational
connections among facts and events, "logic" is a treacherous
word; and nowhere more so than in the analysis of culture. When one
deals with meaningful forms, the temptation to see the relationship
among them as immanent, as consisting of some sort of intrinsic affinity
(or disaffinity) they bear for one another, is virtually overwhelming.
And so we hear cultural integration spoken of as a harmony of meaning,
cultural change as an instability of meaning, and cultural conflict as
an incongruity of meaning, with the implication that the harmony, the
instability, or the incongruity are properties of meaning itself, as, say,
sweetness is a property of sugar or brittleness of glass.
Yet, when we try to treat these properties as we would sweetness or
brittleness, they fail to behave, "logically," in the expected way. When
we look for the constituents of the harmony, the instability, or the incongruity,
we are unable to find them resident in that of which they are
presumably properties. One cannot run symbolic forms through some
sort of cultural assay to discover their harmony content, their stability
ratio, or their index of incongruity; one can only look and see if the
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
forms in question are in fact coexisting, changing, or interfering with
one another in some way or other, which is like tasting sugar to see if it
is sweet or dropping a glass to see if it is brittle, not like investigating
the chemical composition of sugar or the physical structure of glass.
The reason for this is, of course, that meaning is not intrinsic in the objects,
acts, processes, and so on, which bear it, but-as Durkheim,
Weber, and so many others have emphasized-imposed upon them; and
the explanation of its properties must therefore be sought in that which
does the imposing-men living in society. The study of thought is, to
borrow a phrase from Joseph Levenson, the study of men thinking; 44
and as they think not in some special place of their own, but in the
same place-the social world-that they do everything else, the nature
of cultural integration, cultural change, or cultural conflict is to be
probed for there: in the experiences of individuals and groups of individuals
as, under the guidance of symbols, they perceive, feel, reason,
judge, and act.
To say this is, however, not to yield to psychologism, which along
with logicism is the other great saboteur of cultural analysis; for human
experience-the actual living through of events-is not mere sentience,
but, from the most immediate perception to the most mediated judgment,
significant sentience-sentience interpreted, sentience grasped.
For human beings, with the possible exception of neonates, who except
for their physical structure are human only in posse anyway, all experience
is construed experience, and the symbolic forms in terms of which
it is construed thus determine-in conjunction with a wide variety of
other factors ranging from the cellular geometry of the retina to the endogenous
stages of psychological maturation-its intrinsic texture. To
abandon the hope of finding the "logic" of cultural organization in some
Pythagorean "realm of meaning" is not to abandon the hope of finding
it at all. It is to turn our attention toward that which gives symbols their
life: their use.4s
What binds Balinese symbolic structures for defining persons (names,
44 J. Levenson, Modern China and Its Confucian Past (Garden City, 1 964), p.
2 1 2. Here, as elsewhere, I use "thinking" to refer not just to deliberate reflection
but intelligent activity of any sort, and "meaning" to refer not just to abstract
"concepts" but significance of any sort. This is perhaps somewhat arbitrary, and a
little loose, but one must have general terms to talk about general subjects, even
if what falls under such subjects is very far from being homogeneous.
45 "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?-in use it is alive. Is
life breathed into it there?-Or is its use its life?" L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations (New York, 1 953), p. 1 28e. Italics in original.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
kin terms, teknonyms, titles, and so on) to their symbolic structures for
characterizing time (permutational calendars, and so forth), and both of
these to their symbolic structures for ordering interpersonal behavior
(art, ritual, politesse, and so on), is the interaction of the effects each of
these structures has upon the perceptions of those who use them, the
way in which their experiential impacts play into and reinforce one another.
A penchant for "contemporizing" fellowmen blunts the sense of
biological aging; a blunted sense of biological aging removes one of the
main sources of a sense of temporal flow; a reduced sense of temporal
flow gives to interpersonal events an episodic quality. Ceremonialized
interaction supports standardized perceptions of others; standardized
perceptions of others support a "steady-state" conception of society; a
steady-state conception of society supports a taxonomic perception of
time. And so on: one could begin with conceptions of time and go
around, in either direction, the same circle. The circle, though continuous,
is not in a strict sense closed, because none of these modes of experience
is more than a dominant tendency, a cultural emphasis, and their
subdued opposites, equally well-rooted in the general conditions of
human existence and not without some cultural expression of their own,
coexist with them, and indeed act against them. Yet, they are dominant;
they do reinforce one another; and they are persisting. And it is to this
state of affairs, neither permanent nor perfect, that the concept "cultural
integration"-what Weber called "Sinnzusammenhang"-can be legitimately
applied.
In this view, cultural integration is no longer taken to be a sui generis
phenomenon locked away from the common life of man in a logical
world of its own. Perhaps even more important, however, it is also not
taken to be an all-embracing, completely pervasive, unbounded one. In
the first place, as just noted, patterns counteractive to the primary ones
exist as subdominant but nonetheless important themes in, so far as we
can tell, any culture. In an ordinary, quite un-Hegelian way, the elements
of a culture's own negation are, with greater or lesser force, included
within it. With respect to the Balinese, for example, an investigation
of their witch beliefs (or, to speak phenomenologically, witch
experiences) as inverses of what might be called their person beliefs, or
of their trance behavior as an inverse of their etiquette, would be most
enlightening in this respect and would add both depth and complexity to
the present analysis. Some of the more famous attacks upon received
cultural characterizations-revelations of suspicion and factionalism
among the "harmony-loving" Pueblans, or of an "amiable side" to the
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
rivalrous Kwakiutl-consist essentially in a pointing out of the existence,
and the importance, of such themes.46
But beyond this sort of natural counterpoint there are also simple,
unbridged discontinuities between certain major themes themselves. Not
everything is connected to everything else with equal directness; not
everything plays immediately into or against everything else. At the
very least such universal primary interconnection has to be empirically
demonstrated, not just, as so often has been the case, axiomatically as­
sumed.
Cultural discontinuity, and the social disorganization which, even in
highly stable societies, can result from it, is as real as cultural integration.
The notion, still quite widespread in anthropology, that culture is
a seamless web is no less a petitio principii than the older view that culture
is a thing of shreds and patches which, with a certain excess of enthusiasm,
it replaced after the Malinowskian revolution of the early
thirties. Systems need not be exhaustively interconnected to be systems.
They may be densely interconnected or poorly, but which they arehow
rightly integrated they are-is an empirical matter. To assert
connections among modes of experiencing, as among any variables, it is
necessary to find them (and find ways of finding them), not simply assume
them. And as there are some rather compelling theoretical reasons
for believing that a system which is both complex, as any culture is, and
fully joined cannot function, the problem of cultural analysis is as much
a matter of determining independencies as interconnections, gulfs as
well as bridges.47 The appropriate image, if one must have images, of
cultural organization, is neither the spider web nor the pile of sand. It is
46 Li An-che, "Zuiii: Some Observations and Queries," American Anthropologist
39 ( 1 937):62-76; H. Codere, "The Amiable Side of Kwakiutl Life," A merican
Anthropologist 58 ( 1 956):334-35 I . Which of two antithetical patterns or
clusters of patterns, if either, is in fact primary, is of course an empirical problem,
but not, particularly if some thought is given to what "primacy" means in
this connection, an insoluble one.
47 "It has thus been shown that, for adaptations to accumulate, there must not
be channels . . . from some variables . . . to others. . . . The idea so often implicit
in physiological writings that all will be well if only sufficient cross-connections
are available is . . . quite wrong." W. R. Ashby, Design for a Brain, 2nd
ed. rev. (New York, 1 960), p. I S S . Italics in original. Of course, the reference
here is to direct connections-what Ashby calls "primary joins." Any variable
with no relations whatsoever to other variables in the system would simply not
be part of it. For a discussion of the nest of theoretical problems involved here,
see Ashby, pp. 1 7 1 - 1 83, 205-2 1 8. For an argument that cultural discontinuity
may not only be compatible with the effective functioning of the social systems
they govern but even supportive of such functioning. see J. W. Fernandez, "Symbolic
Consensus in a Fang Reformative Cult," American Anthropologist 61
( 1 965):902-929.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
rather more the octopus, whose tentacles are in large part separately integrated,
neurally quite poorly connected with one another and with
what in the octopus passes for a brain, and yet who nonetheless manages
both to get around and to preserve himself, for a while anyway, as
a viable if somewhat ungainly entity.
The close and immediate interdependency between conceptions of
person, time, and conduct which has been proposed in this essay is, so
I would argue, a general phenomenon, even if the particular Balinese
form of it is peculiar to a degree, because such an interdependency is
inherent in the way in which human experience is organized, a necessary
effect of the conditions under which human life is led. But it is
only one of a vast and unknown number of such general interdependencies,
to some of which it is more or less directly connected, to others
only very indirectly, to others for all practical purposes virtually not at
all.
The analysis of culture comes down therefore not to an heroic "holistic"
assault upon "the basic configurations of the culture," an overarching
"order of orders" from which more limited configurations can be
seen as mere deductions, but to a searching out of significant symbols,
clusters of significant symbols, and clusters of clusters of significant
symbols-the material vehicles of perception, emotion, and understanding-and
the statement of the underlying regularities of human
experience implicit in their formation. A workable theory of culture
is to be achieved, if it is to be achieved, by building up from directly
observable modes of thought, first to determinate families of them
and then to more variable, less tightly coherent, but nonetheless ordered
"octopoid" systems of them, confluences of partial integrations, partial
incongruencies, and partial independencies.
Culture moves rather like an octopus too-not all at once in a
smoothly coordinated synergy of parts, a massive coaction of the whole,
but by disjointed movements of this part, then that, and now the other
which somehow cumulate to directional change. Where, leaving cephalopods
behind, in any given culture the first impulses toward progression
will appear, and how and to what degree they will spread through the
system, is, at this stage of our understanding, if not wholly unpredictable,
very largely so. Yet that if such impulses appear within some rather
closely interconnected and socially consequential part of the system,
their driving force will most likely be high, does not appear to be too
unreasonable a supposition.
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
Any development which would effectively attack Balinese personperceptions,
Balinese experiences of time, or Balinese notions of propriety
would seem to be laden with potentialities for transforming the
greater part of Balinese culture. These are not the only points at which
such revolutionary developments might appear (anything which attacked
Balinese notions of prestige and its bases would seem at least equally
portentous), but surely they are among the most important. If the Balinese
develop a less anonymized view of one another, or a more dynamic
sense of time, or a more informal style of social interaction, a
very great deal indeed-not everything, but a very great deal-would
have to change in Balinese life, if only because any one of these changes
would imply, immediately and directly, the others and all three of them
play, in different ways and in different contexts, a crucial role in shaping
that life.
Such cultural changes could, in theory, come from within Balinese
society or from without; but considering the fact that Bali is now part
of a developing national state whose center of gravity is elsewhere-in
the great cities of Java and Sumatra-it would seem most likely to
come from without.
The emergence for almost the first time in Indonesian history of a
political leader who is human, all-too-human, not merely in fact but in
appearance would seem to imply something of a challenge to traditional
Balinese personhood conceptions. Not only is Sukarno a unique, vivid,
and intensely intimate personality in the eyes of the Balinese, he is also,
so to speak, aging in public. Despite the fact that they do not engage in
face-to-face interaction with him, he is phenomenologically much more
their consociate than their contemporary, and his unparalleled success
in achieving this kind of relationship-not only in Bali, but in Indonesia
quite generally-is the secret of a good deal of his hold on, his fascination
for, the population. As with all truly charismatic figures his
power comes in great part from the fact that he does not fit traditional
cultural categories but bursts them open by celebrating his own distinctiveness.
The same is true, in reduced intensity, for the lesser leaders of
the New Indonesia, down to those small-frog Sukarnos (with whom the
population does have face-to-face relations) now beginning to appear in
Bali itself.48 The sort of individualism which Burckhardt saw the Re-
48 It is perhaps suggestive that the only Balinese of much importance in the
central Indonesian government during the early years of the Republic-he was
foreign minister for a while-was the Satria paramount prince of Gia(\jar, one of
410 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
naissance princes bringing, through sheer force of character, to Italy, and
bringing with it the modern Western consciousness, may be in the process
of being brought, in rather different form, to Bali by the new populist
princes of Indonesia.
Similarly, the politics of continuing crisis on which the national state
has embarked, a passion for pushing events toward their climaxes rather
than away from them, would seem to pose the same sort of challenge to
Balinese conceptions of time. And when such politics are placed, as
they are increasingly being placed, in the historical framework so characteristic
of New Nation nationalism almost everywhere--original
greatness, foreign oppression, extended struggle, sacrifice and self-liberation,
impending modernization-the whole conception of the relation
of what is now happening to what has happened and what is going to
happen is altered.
And finally, the new informality of urban life and of the pan-Indonesian
culture which dominates it-the growth in importance of youth
and youth culture with the consequent narrowing, sometimes even the
reversal, of the social distance between generations; the sentimental
comradeship of fellow revolutionaries; the populist equalitarianism of
political ideology, Marxist and non-Marxist alike-appears to contain a
similar threat to the third, the ethos or behavioral style, side of the Balinese
triangle.
All this is admittedly mere speculation (though, given the events of
the fifteen years of Independence, not wholly groundless speculation)
and when, how, how fast, and in what order Balinese perceptions of
person, time, and conduct will change is, if not wholly unpredictable in
general, largely so in detail. But as they do change-which seems to me
certain, and in fact already to have well begun49-the sort of analysis
here developed of cultural concepts as active forces, of thought as a
the traditional Balinese kingdoms, who bore the marvellously Balinese "name" of
Anak Agung Gde Agung. "Anak Agung" is the public title borne by the mem·
bers of the rul ing house of Gianjar, Gde is a birth order title (the Triwangsa
equivalent of Wayan), and Agung though a personal name is in fact just an echo
of the public title. As "gde" and "agung" both mean "big," and "anak" means
man, the whole name comes to something like "Big, Big, Big Man"-as indeed
he was, until he fell from Sukarno·s favor. More recent political leaders in Bali
have taken to the use of their more individualized personal names in the Sukarno
fashion and to the dropping of titles, birth order names, teknonyms, and so on, as
"feudal" or "old-fashioned."
49 This was written in early 1 965; for the dramatic changes that, in fact, oc·
curred later that year, see pp. 282-283 and Chapter I I .
Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali
public phenomenon with effects like other public phenomena, should
aid us in discovering its outlines, its dynamics, and, even more important,
its social implications. Nor, in other forms and with other results,
should it be less useful elsewhere.
Chapter 1 5/Deep Play:
Notes on the
Balinese Cockfight
The Raid
Early in April of 1 95 8, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in
a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small
place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own
world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt
with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their
life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there.
For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters,
invisible men.
We moved into an extended family compound (that had been arranged
before through the provincial government) belonging to one of
the four major factions in village life. But except for our landlord and
the village chief, whose cousin and brother-in-law he was, everyone ignored
us in a way only a Balinese can do. As we wandered around, uncertain,
wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us
with a gaze focused several yards behind us on some more actual stone
or tree. Almost nobody greeted us ; but nobody scowled or said anything
unpleasant to us either, which would have been almost as satisfactory.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
If we ventured to approach someone (something one is powerfully inhibited
from doing in such an atmosphere), he moved, negligently but
definitely, away. If, seated or leaning against a wall, we had him
trapped, he said nothing at all, or mumbled what for the Balinese is the
ultimate nonword-"yes." The indifference, of course, was studied; the
villagers were watching every move we made, and they had an enormous
amount of quite accurate information about who we were and
what we were going to be doing. But they acted as if we simply did not
exist, which, in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did
not, or anyway not yet.
This is, as I say, general in Bali. Everywhere else I have been in Indonesia,
and more latterly in Morocco, when I have gone into a new
village, people have poured out from all sides to take a very close look
at me, and, often an all-too-probing feel as well. In Balinese villages, at
least those away from the tourist circuit, nothing happens at all. People
go on pounding, chatting, making offerings, staring into space, carrying
baskets about while one drifts around feeling vaguely disembodied. And
the same thing is true on the individual level. When you first meet a Balinese,
he seems virtually not to relate to you at all; he is, in the term
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made famous, "away." 1 Thenin
a day, a week, a month (with some people the magic moment never
comes)-he decides, for reasons I have never quite been able to
fathom, that you are real, and then he becomes a warm, gay, sensitive,
sympathetic, though, being Balinese, always precisely controlled, person.
You have crossed, somehow, some moral or metaphysical shadow
line. Though you are not exactly taken as a Balinese (one has to be
born to that), you are at least regarded as a human being rather than a
cloud or a gust of wind. The whole complexion of your relationship
dramatically changes to, in the majority of cases, a gentle, almost affectionate
one-a low-keyed, rather playful, rather mannered, rather bemused
geniality.
My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of-wind stage, a most
frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really
real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a
large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new
school.
Now, a few special occasions aside, cockfights are illegal in Bali
' G. Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis
(New York, 1 942), p. 68.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
under the Republic (as, for not altogether unrelated reasons, they were
under the Dutch), largely as a result of the pretensions to puritanism
radical nationalism tends to bring with it. The elite, which is not itself
so very puritan, worries about the poor, ignorant peasant gambling all
his money away, about what foreigners will think, about the waste of
time better devoted to building up the country. It sees cockfighting as
"primitive," "backward," "unprogressive," and generally unbecoming
an ambitious nation. And, as with those other embarrassments-opium
smoking, begging, or uncovered breasts-it seeks, rather unsystematically,
to put a stop to it.
Of course, like drinking during Prohibition or, today, smoking marihuana,
cockfights, being a part of "The Balinese Way of Life," nonetheless
go on happening, and with extraordinary frequency. And, as with
Prohibition or marihuana, from time to time the police (who, in 1 958
at least, were almost all not Balinese but Javanese) feel called upon to
make a raid, confiscate the cocks and spurs, fine a few people, and even
now and then expose some of them in the tropical sun for a day as object
lessons which never, somehow, get learned, even though occasionally,
quite occasionally, the object dies.
As a result, the fights are usually held in a secluded corner of a village
in semisecrecy, a fact which tends to slow the action a little-not
very much, but the Balinese do not care to have it slowed at all. In this
case, however, perhaps because they were raising money for a school
that the government was unable to give them, perhaps because raids had
been few recently, perhaps, as I gathered from subsequent discussion,
there was a notion that the necessary bribes had been paid, they thought
they could take a chance on the central square and draw a larger and
more enthusiastic crowd without attracting the attention of the law. .
They were wrong. In the midst of the third match, with hundreds of
people, including, still transparent, myself and my wife, fused into a
single body around the ring, a superorganism in the literal sense, a
truck full of policemen armed with machine guns roared up. Amid
great screeching cries of "pulisi! pulisi!" from the crowd, the policemen
jumped out, and, springing into the center of the ring, began to swing
their guns around like gangsters in a motion picture, though not going
so far as actually to fire them. The superorganism came instantly apart
as its components scattered in all directions. People raced down the
road, disappeared headfirst over walls, scrambled under platforms,
folded themselves behind wicker screens, scuttled up coconut trees.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
Cocks armed with steel spurs sharp enough to cut off a finger or run a
hole through a foot were running wildly around. Everything was dust
and panic.
On the established anthropological principle, "When in Rome," my
wife and I decided, only slightly less instantaneously than everyone else,
that the thing to do was run too. We ran down the main village street,
northward, away from where we were living, for we were on that side of
the ring. About halfway down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a
compound-his own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead of us
but rice fields, open country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As
the three of us came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who had apparently
been through this sort of thing before, whipped out a table, a
tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any
explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea,
and sought to compose ourselves.
A few moments later, one of the policemen marched importantly into
the yard, looking for the village chief. (The chief had not only been at
the fight, he had arranged it. When the truck drove up he ran to the
river, stripped off his sarong, and plunged in so he could say, when at
length they found him sitting there pouring water over his head, that he
had been away bathing when the whole affair had occurred and was ignorant
of it. They did not believe him and fined him three hundred rupiah,
which the village raised collectively.) Seeing me and my wife,
"White Men," there in the yard, the policeman performed a classic
double take. When he found his voice again he asked, approximately,
what in the devil did we think we were doing there. Our host of five
minutes leaped instantly to our defense, producing an impassioned
description of who and what we were, so detailed and so accurate that
it was my turn, having barely communicated with a living human being
save my landlord and the village chief for more than a week, to be
astonished. We had a perfect right to be there, he said, looking the Javanese
upstart in the eye. We were American professors; the government
had cleared us; we were there to study culture; we were going to write
a book to tell Americans about Bali. And we had all been there drinking
tea and talking about cultural matters all afternoon and did not
know anything about any cockfight. Moreover, we had not seen the village
chief all day; he must have gone to town. The policeman retreated
in rather total disarray. And, after a decent interval, bewildered but
relieved to have survived and stayed out ofjail, so did we.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
The next morning the village was a completely different world for us.
Not only were we no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of
all attention, the object of a great outpouring of warmth, interest, and
most especially, amusement. Everyone in the village knew we had fled
like everyone else. They asked us about it again and again (I must have
told the story, small detail by small detail, fifty times by the end of the
day), gently, affectionately, but quite insistently teasing us: "Why didn't
you just stand there and tell the police who you were?" "Why didn't
you just say you were only watching and not betting?" "Were you really
afraid of those little guns?" As always, kinesthetically minded and, even
when fleeing for their lives (or, as happened eight years later, surrendering
them), the world's most poised people, they gleefully mimicked, also
over and over again, our graceless style of running and what they
claimed were our panic-stricken facial expressions. But above all,
everyone was extremely pleased and even more surprised that we had
not simply "pulled out our papers" (they knew about those too) and asserted
our Distinguished Visitor status, but had instead demonstrated
our solidarity with what were now our covillagers. (What we had actually
demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that
too.) Even the Brahmana priest, an old, grave, halfway-to-heaven type
who because of its associations with the underworld would never be involved,
even distantly, in a cockfight, and was difficult to approach even
to other Balinese, had us called into his courtyard to ask us about what
had happened, chuckling happily at the sheer extraordinariness of it all.
In Bali, to be teased is to be accepted. It was the turning point so far
as our relationship to the community was concerned, and we were quite
literally "in." The whole village opened up to us, probably more than it
ever would have otherwise (I might actually never have gotten to that
priest, and our accidental host became one of my best informants), and
certainly very much faster. Getting caught, or almost caught, in a vice
raid is perhaps not a very generalizable recipe for achieving that mysterious
necessity of anthropological field work, rapport, but for me it
worked very well. It led to a sudden and unusually complete acceptance
into a society extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate. It gave me
the kind of immediate, inside-view grasp of an aspect of "peasant mentality"
that anthropologists not fortunate enough to flee headlong with
their subjects from armed authorities normally do not get. And, perhaps
most important of all, for the other things might have come in other
ways, it put me very quickly on to a combination emotional explosion,
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
status war, and philosophical drama of central significance to the society
whose inner nature I desired to understand. By the time I left I had
spent about as much time looking into cockfights as into witchcraft, irrigation,
caste, or marriage.
Of Cocks and Men
Bali, mainly because it is Bali, is a well-studied place. Its mythology,
art, ritual, social organization, patterns of child rearing, forms of law,
even styles of trance, have all been microscopically examined for traces
of that elusive substance Jane Belo called "The Balinese Temper." 2
But, aside from a few passing remarks, the cockfight has barely been
noticed, although as a popular obsession of consuming power it is at
least as important a revelation of what being a Balinese "is really like"
as these more celebrated phenomena.3 As much of America surfaces in
a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table,
much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only apparently cocks
that are fighting there. Actually, it is men.
To anyone who has been in Bali any length of time, the deep psychological
identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable.
The double entendre here is deliberate. It works in exactly the same
way in Balinese as it does in English, even to producing the same tired
jokes, strained puns, and uninventive obscenities. Bateson and Mead
have even suggested that, in line with the Balinese conception of the
body as a set of separately animated parts, cocks are viewed as detachable,
self-operating penises, ambulant genitals with a life of their own.4
2 J. Belo, "The Balinese Temper," in Traditional Balinese Culture, ed. J. Belo
(New York, 1 970) (originally published in 1 935), pp. 85- 1 1 0.
3 The best discussion of cockfighting is again Bateson and Mead's Balinese
Character, pp. 24-25, 1 40; but it, too, is general and abbreviated.
4 Ibid., pp. 25-26. The cockfight is unusual within Balinese culture in being a
single-sex public activity from which the other sex is totally and expressly excluded.
Sexual differentiation is culturally extremely played down in Bali and
most activities, formal and informal, involve the participation of men and women
on equal ground, commonly as linked couples. From religion, to politics, to economics,
to k inship, to dress, Bali is a rather "unisex" society, a fact both its customs
and its symbolism clearly express. Even in contexts where women do not in
fact play much of a role-music, painting, certain agricultural activities-their
absence, which is only relative in any case, is more a mere matter of fact than
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
And while I do not have the kind of unconscious material either to confirm
or disconfirm this intriguing notion, the fact that they are masculine
symbols par excellence is about as indubitable, and to the Balinese
about as evident, as the fact that water runs downhill.
The language of everyday moralism is shot through, on the male side
of it, with roosterish imagery. Sabung, the word for cock (and one
which appears in inscriptions as early as A.D. 922), is used metaphorically
to mean "hero," "warrior," "champion," "man of parts," "political
candidate," "bachelor," "dandy," "lady-killer," or "tough guy." A
pompous man whose behavior presumes above his station is compared
to a tailless cock who struts about as though he had a large, spectacular
one. A desperate man who makes a last, irrational effort to extricate
himself from an impossible situation is likened to a dying cock who
makes one final lunge at his tormentor to drag him along to a common
destruction. A stingy man, who promises much, gives little, and begrudges
that, is compared to a cock which, held by the tail, leaps at another
without in fact engaging him. A marriageable young man still shy
with the opposite sex or someone in a new job anxious to make a good
impression is called "a fighting cock caged for the first time." s Court
trials, wars, political contests, inheritance disputes, and street arguments
are all compared to cockfights.6 Even the very island itself is perceived
from its shape as a small, proud cock, poised, neck extended, back taut,
tail raised, in eternal challenge to large, feckless, shapeless Java.7
But the intimacy of men with their cocks is more than metaphorical.
Balinese men, or anyway a large majority of Balinese men, spend an
enormous amount of time with their favorites, grooming them, feeding
them, discussing them, trying them out against one another, or just gazsocially
enforced. To this general pattern, the cockfight, entirely of, by, and for
men (women-at least Balinese women-do not even watch), is the most striking
exception.
5 C. Hooykaas, The Lay of the Jaya Prana (London, 1 958), p. 39. The lay has
a stanza (no. 1 7) with the reluctant bridgegroom use. Jaya Prana, the subject of a
Balinese Uriah myth, responds to the lord who has offered him the loveliest of
six hundred servant girls: "Godly King, my Lord and Master 1 I beg you. give me
leave to go / such things are not yet in my mind; / like a fighting cock encaged /
indeed I am on my mettle I I am alone / as yet the flame has not been fanned."
' For these, see V. E. Korn, Het Adatrecht van Bali, 2d ed. (The Hague, 1932),
index under toh.
7 There is indeed a legend to the effect that the separation of Java and Bali is
due to the action of a powerful Javanese religious figure who wished to protect
himself against a Balinese culture hero (the ancestor of two Ksatria castes) who
was a passionate cockfighting gambler. See C. Hooykaas, Agama Tirtha (Amsterdam,
1 964), p. 1 84.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
ing at them with a mixture of rapt admiration and dreamy self-absorption.
Whenever you see a group of Balinese men squatting idly in the
council shed or along the road in their hips down, shoulders forward,
knees up fashion, half or more of them will have a rooster in his hands,
holding it between his thighs, bouncing it gently up and down to
strengthen its legs, ruffling its feathers with abstract sensuality, pushing
it out against a neighbor's rooster to rouse its spirit, withdrawing it toward
his loins to calm it again. Now and then, to get a feel for another
bird, a man will fiddle this way with someone else's cock for a while,
but usually by moving around to squat in place behind it, rather than
just having it passed across to him as though it were merely an animal.
In the houseyard, the high-walled enclosures where the people live,
fighting cocks are kept in wicker cages, moved frequently about so as to
maintain the optimum balance of sun and shade. They are fed a special
diet, which varies somewhat according to individual theories but which
is mostly maize, sifted for impurities with far more care than it is when
mere humans are going to eat it, and offered to the animal kernel by
kernel. Red pepper is stuffed down their beaks and up their anuses to
give them spirit. They are bathed in the same ceremonial preparation of
tepid water, medicinal herbs, flowers, and onions in which infants are
bathed, and for a prize cock just about as often. Their combs are
cropped, their plumage dressed, their spurs trimmed, and their legs
massaged, and they are inspected for flaws with the squinted concentration
of a diamond merchant. A man who has a passion for cocks, an
enthusiast in the literal sense of the term, can spend most of his life
with them, and even those, the overwhelming majority, whose passion
though intense has not entirely run away with them, can and do spend
what seems not only to an outsider, but also to themselves, an inordinate
amount of time with them. "I am cock crazy," my landlord, a quite ordinary
afficionado by Balinese standards, used to moan as he went to
move another cage, give another bath, or conduct another feeding.
"We're all cock crazy."
The madness has some less visible dimensions, however, because although
it is true that cocks are symbolic expressions or magnifications
of their owner's self, the narcissistic male ego writ out in Aesopian
terms, they are also expressions-and rather more immediate ones--of
what the Balinese regard as the direct inversion, aesthetically, morally,
and metaphysically, of human status: animality.
The Balinese revulsion against any behavior regarded as animal-like
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
can hardly be overstressed. Babies are not allowed to crawl for that reason.
Incest, though hardly approved, is a much less horrifying crime
than bestiality. (The appropriate punishment for the second is death by
drowning, for the first being forced to live like an animal.) s Most demons
are represented-in sculpture, dance, ritual, myth-in some real
or fantastic animal form. The main puberty rite consists in filing the
child's teeth so they will not look like animal fangs. Not only defecation
but eating is regarded as a disgusting, almost obscene activity, to be
conducted hurriedly and privately, because of its association with animality.
Even falling down or any form of clumsiness is considered to be
bad for these reasons. Aside from cocks and a few domestic animalsoxen,
ducks-of no emotional significance, the Balinese are aversive to
animals and treat their large number of dogs not merely callously but
with a phobic cruelty. In identifying with his cock, the Balinese man is
identifying not just with his ideal self, or even his penis, but also, and at
the same time, with what he most fears, hates, and ambivalence being
what it is, is fascinated by-"The Powers of Darkness."
The connection of cocks and cockfighting with such Powers, with the
animalistic demons that threaten constantly to invade the small,
cleared-off space in which the Balinese have so carefully built their
lives and devour its inhabitants, is quite explicit. A cockfight, any cockfight,
is in the first instance a blood sacrifice offered, with the appropriate
chants and oblations, to the demons in order to pacify their ravenous,
cannibal hunger. No temple festival should be conducted until one
is made. (If it is omitted, someone will inevitably fall into a trance and
command with the voice of an angered spirit that the oversight be immediately
corrected.) Collective responses to natural evils-illness, crop
failure, volcanic eruptions-almost always involve them. And that famous
holiday in Bali, "The Day of Silence" (Njepi), when everyone sits
silent and immobile all day long in order to avoid contact with a sudden
influx of demons chased momentarily out of hell, is preceded the previous
day by large-scale cockfights (in this case legal) in almost every
village on the island.
In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative
power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened an-
8 An incestuous couple is forced to wear pig yokes over their necks and crawl
to a pig trough and eat with their mouths there. On this, see J . Belo, "Customs
Pertaining to Twins in Bali," in Traditional Balinese Culture, ed. J. Belo, p. 49; on
the abhorrence of animality generally, Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character, p.
22.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
imality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death. It
is little wonder that when, as is the invariable rule, the owner of the
winning cock takes the carcass of the loser-often torn limb from limb
by its enraged owner-home to eat, he does so with a mixture of social
embarrassment, moral satisfaction, aesthetic disgust, and cannibal joy.
Or that a man who has lost an important fight is sometimes driven to
wreck his family shrines and curse the gods, an act of metaphysical (and
social) suicide. Or that in seeking earthly analogues for heaven and hell
the Balinese compare the former to the mood of a man whose cock has
just won, the latter to that of a man whose cock has just lost.
The Fight
Cockfights (tetadjen; sabungan) are held in a ring about fifty feet square.
Usually they begin toward late afternoon and run three or four hours
until sunset. About nine or ten separate matches (sehet) comprise a program.
Each match is precisely like the others in general pattern: there is
no main match, no connection between individual matches, no variation
in their format, and each is arranged on a completely ad hoc basis.
After a fight has ended and the emotional debris is cleaned away-the
bets have been paid, the curses cursed, the carcasses possessed-seven,
eight, perhaps even a dozen men slip negligently into the ring with a
cock and seek to find there a logical opponent for it. This process,
which rarely takes less than ten minutes, and often a good deal longer,
is conducted in a very subdued, oblique, even dissembling manner.
Those not immediately involved give it at best but disguised, sidelong
attention; those who, embarrassedly, are, attempt to pretend somehow
that the whole thing is not really happening.
A match made, the other hopefuls retire with the same deliberate indifference,
and the selected cocks have their spurs (tadji) affixedrazor-sharp,
pointed steel swords, four or five inches long. This is a delicate
job which only a small proportion of men, a half-dozen or so in
most villages, know how to do properly. The man who attaches the
spurs also provides them, and if the rooster he assists wins, its owner
awards him the spur-leg of the victim. The spurs are affixed by winding
a long length of string around the foot of the spur and the leg of the
4ZZ THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
cock. For reasons I shall come to presently, it is done somewhat differently
from case to case, and is an obsessively deliberate affair. The lore
about spurs is extensive-they are sharpened only at eclipses and the
dark of the moon, should be kept out of the sight of women, and so
forth. And they are handled, both in use and out, with the same curious
combination of fussiness and sensuality the Balinese direct toward ritual
objects generally.
The spurs affixed, the two cocks are placed by their handlers (who
may or may not be their owners) facing one another in the center of the
ring.9 A coconut pierced with a small hole is placed in a pail of water,
in which it takes about twenty-one seconds to sink, a period known as a
tjeng and marked at beginning and end by the beating of a slit gong.
During these twenty-one seconds the handlers (pengangkeb) are not permitted
to touch their roosters. If, as sometimes happens, the animals
have not fought during this time, they are picked up, fluffed, pulled,
prodded, and otherwise insulted, and put back in the center of the ring
and the process begins again. Sometimes they refuse to fight at all, or
one keeps running away, in which case they are imprisoned together
under a wicker cage, which usually gets them engaged.
Most of the time, in any case, the cocks fly almost immediately at
one another in a wing-beating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of
animal fury so pure, so absolute, and in its own way so beautiful, as to
be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate. Within moments one or
the other drives home a solid blow with his spur. The handler whose
cock has delivered the blow immediately picks it up so that it will not
get a return blow, for if he does not the match is likely to end in a mutually
mortal tie as the two birds wildly hack each other to pieces. This
is particularly true if, as often happens, the spur sticks in its victim's
body, for then the aggressor is at the mercy of his wounded foe.
With the birds again in the hands of their handlers, the coconut is
now sunk three times after which the cock which has landed the blow
9 Except for unimportant, small-bet fights (on the question of fight "impor·
tance," see below) spur affixing is usually done by someone other than the owner.
Whether the owner handles his own cock or not more or less depends on how
skilled he is at it, a consideration whose importance is again relative to the importance
of the fight. When spur affixers and cock handlers are someone other
than the owner, they are almost always a quite close relative-a brother or
cousin-or a very intimate friend of his. They are thus almost extensions of his
personality, as the fact that all three will refer to the cock as "mine," say "I"
fought So-and-So, and so on, demonstrates. Also, owner-handler-affixer triads
tend to be fairly fixed, though individuals may participate in several and often
exchange roles within a given one.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
must be set down to show that he is firm, a fact he demonstrates by
wandering idly around the ring for a coconut sink. The coconut is then
sunk twice more and the fight must recommence.
During this interval, slightly over two minutes, the handler of the
wounded cock has been working frantically over it, like a trainer patching
a mauled boxer between rounds, to get it in shape for a last, desperate
try for victory. He blows in its mouth, putting the whole chicken
head in his own mouth and sucking and blowing, fluffs it, stuffs its
wounds with various sorts of medicines, and generally tries anything he
can think of to arouse the last ounce of spirit which may be hidden
somewhere within it. By the time he is forced to put it back down he is
usually drenched in chicken blood, but, as in prize fighting, a good handler
is worth his weight in gold. Some of them can virtually make the
dead walk, at least long enough for the second and final round.
In the climactic battle (if there is one; sometimes the wounded cock
simply expires in the handler's hands or immediately as it is placed
down again), the cock who landed the first blow usually proceeds to
finish off his weakened opponent. But this is far from an inevitable outcome,
for if a cock can walk, he can fight, and if he can fight, he can
kill, and what counts is which cock expires first. If the wounded one can
get a stab in and stagger on until the other drops, he is the official winner,
even if he himself topples over an instant later.
Surrounding all this melodrama-which the crowd packed tight
around the ring follows in near silence, moving their bodies in kinesthetic
sympathy with the movement of the animals, cheering their champions
on with wordless hand motions, shiftings of the shoulders, turnings
of the head, falling back en masse as the cock with the murderous
spurs careens toward one side of the ring (it is said that spectators
sometimes lose eyes and fingers from being too attentive), surging forward
again as they glance off toward another-is a vast body of extraordinarily
elaborate and precisely detailed rules.
These rules, together with the developed lore of cocks and cockfighting
which accompanies them, are written down in palm-leaf manuscripts
(lontar; ronta() passed on from generation to generation as part of the
general legal and cultural tradition of the villages. At a fight, the umpire
(saja komong; djuru kembar)-the man who manages the coconut
-is in charge of their application and his authority is absolute. I have
never seen an umpire's judgment questioned on any subject, even by the
more despondent losers, nor have I ever heard, even in private, a
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
charge of unfairness directed against one, or, for that matter, complaints
about umpires in general. Only exceptionally well trusted, solid, and,
given the complexity of the code, knowledgeable citizens perform this
job, and in fact men will bring their cocks only to fights presided over
by such men. It is also the umpire to whom accusations of cheating,
which, though rare in the extreme, occasionally arise, are referred; and
it is he who in the not infrequent cases where the cocks expire virtually
together decides which (if either, for, though the Balinese do not care
for such an outcome, there can be ties) went first. Likened to a judge, a
king, a priest, and a policeman, he is all of these, and under his assured
direction the animal passion of the fight proceeds within the civic certainty
of the law. In the dozens of cockfights I saw in Bali, I never once
saw an altercation about rules. Indeed, I never saw an open altercation,
other than those between cocks, at all.
This crosswise doubleness of an event which, taken as a fact of nature,
is rage untrammeled and, taken as a fact of culture, is form perfected,
defines the cockfight as a sociological entity. A cockfight is what,
searching for a name for something not vertebrate enough to be called a
group and not structureless enough to be called a crowd, Erving Goffman
has called a "focused gathering"-a set of persons engrossed in a
common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that
flow.10 Such gatherings meet and disperse; the participants in them fluctuate;
the activity that focuses them is discrete-a particulate process
that reoccurs rather than a continuous one that endures. They take their
form from the situation that evokes them, the floor on which they are
placed, as Goffman puts it; but it is a form, and an articulate one, nonetheless.
For the situation, the floor is itself created, in jury deliberations,
surgical operations, block meetings, sit-ins, cockfights, by the cultural
preoccupations-here, as we shall see, the celebration of status rivalry
-which not only specify the focus but, assembling actors and arranging
scenery, bring it actually into being.
In classical times (that is to say, prior to the Dutch invasion of
1 908), when there were no bureaucrats around to improve popular morality,
the staging of a cockfight was an explicitly societal matter. Bringing
a cock to an important fight was, for an adult male, a compulsory
duty of citizenship; taxation of fights, which were usually held on market
day, was a major source of public revenue; patronage of the art was
10 E. Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapol
is, 1 96 1 ), pp. 9- 1 0.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
a stated responsibility of princes; and the cock ring, or wantilan, stood
in the center of the village near those other monuments of Balinese
civility-the council house, the origin temple, the marketplace, the signal
tower, and the banyan tree. Today, a few special occasions aside,
the newer rectitude makes so open a statement of the connection between
the excitements of collective life and those of blood sport impossible,
but, less directly expressed, the connection itself remains intimate
and intact. To expose it, however, it is necessary to turn to the aspect of
cockfighting around which all the others pivot, and through which they
exercise their force, an aspect I have thus far studiously ignored. I
mean, of course, the gambling.
Odds and Even Money
The Balinese never do anything in a simple way that they can contrive
to do in a complicated one, and to this generalization cockfight wagering
is no exception.
In the first place, there are two sorts of bets, or toh.11 There is the
single axial bet in the center between the principals (toh ketengah), and
there is the cloud of peripheral ones around the ring between members
of the audience (toh kesasi). The first is typically large; the second typically
small. The first is collective, involving coalitions of bettors clustering
around the owner; the second is individual, man to man. The first is
a matter of deliberate, very quiet, almost furtive arrangement by the coalition
members and the umpire huddled like conspirators in the center
of the ring; the second is a matter of impulsive shouting, public offers,
and public acceptances by the excited throng around its edges. And
most curiously, and as we shall see most revealingly, where the first is
always, without exception, even money, the second, equally without exu
This word, which literally means an indelible stain or mark, as in a birthmark
or a vein in a stone, is used as well for a deposit in a court case, for a
pawn, for security offered in a loan, for a stand-in for someone else in a legal or
ceremonial context, for an earnest advanced in a business deal, for a sign placed
in a field to indicate its ownership is in dispute, and for the status of an unfaithful
wife from whose lover her husband must gain satisfaction or surrender her to
him. See Korn, Het Adatrecht van Bali; Th. Pigeaud, Javaans-Nederlands Handwoordenboek
(Groningen, 1 938); H. H. Juynboll, Oudjavaansche-Nederlandsche
Woordenlijst (Leiden, 1 923).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ception, is never such. What is a fair coin in the center is a biased one
on the side.
The center bet is the official one, hedged in again with a webwork of
rules, and is made between the two cock owners, with the umpire as
overseer and public witness. 12 This bet, which, as I say, is always relatively
and sometimes very large, is never raised simply by the owner in
whose name it is made, but by him together with four or five, sometimes
seven or eight, allies-kin, village mates, neighbors, close friends.
He may, if he is not especially well-to-do, not even be the major contributor;
though, if only to show that he is not involved in any chicanery,
he must be a significant one.
Of the fifty-seven matches for which I have exact and reliable data on
the center bet, the range is from fifteen ringgits to five hundred, with a
mean at eighty-five and with the distribution being rather noticeably trimodal:
small fights ( 1 5 ringgits either side of 35) accounting for about
45 percent of the total number; medium ones (20 ringgits either side of
70) for about 25 percent; and large (75 ringgits either side of 1 75) for
about 20 percent, with a few very small and very large ones out at the
extremes. In a society where the normal daily wage of a manual laborer
-a brickmaker, an ordinary farmworker, a market porter-was about
three ringgits a day, and considering the fact that fights were held on
the average about every two-and-a-half days in the immediate area I
studied, this is clearly serious gambling, even if the bets are pooled
rather than individual efforts.
The side bets are, however, something else altogether. Rather than
the solemn, legalistic pactmaking of the center, wagering takes place
rather in the fashion in which the stock exchange used to work when it
was out on the curb. There is a fixed and known odds paradigm which
runs in a continuous series from ten-to-nine at the short end to two-toone
at the long: 1 0-9, 9-8, 8-7, 7-6, 6-5, 5 -4, 4-3, 3-2, 2- 1 . The
man who wishes to back the underdog cock (leaving aside how favorites,
kebut, and underdogs, ngai, are established for the moment) shouts
the short-side number indicating the odds he wants to be given. That is,
if he shouts gasa/, "five," he wants the underdog at five-to-four (or, for
12 The center bet must be advanced in cash by both parties prior to the actual
fight. The umpire holds the stakes until the decision is rendered and then awards
them to the winner, avoiding, among other things, the intense embarrassment
both winner and loser would feel if the latter had to pay off personally following
his defeat. About 10 percent of the winner's receipts are subtracted for the umpire's
share and that of the fight sponsors.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
him, four-to-five); if he shouts "four," he wants it at four-to-three
(again, he putting up the "three"); if "nine," at nine-to-eight, and so on.
A man backing the favorite, and thus considering giving odds if he can
get them short enough, indicates the fact by crying out the color-type of
that cock-"brown," "speckled," or whatever. •3
As odds-takers (backers of the underdog) and odds-givers (backers of
the favorite) sweep the crowd with their shouts, they begin to focus in
on one another as potential betting pairs, often from far across the ring.
The taker tries to shout the giver into longer odds, the giver to shout
the taker into shorter ones. 14 The taker, who is the wooer in this situation,
will signal how large a bet he wishes to make at the odds he is
shouting by holding a number of fingers up in front of his face and vigorously
waving them. If the giver, the wooed, replies in kind, the bet is
made; if he does not, they unlock gazes and the search goes on.
The side betting, which takes place after the center bet has been
made and its size announced, consists then in a rising crescendo of
13 Actually, the typing of cocks, which is extremely elaborate (I have collected
more than twenty classes, certainly not a complete list), is not based on color
alone, but on a series of independent, interacting, dimensions, which includebesides
color-size, bone thickness, plumage, and temperament. (But not ped igree.
The Balinese do not breed cocks to any significant extent, nor, so far as I
have been able to d iscover, have they ever done so. The asil, or jungle cock,
which is the basic fighting strain everywhere the sport is found, is native to
southern Asia, and one can buy a good example in the chicken section of almost
any Balinese market for anywhere from four or five ringgits up to fifty or more.)
The color element is merely the one normally used as the type name, except
when the two cocks of different types-as on principle they must be-have the
same color, in which case a secondary indication from one of the other dimensions
("large speckled" v. "small speckled," etc.) is added. The types are coordinated
with various cosmological ideas which help shape the making of matches,
so that, for example, you fight a small, headstrong, speckled brown-on-white cock
with flat-lying feathers and thin legs from the east side of the ring on a certain
day of the complex Balinese calendar, and a large, cautious, all-black cock with
tufted feathers and stubby legs from the north side on another day, and so on.
All this is again recorded in palm-leaf manuscripts and endlessly discussed by the
Balinese (who do not all have identical systems), and a full-scale componentialcum-symbolic
analysis of cock classifications would be extremely valuable both as
an adjunct to the description of the cockfight and in itself. But my data on the
subject, though extensive and varied, do not seem to be complete and systematic
enough to attempt such an analysis here. For Balinese cosmological ideas more
generally see Bela, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture, and J. L. Swellengrebel, ed.,
Bali: Studies in Life, Thought, and Ritual (The Hague, 1 960).
1 4 For purposes of ethnographic completeness, it should be noted that it is possible
for the man backing the favorite-the odds-giver-to make a bet in which
he wins if his cock wins or there is a tie, a slight shortening of the odds (I do not
have enough cases to be exact, but ties seem to occur about once every fifteen or
twenty matches). He indicates his wish to do this by shouting sapih ("tie") rather
than the cock-type, but such bets are in fact infrequent.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
shouts as backers of the underdog offer their propositions to anyone
who will accept them, while those who are backing the favorite but do
not like the price being offered, shout equally frenetically the color of
the cock to show they too are desperate to bet but want shorter odds.
Almost always odds-calling, which tends to be very consensual in
that at any one time almost all callers are calling the same thing, starts
off toward the long end of the range-five-to-four or four-to-threeand
then moves, also consensually, toward the short end with greater or
lesser speed and to a greater or lesser degree. Men crying "five" and
finding themselves answered only with cries of "brown" start crying
"six," either drawing the other callers fairly quickly with them or retiring
from the scene as their too-generous offers are snapped up. If the
change is made and partners are still scarce, the procedure is repeated
in a move to "seven," and so on, only rarely, and in the very largest
fights, reaching the ultimate "nine" or "ten" levels. Occasionally, if the
cocks are clearly mismatched, there may be no upward movement at all,
or even a movement down the scale to four-to-three, three-to-two, very,
very rarely two-to-one, a shift which is accompanied by a declining
number of bets as a shift upward is accompanied by an increasing number.
But the general pattern is for the betting to move a shorter or
longer distance up the scale toward the, for sidebets, nonexistent pole of
even money, with the overwhelming majority of bets falling in the
four-to-three to eight-to-seven range. •s
As the moment for the release of the cocks by the handlers approaches,
the screaming, at least in a match where the center bet is
large, reaches almost frenzied proportions as the remaining unfulfilled
bettors try desperately to find a last-minute partner at a price they can
live with. (Where the center bet is small, the opposite tends to occur:
15 The precise dynamics of the movement of the betting is one of the most intriguing,
most complicated, and, given the hectic conditions under which it occurs,
most difficult to study, aspects of the fight. Motion picture recording plus
multiple observers would probably be necessary to deal with it effectively. Even
impressionistically-the only approach open to a lone ethnographer caught in the
middle of all this-it is clear that certain men lead both in determining the favorite
(that is, making the opening cock-type calls which always initiate the process)
and in directing the movement of the odds, these "opinion leaders" being
the more accomplished cockfighters-cum-solid-citizens to be discussed below. If
these men begin to change their calls, others follow; if they begin to make bets,
so do others and-though there are always a large number of frustrated bettors
crying for shorter or longer odds to the end-the movement more or less ceases.
But a detailed understanding of the whole process awaits what, alas, it is not very
likely ever to get: a decision theorist armed with precise observations of individual
behavior.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
betting dies off, trailing into silence, as odds lengthen and people lose
interest.) In a large-bet, well-made match-the kind of match the Balinese
regard as "real cockfighting"-the mob scene quality, the sense
that sheer chaos is about to break loose, with all those waving, shouting,
pushing, clambering men is quite strong, an effect which is only heightened
by the intense stillness that falls with instant suddenness, rather as
if someone had turned off the current, when the slit gong sounds, the
cocks are put down, and the battle begins.
When it ends, anywhere from fifteen seconds to five minutes later, all
bets are immediately paid. There are absolutely no IOUs, at least to a
betting opponent. One may, of course, borrow from a friend before offering
or accepting a wager, but to offer or accept it you must have the
money already in hand and, if you lose, you must pay it on the spot, before
the next match begins. This is an iron rule, and as I have never
heard of a disputed umpire's decision (though doubtless there must
sometimes be some), I have also never heard of a welshed bet, perhaps
because in a worked-up cockfight crowd the consequences might be, as
they are reported to be sometimes for cheaters, drastic and immediate.
It is, in any case, this formal asymmetry between balanced center bets
and unbalanced side ones that poses the critical analytical problem for a
theory which sees cockfight wagering as the link connecting the fight to
the wider world of Balinese culture. It also suggests the way to go about
solving it and demonstrating the link.
The first point that needs to be made in this connection is that the
higher the center bet, the more likely the match will in actual fact be an
even one. Simple considerations of rationality suggest that. If you are
betting fifteen ringgits on a cock, you might be willing to go along with
even money even if you feel your animal somewhat the less promising.
But if you are betting five hundred you are very, very likely to be loathe
to do so. Thus, in large-bet fights, which of course involve the better animals,
tremendous care is taken to see that the cocks are about as
evenly matched as to size, general condition, pugnacity, and so on as is
humanly possible. The different ways of adjusting the spurs of the animals
are often employed to secure this. If one cock seems stronger, an
agreement will be made to position his spur at a slightly less advantageous
angle-a kind of handicapping, at which spur affixers are, so it is
said, extremely skilled. More care will be taken, too, to employ skillful
handlers and to match them exactly as to abilities.
In short, in a large-bet fight the pressure to make the match a genu-
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
inely fifty-fifty proposition is enormous, and is consciously felt as such.
For medium fights the pressure is somewhat less, and for small ones less
yet, though there is always an effort to make things at least approximately
equal, for even at fifteen ringgits (five days' work) no one wants
to make an even money bet in a clearly unfavorable situation. And,
again, what statistics I have tend to bear this out. In my fifty-seven
matches, the favorite won thirty-three times overall, the underdog
twenty-four, a 1 .4 : I ratio. But if one splits the figures at sixty ringgits
center bets, the ratios turn out to be 1 . 1 : I (twelve favorites, eleven underdogs)
for those above this line, and 1 .6 : I (twenty-one and thirteen)
for those below it. Or, if you take the extremes, for very large fights,
those with center bets over a hundred ringgits the ratio is I : I (seven
and seven); for very small fights, those under forty ringgits, it is 1 .9 : I
(nineteen and ten). I &
Now, from this proposition-that the higher the center bet the more
exactly a fifty-fifty proposition the cockfight is-two things more or less
immediately follow: ( I ) the higher the center bet is, the greater the pull
on the side betting toward the short-odds end of the wagering spectrum,
and vice versa; (2) the higher the center bet is, the greater the volume
of side betting, and vice versa.
The logic is similar in both cases. The closer the fight is in fact to
even money, the less attractive the long end of the odds will appear and,
therefore, the shorter it must be if there are to be takers. That this is
the case is apparent from mere inspection, from the Balinese's own analysis
of the matter, and from what more systematic observations I was
able to collect. Given the difficulty of making precise and complete recordings
of side betting, this argument is hard to cast in numerical
form, but in all my cases the odds-giver, odds-taker consensual point, a
quite pronounced mini-max saddle where the bulk (at a guess, twothirds
to three-quarters in most cases) of the bets are actually made, was
three or four points further along the scale toward the shorter end for
16 Assuming only binomial variability, the departure from a fifty-fifty expectation
in the sixty-ringgits-and-below case is 1 .38 standard deviations, or (in a one
direction test) an eight in one hundred possibility by chance alone; for the below-forty-ringgits
case it is 1 .65 standard deviations, or about five in one
hundred. The fact that these departures though real are not extreme merely indicates,
again, that even in the smaller fights the tendency to match cocks at least
reasonably evenly persists. It is a matter of relative relaxation of the pressures toward
equalization, not their elimination. The tendency for high-bet contests to be
coin-flip propositions is, of course, even more striking, and suggests the Balinese
know quite well what they are about.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 43 1
the large-center-bet fights than for the small ones, with medium ones
generally in between. In detail, the fit is not, of course, exact, but the
general pattern is quite consistent: the power of the center bet to pull
the side bets toward its own even-money pattern is directly proportional
to its size, because its size is directly proportional to the degree to
which the cocks are in fact evenly matched. As for the volume question,
total wagering is greater in large-center-bet fights because such fights
are considered more "interesting," not only in the sense that they are
less predictable, but, more crucially, that more is at stake in them-in
terms of money, in terms of the quality of the cocks, and consequently,
as we shall see, in terms of social prestige. J7
The paradox of fair coin in the middle, biased coin on the outside is
thus a merely apparent one. The two betting systems, though formally
incongruent, are not really contradictory to one another, but are part of
a single larger system in which the center bet is, so to speak, the "center
of gravity," drawing, the larger it is the more so, the outside bets toward
the short-odds end of the scale. The center bet thus "makes the
game," or perhaps better, defines it, signals what, following a notion of
Jeremy Bentham's, I am going to call its "depth."
The Balinese attempt to create an interesting, if you will, "deep,"
match by making the center bet as large as possible so that the cocks
matched will be as equal and as fine as possible, and the outcome, thus,
as unpredictable as possible. They do not always succeed. Nearly half
the matches are relatively trivial, relatively uninteresting-in my borrowed
terminology, "shallow"-affairs. But that fact no more argues
against my interpretation than the fact that most painters, poets, and
playwrights are mediocre argues against the view that artistic effort is
17 The reduction in wagering in smaller fights (which, of course, feeds on itself;
one of the reasons people find small fights uninteresting is that there is less
wagering in them, and contrariwise for large ones) takes place in three mutually
reinforcing ways. First, there is a simple withdrawal of interest as people wander
off to have a cup of coffee or chat with a friend. Second, the Balinese do not
mathematically reduce odds, but bet directly in terms of stated odds as such.
Thus, for a nine-to-eight bet, one man wagers nine ringgits, the other eight; for
five-to-four, one wagers five, the other four. For any given currency u nit, like the
ringgit, therefore, 6.3 times as much money is involved in a ten-to-nine bet as in
a two-to-one bet, for example, and, as noted, in small fights betting settles toward
the longer end. Finally, the bets which are made tend to be one- rather than
two-, three-, or in some of the very largest fights, four- or five-finger ones. (The
fingers indicate the mullip/es of the stated bet odds at issue, not absolute figures.
Two fingers in a six-to-five situation means a man wants to wager ten ringgits on
the underdog against twelve, three in an eight-to-seven situation, twenty-one
against twenty-four, and so on.)
432 THE INTE RPRETATION OF CULTURES
directed toward profundity and, with a certain frequency, approximates
it. The image of artistic technique is indeed exact: the center bet is a
means, a device, for creating "interesting," "Jeep" matches, not the reason,
or at least not the main reason, why they are interesting, the source
of their fascination, the substance of their depth. The question of why
such matches are interesting-indeed, for the Balinese, exquisitely
absorbing-takes us out of the realm of formal concerns into more
broadly sociological and social-psychological ones, and to a less purely economic
idea of what "depth" in gaming amounts to. 1 8
Playing with Fire
Bentham's concept of "deep play" is found in his The Theory of Legislation.
•9 By it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is,
from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all.
If a man whose fortune is a thousand pounds (or ringgits) wages five
18 Besides wagering there are other economic aspects of the cockfight, especially
its very close connection with the local market system which, though secondary
both to its motivation and to its function, are not without importance.
Cockfights are open events to which anyone who wishes may come, sometimes
from quite distant areas, but well over 90 percent, probably over 95 , are very
local affairs, and the locality concerned is defined not by the village, nor even by
the administrative district, but by the rural market system. Bali has a three-day
market week with the familiar "solar-system"-type rotation. Though the markets
themselves have never been very highly developed, small morning affairs in a village
square, it is the microregion such rotation rather generally marks out-ten
or twenty square miles, seven or eight neighboring villages (which in contemporary
Bali is usually going to mean anywhere from five to ten or eleven thousand
people) from which the core of any cockfight audience, indeed virtually all of it,
will come. Most of the fights are in fact organized and sponsored by small combines
of petty rural merchants under the general premise, very strongly held by
them and indeed by all Balinese, that cockfights are good for trade because "they
get money out of the house, they make it circulate." Stalls selling various sorts of
things as well as assorted sheer-chance gambl ing games (see below) are set up
around the edge of the area so that this even takes on the qual ity of a small fair.
This connection of cockfighting with markets and market sellers is very old, as,
among other things, their conjunction in inscriptions [ R. Goris, Prasasti Bali, 2
vols. (Bandung, 1 954) ] indicates. Trade has followed the cock for centuries in
rural Bali, and the sport has been one of the main agencies of the island's mone­
tization.
19 The phrase is found in the Hildreth translation, International Library of
Psychology ( 1 93 1), note to p. 1 06; see L. L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (New
Haven, 1 964), p. 6 fT.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 433
hundred of it on an even bet, the marginal utility of the pound he stands
to win is clearly less than the marginal disutility of the one he stands to
lose. In genuine deep play, this is the case for both parties. They are
both in over their heads. Having come together in search of pleasure
they have entered into a relationship which will bring the participants,
considered collectively, net pain rather than net pleasure. Bentham's
conclusion was, therefore, that deep play was immoral from first principles
and, a typical step for him, should be prevented legally.
But more interesting than the ethical problem, at least for our concerns
here, is that despite the logical force of Bentham's analysis men
do engage in such play, both passionately and often, and even in the
face of law's revenge. For Bentham and those who think as he does
(nowadays mainly lawyers, economists, and a few psychiatrists), the explanation
is, as I have said, that such men are irrational-addicts, fetishists,
children, fools, savages, who need only to be protected against
themselves. But for the Balinese, though naturally they do not formulate
it in so many words, the explanation lies in the fact that in such play,
money is less a measure of utility, had or expected, than it is a symbol
of moral import, perceived or imposed.
It is, in fact, in shallow games, ones in which smaller amounts of
money are involved, that increments and decrements of cash are more
nearly synonyms for utility and disutility, in the ordinary, unexpanded
sense-for pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. In deep ones,
where the amounts of money are great, much more is at stake than material
gain: namely, esteem, honor, dignity, respect-in a word, though
in Bali a profoundly freighted word, status.2o It is at stake symbolically,
for (a few cases of ruined addict gamblers aside) no one's status is
actually altered by the outcome of a cockfight; it is only, and that momentarily,
affirmed or insulted. But for the Balinese, for whom nothing
is more pleasurable than an affront obliquely delivered or more painful
than one obliquely received-particularly when mutual acquaintances,
undeceived by surfaces, are watching-such appraisive drama is deep
indeed.
This, I must stress immediately, is not to say that the money does not
matter, or that the Balinese is no more concerned about losing five
20 Of course, even in Bentham, utility is not normally confined as a concept to
monetary losses and gains, and my argument here might be more carefully put in
terms of a denial that for the Balinese, as for any people, utility (pleasure, happiness
. . . ) is merely identifiable with wealth. But such terminological problems
are in any case secondary to the essential point: the cockfight is not roulette.
434 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
hundred ringgits than fifteen. Such a conclusion would be absurd. It is
because money does, in this hardly unmaterialistic society, matter and
matter very much that the more of it one risks, the more of a lot of
other things, such as one's pride, one's poise, one's dispassion, one's
masculinity, one also risks, again only momentarily but again very publicly
as well. In deep cockfights an owner and his collaborators, and, as
we shall see, to a lesser but still quite real extent also their backers on
the outside, put their money where their status is.
It is in large part because the marginal disutility of loss is so great at
the higher levels of betting that to engage in such betting is to lay one's
public self, allusively and metaphorically, through the medium of one's
cock, on the line. And though to a Benthamite this might seem merely
to increase the irrationality of the enterprise that much further, to the
Balinese what it mainly increases is the meaningfulness of it all. And as
(to follow Weber rather than Bentham) the imposition of meaning on
life is the major end and primary condition of human existence, that access
of significance more than compensates for the economic costs involved.21
Actually, given the even-money quality of the larger
matches, important changes in material fortune among those who regularly
participate in them seem virtually nonexistent, because matters
more or less even out over the long run. It is, actually, in the smaller,
shallow fights, where one finds the handful of more pure, addict-type
gamblers involved-those who are in it mainly for the money-that
"real" changes in social position, largely downward, are affected. Men
of this sort, plungers, are highly dispraised by "true cockfighters" as
fools who do not understand what the sport is all about, vulgarians who
simply miss the point of it all. They are, these addicts, regarded as fair
game for the genuine enthusiasts, those who do understand, to take a
little money away from-something that is easy enough to do by luring
them, through the force of their greed, into irrational bets on mismatched
cocks. Most of them do indeed manage to ruin themselves in a
21 M. Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston, 1 963). There is nothing specifically
Balinese, of course, about deepening significance with money, as Whyte's
description of comer boys in a working-class district of Boston demonstrates:
"Gambling plays an important role in the lives of Comerville people. Whatever
game the corner boys play, they nearly always bet on the outcome. When there is
nothing at stake, the game is not considered a real contest. This does not mean
that the financial element is all-important. I have frequently heard men say that
the honor of winning was much more important than the money at stake. The
corner boys consider playing for money the real test of skill and, unless a man
performs well when money is at stake, he is not considered a good competitor."
W. F. Whyte, Street Corner Society, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1955), p. 140.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 435
remarkably short time, but there always seems to be one or two of them
around, pawning their land and selling their clothes in order to bet, at
any particular time.22
This graduated correlation of "status gambling" with deeper fights
and, inversely, "money gambling" with shallower ones is in fact quite
general. Bettors themselves form a sociomoral hierarchy in these terms.
As noted earlier,
·
at most cockfights there are, around the very edges of
the cockfight area, a large number of mindless, sheer-chance-type gambling
games (roulette, dice throw, coin-spin, pea-under-the-shell) operated
by concessionaires. Only women, children, adolescents, and various
other sorts of people who do not (or not yet) fight cocks-the extremely
poor, the socially despised, the personally idiosyncratic-play at these
games, at, of course, penny ante levels. Cockfighting men would be
ashamed to go anywhere near them. Slightly above these people in
standing are those who though they do not themselves fight cocks, bet
on the smaller matches around the edges. Next, there are those who
fight cocks in small, or occasionally medium matches, but have not the
status to join in the large ones, though they may bet from time to time
on the side in those. And finally, there are those, the really substantial
members of the community, the solid citizenry around whom local life
revolves, who fight in the larger fights and bet on them around the side.
The focusing element in these focused gatherings, these men generally
dominate and define the sport as they dominate and define the society.
When a Balinese male talks, in that almost venerative way, about "the
true cockfighter," the bebatoh ("bettor") or djuru kurung ("cage
keeper"), it is this sort of person, not those who bring the mentality of
the pea-and-shell game into the quite different, inappropriate context of
the cockfight, the driven gambler (potet, a word which has the secondary
meaning of thief or reprobate), and the wistful hanger-on, that they
22 The extremes to which this madness is conceived on occasion to go-and
the fact that it is considered madness-is demonstrated by the Bal inese folk tale
I Tuhung Kuning. A gambler becomes so deranged by his passion that, leaving
on a trip, he orders his pregnant wife to take care of the prospective newborn if
it is a boy but to feed it as meat to his fighting cocks if it is a girl. The mother
gives birth to a girl, but rather than giving the child to the cocks she gives them
a large rat and conceals the girl with her own mother. When the husband returns,
the cocks, crowing a jingle, inform him of the deception and, furious, he sets out
to kill the child. A goddess descends from heaven and takes the girl up to the
skies with her. The cocks die from the food given them, the owner's sanity is restored,
the goddess brings the girl back to the father, who reunites him with his
wife. The story is given as "Geel Komkommertje" in J. Hooykaas-van Leeuwen
Boomkamp, Sprookjes en Verhalen van Bali (The Hague, 1 956), pp. 1 9-25.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
mean. For such a man, what is really going on in a match is something
rather closer to an affaire d'honneur (though, with the Balinese talent
for practical fantasy, the blood that is spilled is only figuratively human)
than to the stupid, mechanical crank of a slot machine.
What makes Balinese cockfighting deep is thus not money in itself,
but what, the more of it that is involved the more so, money causes to
happen: the migration of the Balinese status hierarchy into the body of
the cockfight. Psychologically an Aesopian representation of the
ideal 1demonic, rather narcissistic, male self, sociologically it is an
equally Aesopian representation of the complex fields of tension set up
by the controlled, muted, ceremonial, but for all that deeply felt, interaction
of those selves in the context of everyday life. The cocks may be
surrogates for their owners' personalities, animal mirrors of psychic
form, but the cockfight is-or more exactly, deliberately is made to be
-a simulation of the social matrix, the involved system of cross-cutting,
overlapping, highly corporate groups-villages, kingroups, irrigation
societies, temple congregations, "castes"-in which its devotees
live.2a And as prestige, the necessity to affirm it, defend it, celebrate
it, justify it, and just plain bask in it (but not, given the strongly ascriptive
character of Balinese stratification, to seek it), is perhaps the central
driving force in the society, so also-ambulant penises, blood sacrifices,
and monetary exchanges aside-is it of the cockfight. This
apparent amusement and seeming sport is, to take another phrase from
Erving Goffman, "a status bloodbath." 24
The easiest way to make this clear, and at least to some degree to
demonstrate it, is to invoke the village whose cockfighting activities I
observed the closest-the one in which the raid occurred and from which
my statistical data are taken.
Like all Balinese villages, this one-Tihingan, in the Klungkung region
of southeast Bali-is intricately organized, a labyrinth of alliances
and oppositions. But, unlike many, two sorts of corporate groups, which
are also status groups, particularly stand out, and we may concentrate
on them, in a part-for-whole way, without undue distortion.
23 For a fuller description of Balinese rural social structure, see C. Geertz,
"Form and Variation in Balinese Village Structure," American Anthropologist 6 1
( 1 959): pp. 94- 1 08; "Tihingan, A Balinese Village," i n R. M. Koentjaraningrat,
Villages in Indonesia (Ithaca, 1 967), pp. 2 1 0-243; and, though it is a bit off the
norm as Balinese villages go, V. E. Korn, De Dorpsrepubliek tnganan Pagringsingan
(Santpoort, Netherlands, 1 933).
24 Goffman, Encounters, p. 78.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 437
First, the village is dominated by four large, patrilineal, partly endogamous
descent groups which are constantly vying with one another and
form the major factions in the village. Sometimes they group two and
two, or rather the two larger ones versus the two smaller ones plus all
the unaffiliated people; sometimes they operate independently. There
are also subfactions within them, subfactions within the subfactions, and
so on to rather fine levels of distinction. And second, there is the village
itself, almost entirely endogamous, which is opposed to all the other villages
round about in its cockfight circuit (which, as explained, is the
market region), but which also forms alliances with certain of these
neighbors against certain others in various supravillage political and social
contexts. The exact situation is thus, as everywhere in Bali, quite
distinctive; but the general pattern of a tiered hierarchy of status rivalries
between highly corporate but various based groupings (and, thus,
between the members of them) is entirely general.
Consider, then, as support of the general thesis that the cockfight, and
especially the deep cockfight, is fundamentally a dramatization of status
concerns, the following facts, which to avoid extended ethnographic description
I shall simply pronounce to be facts-though the concrete evidence,
examples, statements, and numbers that could be brought to bear
in support of them, is both extensive and unmistakable:
1 . A man virtually never bets against a cock owned by a member of
his own kingroup. Usually he will feel obliged to bet for it, the more so
the closer the kin tie and the deeper the fight. If he is certain in his
mind that it will not win, he may just not bet at all, particularly if it is
only a second cousin's bird or if the fight is a shallow one. But as a rule
he will feel he must support it and, in deep games, nearly always does.
Thus the great majority of the people calling "five" or "speckled" so
demonstratively are expressing their allegiance to their kinsman, not
their evaluation of his bird, their understanding of probability theory,
or even their hopes of unearned income.
2. This principle is extended logically. If your kingroup is not involved
you will support an allied kingroup against an unallied one in
the same way, and so on through the very involved networks of alliances
which, as I say, make up this, as any other, Balinese village.
3 . So, too, for the village as a whole. If an outsider cock is fighting
any cock from your village, you will tend to support the local one. If,
what is a rarer circumstance but occurs every now and then, a cock
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
from outside your cockfight circuit is fighting one inside it, you will also
tend to support the "home bird."
4. Cocks which come from any distance are almost always favorites,
for the theory is the man would not have dared to bring it if it was not
a good cock, the more so the further he has come. His followers are, of
course, obliged to support him, and when the more grand-scale legal
cockfights are held (on holidays, and so on) the people of the village
take what they regard to be the best cocks in the village, regardless of
ownership, and go off to support them, although they will almost certainly
have to give odds on them and to make large bets to show that
they are not a cheapskate village. Actually, such "away games," though
infrequent, tend to mend the ruptures between village members that the
constantly occurring "home games," where village factions are opposed
rather than united, exacerbate.
5. Almost all matches are sociologically relevant. You seldom get
two outsider cocks fighting, or two cocks with no particular group backing,
or with group backing which is mutually unrelated in any clear
way. When you do get them, the game is very shallow, betting very
slow, and the whole thing very dull, with no one save the immediate
principals and an addict gambler or two at all interested.
6. By the same token, you rarely get two cocks from the same group,
even more rarely from the same subfaction, and virtually never from the
same sub-subfaction (which would be in most cases one extended family)
fighting. Similarly, in outside village fights two members of the village
will rarely fight against one another, even though, as bitter rivals,
they would do so with enthusiasm on their home grounds.
7. On the individual level, people involved in an institutionalized
hostility relationship, called puik, in which they do not speak or otherwise
have anything to do with each other (the causes of this formal
breaking of relations are many: wife-capture, inheritance arguments,
political differences) will bet very heavily, sometimes almost maniacally,
against one another in what is a frank and direct attack on the
very masculinity, the ultimate ground of his status, of the opponent.
8. The center bet coalition is, in all but the shallowest games, always
made up by structural allies-no "outside money" is involved. What is
"outside" depends upon the context, of course, but given it, no outside
money is mixed in with the main bet; if the principals cannot raise it, it
is not made. The center bet, again especially in deeper games, is thus
the most direct and open expression of social opposition, which is one
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 439
of the reasons why both it and matchmaking are surrounded by such an
air of unease, furtiveness, embarrassment, and so on.
9. The rule about borrowing money-that you may borrow for a bet
but not in one-stems (and the Balinese are quite conscious of this)
from similar considerations: you are never at the economic mercy of
your enemy that way. Gambling debts, which can get quite large on a
rather short-term basis, are always to friends, never to enemies, structurally
speaking.
I 0. When two cocks are structurally irrelevant or neutral so far as
you are concerned (though, as mentioned, they almost never are to each
other) you do not even ask a relative or a friend whom he is betting on,
because if you know how he is betting and he knows you know, and you
go the other way, it will lead to strain. This rule is explicit and rigid;
fairly elaborate, even rather artificial precautions are taken to avoid
breaking it. At the very least you must pretend not to notice what he is
doing, and he what you are doing.
1 1 . There is a special word for betting against the grain, which is
also the word for "pardon me" (mpura). It is considered a bad thing to
do, though if the center bet is small it is sometimes all right as long as
you do not do it too often. But the larger the bet and the more frequently
you do it, the more the "pardon me" tack will lead to social
disruption.
1 2. In fact, the institutionalized hostility relation, puik, is often formally
initiated (though its causes always lie elsewhere) by such a "pardon
me" bet in a deep fight, putting the symbolic fat in the fire. Similarly,
the end of such a relationship and resumption of normal social
intercourse is often signalized (but, again, not actually brought about)
by one or the other of the enemies supporting the other's bird.
1 3. In sticky, cross-loyalty situations, of which in this extraordinarily
complex social system there are of course many, where a man is caught
between two more or less equally balanced loyalties, he tends to wander
off for a cup of coffee or something to avoid having to bet, a form of
behavior reminiscent of that of American voters in similar situa­
tions.25
1 4. The people involved in the center bet are, especially in deep
fights, virtually always leading members of their group-kinship, village,
or whatever. Further, those who bet on the side (including these
2$ B. R. Berelson, P. F. Lazersfeld, and W. N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of
Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago, 1 954).
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
people) are, as I have already remarked, the more established members
of the village-the solid citizens. Cockfighting is for those who are involved
in the everyday politics of prestige as well, not for youth,
women, subordinates, and so forth.
1 5. So far as money is concerned, the explicitly expressed attitude
toward it is that it is a secondary matter. It is not, as I have said, of no
importance; Balinese are no happier to lose several weeks' income than
anyone else. But they mainly look on the monetary aspects of the cockfight
as self-balancing, a matter of just moving money around, circulating
it among a fairly well-defined group of serious cockfighters. The
really important wins and losses are seen mostly in other terms, and the
general attitude toward wagering is not any hope of cleaning up, of
making a killing (addict gamblers again excepted), but that of the horseplayer's
prayer: "Oh, God, please let me break even." In prestige terms,
however, you do not want to break even, but, in a momentary, punctuate
sort of way, win utterly. The talk (which goes on all the time) is
about fights against such-and-such a cock of So-and-So which your cock
demolished, not on how much you won, a fact people, even for large
bets, rarely remember for any length of time, though they will remember
the day they did in Pan Lob's finest cock for years.
1 6. You must bet on cocks of your own group aside from mere loyalty
considerations, for if you do not people generally will say, "What!
Is he too proud for the likes of us? Does he have to go to Java or Den
Pasar [the capital town 1 to bet, he is such an important man?" Thus
there is a general pressure to bet not only to show that you are important
locally, but that you are not so important that you look down on
everyone else as unfit even to be rivals. Similarly, home team people
must bet against outside cocks or the outsiders will accuse them-a serious
charge-of just collecting entry fees and not really being interested
in cockfighting, as well as again being arrogant and insulting.
1 7 . Finally, the Balinese peasants themselves are quite aware of all
this and can and, at least to an ethnographer, do state most of it in approximately
the same terms as I have. Fighting cocks, almost every Balinese
I have ever discussed the subject with has said, is like playing
with fire only not getting burned. You activate village and kingroup rivalries
and hostilities, but in "play" form, coming dangerously and entrancingly
close to the expression of open and direct interpersonal and
intergroup aggression (something which, again, almost never happens in
the normal course of ordinary life), but not quite, because, after all, it is
"only a cockfight."
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 44 1
More observations of this sort could be advanced, but perhaps the
general point is, if not made, at least well-delineated, and the whole argument
thus far can be usefully summarized in a formal paradigm:
THE MORE A MATCH IS • • •
1 . Between near status equals (and /or personal enemies)
2. Between high status individuals
THE DEEPER THE MATCH.
THE DEEPER THE MATCH • • •
I . The closer the identification of cock and man (or, more properly,
the deeper the match the more the man will advance his
best, most closely-identified-with cock).
2. The finer the cocks involved and the more exactly they will be
matched.
3. The greater the emotion that will be involved and the more the
general absorption in the match.
4. The higher the individual bets center and outside, the shorter
the outside bet odds will tend to be, and the more betting there
will be overall.
5. The less an "economic" and the more a "status" view of gaming
will be involved, and the "solider" the citizens who will be
gaming.26
Inverse arguments hold for the shallower the fight, culminating, in a
reversed-signs sense, in the coin-spinning and dice-throwing amusements.
For deep fights there are no absolute upper limits, though there
are of course practical ones, and there are a great many legendlike tales
of great Duel-in-the-Sun combats between lords and princes in classical
times (for cockfighting has always been as much an elite concern as a
popular one), far deeper than anything anyone, even aristocrats, could
produce today anywhere in Bali.
Indeed, one of the great culture heroes of Bali is a prince, called
after his passion for the sport, "The Cockfighter," who happened to be
away at a very deep cockfight with a neighboring prince when the whole
of his family-father, brothers, wives, sisters-were assassinated by
26 As this is a formal paradigm, it is intended to display the logical, not the
causal, structure of cockfighting. Just which of these considerations leads to
which, in what order, and by what mechanisms, is another matter-one I have
attempted to shed some light on in the general discussion.
442 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE S
commoner usurpers. Thus spared, he returned to dispatch the upstart,
regain the throne, reconstitute the Balinese high tradition, and build its
most powerful, glorious, and prosperous state. Along with everything
else that the Balinese see in fighting cocks-themselves, their social
order, abstract hatred, masculinity, demonic power-they also see the
archetype of status virtue, the arrogant, resolute, honor-mad player with
real fire, the ksatria prince.27
27 In another of Hooykaas-van Leeuwen Boomkamp's folk tales ("De Gast,"
Sprookjes en Verhalen van Bali, pp. 1 72- 1 80). a low caste Sudra, a generous,
pious, and carefree man who is also an accomplished cockfighter, loses, despite
his accomplishment, fight after fight until he is not only out of money but down
to his last cock. He does not despair, however-"1 bet," he says, "upon the Unseen
World."
H is wife, a good and hard-working woman, knowing how much he enjoys
cockfighting, gives him her last "rainy day" money to go and bet. But, filled with
misgivings due to his run of ill luck, he leaves his own cock at home and bets
merely on the side. He soon loses all but a coin or two and repairs to a food
stand for a snack, where he meets a decrepit, odorous, and generally unappetizing
old beggar leaning on a staff. The old man asks for food, and the hero spends his
last coins to buy him some. The old man then asks to pass the night with the
hero, which the hero gladly invites him to do. As there is no food in the house,
however, the hero tells his wife to kill the last cock for dinner. When the old
man discovers this fact, he tells the hero he has three cocks in his own mountain
hut and says the hero may have one of them for fighting. He also asks for the
hero's son to accompany him as a servant, and, after the son agrees, this is done.
The old man turns out to be Siva and, thus, to live in a great palace in the
sky, though the hero does not know this. In time, the hero decides to visit his
son and collect the promised cock. Lifted up into Siva's presence, he is given the
choice of three cocks. The first crows: "I have beaten fifteen opponents." The
second crows, "I have beaten twenty-five opponents." The third crows, "I have beaten
the king." "That one, the third, is my choice," says the hero, and returns with it to
earth.
When he arrives at the cockfight, he is asked for an entry fee and replies, "I
have no money; I will pay after my cock has won." As he is known never to
win, he is let in because the king, who is there fighting, dislikes him and hopes to
enslave him when he loses and cannot pay off. In order to insure that this happens,
the king matches his finest cock against the hero's. When the cocks are placed
down, the hero's ftees, and the crowd, led by the arrogant king, hoots in laughter.
The hero's cock then fties at the king himself, killing him with a spur stab in the
throat. The hero ftees. His house is encircled by the king's men. The cock
changes into a Garuda, the great mythic bird of lndic legend, and carries the
hero and his wife to safety in the heavens.
When the people see this, they make the hero king and his wife queen and
they return as such to earth. Later their son, released by Siva, also returns and
the hero-king announces his intention to enter a hermitage. (" I will fight no more
cockfights. I have bet on the Unseen and won.") He enters the hermitage and his
son becomes king.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 443
Feathers, Blood, Crowds, and Money
"Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden says in his elegy of Yeats, "it
survives in the valley of its saying . . . a way of happening, a mouth."
The cockfight too, in this colloquial sense, makes nothing happen. Men
go on allegorically humiliating one another and being allegorically humiliated
by one another, day after day, glorying quietly in the experience
if they have triumphed, crushed only slightly more openly by it if
they have not. But no one's status really changes. You cannot ascend
the status ladder by winning cockfights; you cannot, as an individual,
really ascend it at all. Nor can you descend it that way.2s All you can
do is enjoy and savor, or suffer and withstand, the concocted sensation
of drastic and momentary movement along an aesthetic semblance of
that ladder, . a kind of behind-the-mirror status jump which has the look
of mobility without its actuality.
Like any art form-for that, finally, is what we are dealing withthe
cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by
presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical
consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to
the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully
articulated and more exactly perceived. The cockfight is "really
real" only to the cocks-it does not kill anyone, castrate anyone, reduce
anyone to animal status, alter the hierarchical relations among people,
or refashion the hierarchy; it does not even redistribute income in any
significant way. What it does is what, for other peoples with other temperaments
and other conventions, Lear and Crime and Punishment do;
it catches up these themes--death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence,
chance-and, ordering them into an encompassing structure,
presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of
their essential nature. It puts a construction on them, makes them, to
28 Addict gamblers are really less declassed (for their status is, as everyone
else's, inherited) than merely impoverished and personally d isgraced. The most
prominent addict gambler in my cockfight circuit was actually a very high caste
satria who sold off most of his considerable lands to support his habit. Though
everyone privately regarded him as a fool and worse (some, more charitable, regarded
him as sick), he was publicly treated with the elaborate deference and politeness
due his rank. On the independence of personal reputation and public sta·
tus in Bali, see above, Chapter 14.
444 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
those historically positioned to appreciate the construction, meaningful
-visible, tangible, graspable-"real," in an ideational sense. An
image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of expression;
its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten
them (though, in its playing-with-fire way it does a bit of both), but, in
a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them.
The question of how it is that we perceive qualities in thingspaintings,
books, melodies, plays-that we do not feel we can assert literally
to be there has come, in recent years, into the very center of aesthetic
theory.29 Neither the sentiments of the artist, which remain his,
nor those of the audience, which remain theirs, can account for the agitation
of one painting or the serenity of another. We attribute grandeur,
wit, despair, exuberance to strings of sounds; lightness, energy, violence,
fluidity to blocks of stone. Novels are said to have strength,
buildings eloquence, plays momentum, ballets repose. In this realm of
eccentric predicates, to say that the cockfight, in its perfected cases at
least, is "disquietful" does not seem at all unnatural, merely, as I have
just denied it practical consequence, somewhat puzzling.
The disquietfulness arises, "somehow," out of a conjunction of three
attributes of the fight: its immediate dramatic shape; its metaphoric content;
and its social context. A cultural figure against a social ground, the
fight is at once a convulsive surge of animal hatred, a mock war of symbolical
selves, and a formal simulation of status tensions, and its aesthetic
power derives from its capacity to force together these diverse
realities. The reason it is disquietful is not that it has material effects (it
has some, but they are minor) ; the reason that it is disquietful is that,
joining pride to selfhood, selfhood to cocks, and cocks to destruction, it
brings to imaginative realization a dimension of Balinese experience
normally well-obscured from view. The transfer of a sense of gravity
into what is in itself a rather blank and unvarious spectacle, a commotion
of beating wings and throbbing legs, is effected by interpreting it as
expressive of something unsettling in the way its authors and audience
live, or, even more ominously, what they are.
As a dramatic shape, the fight displays a characteristic that does not
seem so remarkable until one realizes that it does not have to be there:
29 For four, somewhat variant, treatments, see S. Langer, Feeling and Form
(New York, 1 953); R. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York, 1968);
N. Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1 968); M. Merleau-Ponty, "The Eye
and the M ind," in his The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill., 1964), pp.
1 59- 1 90.
Notes on the Baline� Cockfight 445
a radically atomistical structure.ao Each match is a world unto itself, a
particulate burst of form. There is the matchmaking, there is the betting,
there is the fight, there is the result-utter triumph and utter
defeat-and there is the hurried, embarrassed passing of money. The
loser is not consoled. People drift away from him, look around him,
leave him to assimilate his momentary descent into nonbeing, reset his
face, and return, scarless and intact, to the fray. Nor are winners congratulated,
or events rehashed; once a match is ended the crowd's attention
turns totally to the next, with no looking back. A shadow of the experience
no doubt remains with the principals, perhaps even with some
of the witnesses of a deep fight, as it remains with us when we leave
the theater after seeing a powerful play well-performed; but it quite
soon fades to become at most a schematic memory-a diffuse glow or
an abstract shudder-and usually not even that. Any expressive form
lives only in its own present-the one it itself creates. But, here, that
present is severed into a string of flashes, some more bright than others,
but all of them disconnected, aesthetic quanta. Whatever the cockfight
says, it says in spurts.
But, as I have argued lengthily elsewhere, the Balinese live in
spurts.a1 Their life, as they arrange it and perceive it, is less a ftow, a
directional movement out of the past, through the present, toward the
future than an on-off pulsation of meaning and vacuity, an arhythmic
alternation of short periods when "something" (that is, something significant)
is happening, and equally short ones where "nothing" (that is,
nothing much) is-between what they themselves call "full" and
"empty" times, or, in another idiom, "junctures" and "holes." In focusing
activity down to a burning-glass dot, the cockfight is merely being
Balinese in the same way in which everything from the monadic en-
3o British cockfights (the sport was banned there in 1 840) indeed seem to have
lacked it, and to have generated, therefore, a quite different family of shapes.
Most British fights were "mains," in which a preagreed number of cocks were
aligned into two teams and fought serially. Score was kept and wagering took
place both on the individual matches and on the main as a whole. There were
also "battle Royales," both in England and on the Continent, in which a large
number of cocks were let loose at once with the one left standing at the end the
victor. And in Wales, the so-called Welsh main followed an elimination pattern,
along the lines of a present-day tennis tournament, winners proceeding to the next
round. As a genre, the cock fight has perhaps less compositional flexibility than,
say, Latin comedy, but it is not entirely without any. On cockfighting more generally,
see A. Ruport, The Art of Cockfighting (New York, 1 949); G. R. Scott,
History of Cockfighting (London, 1 957); and L. Fitz-Barnard, Fighting Sports
(London, 1 92 1 ).
31 Above, pp. 3 9 1 -398.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
counters of everyday life, through the clanging pointillism of game/an
music, to the visiting-day-of-the-gods temple celebrations are. It is not
an imitation of the punctuateness of Balinese social life, nor a depiction
of it, nor even an expression of it; it is an example of it, carefully pre­
pared.32
If one dimension of the cockfight's structure, its lack of temporal
directionality, makes it seem a typical segment of the general social life,
however, the other, its flat-out, head-to-head (or spur-to-spur) aggressiveness,
makes it seem a contradiction, a reversal, even a subversion of
it. In the normal course of things, the Balinese are shy to the point of
obsessiveness of open conflict. Oblique, cautious, ·subdued, controlled,
masters of indirection and dissimulation-what they call a/us, "polished,"
"smooth"-they rarely face what they can turn away from,
rarely resist what they can evade. But here they portray themselves as
wild and murderous, with manic explosions of instinctual cruelty. A
powerful rendering of life as the Balinese most deeply do not want it (to
adapt a phrase Frye has used of Gloucester's blinding) is set in the context
of a sample of it as they do in fact have jt,aa And, because the context
suggests that the rendering, if less than a straightforward description,
is nonetheless more than an idle fancy; it is here that the
disquietfulness-the disquietfulness of the fight, not (or, anyway, not
necessarily) its patrons, who seem in fact rather thoroughly to enjoy it
-emerges. The slaughter in the cock ring is not a depiction of how
things literally are among men, but, what is almost worse, of how, from
a particular angle, they imaginatively are.34
32 For the necessity of distinguishing among "description," "representation,"
"exemplification," and "expression" (and the irrelevance of "imitation" to all of
them) as modes of symbolic reference, see Goodman, lAnguages of Art, pp.
6 1 - 1 10, 45-9 1 , 225-24 1 .
3 3 N. Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington, Ind.. 1 964), p. 99.
34 There are two other Balinese values and disvalues which, connected with
punctuate temporal ity on the one hand and unbridled aggressiveness on the
other, reinforce the sense that the cockfight is at once continuous with ord inary
social life and a direct negation of it: what the Balinese call rame, and what
they call paling. Rame means crowded, noisy, and active, and is a highly sought-after
social state: crowded markets, mass festivals, busy streets are all rame, as, of course,
is, in the extreme, a cockfight. Rame is what happens in the "full" times (its opposite,
sepi, "quiet," is what happens in the "empty" ones). Paling is social vertigo, the dizzy,
disoriented, lost, turned-around feeling one gets when one's place in the coordinates
of social space is not clear, and it is a tremendously disfavored, immensely anxietyproducing
state. Balinese regard the exact maintenance of spatial orientation ("not
to know where north is" is to be crazy), balance, decorum, status relationships, and
so forth, as fundamental to ordered life (krama) and paling, the sort of whirling con-
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 447
The angle, of course, is stratificatory. What, as we have already seen,
the cockfight talks most forcibly about is status relationships, and what
it says about them is that they are matters of life and death. That prestige
is a profoundly serious business is apparent everywhere one looks
in Bali-in the village, the family, the economy, the state. A peculiar
fusion of Polynesian title ranks and Hindu castes, the hierarchy of pride
is the moral backbone of the society. But only in the cockfight are the
sentiments upon which that hierarchy rests revealed in their natural
colors. Enveloped elsewhere in a haze of etiquette, a thick cloud of euphemism
and ceremony, gesture and allusion, they are here expressed in
only the thinnest disguise of an animal mask, a mask which in fact demonstrates
them far more effectively than it conceals them. Jealousy is as
much a part of Bali as poise, envy as grace, brutality as charm; but
without the cockfight the Balinese would have a much less certain understanding
of them, which is, presumably, why they value it so highly.
Any expressive form works (when it works) by disarranging semantic
contexts in such a way that properties conventionally ascribed to certain
things are unconventionally ascribed to others, which are then seen actually
to possess them. To call the wind a cripple, as Stevens does, to fix
tone and manipulate timbre, as Schoenberg does, or, closer to our case,
to picture an art critic as a dissolute bear, as Hogarth does, is to cross
conceptual wires; the established conjunctions between objects and their
qualities are altered, and phenomena-fall weather, melodic shape, or
cultural journalism-are clothed in signifiers which normally point to
other referents.35 Similarly, to connect-and connect, and connect-the
collision of roosters with the divisiveness of status is to invite a transfer
fusion of position the scrambling cocks exemplify as its profoundest enemy and contradiction.
On rame, see Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character, pp. 3 , 64; on paling,
ibid., p. I I, and Belo, ed., Traditional Balinese Culture, p. 90 ff.
35 The Stevens reference is to his "The Motive for Metaphor" ("You like it
under the trees in autumn, / Because everything is half dead./The wind moves
like a cripple among the leaves / And repeats words without meaning") [Copyright
1 947 by Wallace Stevens, reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.] ; the Schoenberg
reference is to the third of his Five Orchestral Pieces (Opus 1 6), and is borrowed
from H. H. Drager, "The Concept of 'Tonal Body,' " in Reflections on Art, ed.
S. Langer (New York, 1 96 1 ), p. 174. On Hogarth, and on this whole problem-there
called "multiple matrix matching"-see E. H. Gombrich, ''The Use of Art for the
Study of Symbols," in Psychology and the Visual Arts, ed. J. Hogg (Baltimore, 1 969),
pp. 1 49- 1 70. The more usual term for this sort ofsemantic alchemy is "metaphorical
transfer," and good technical discussions of it can be found in M . Black, Models and
Metaphors (Ithaca, N .Y., 1962), p. 25 ff; Goodman, Language as Art, p. 44 ff; and
W. Percy, "Metaphor as Mistake,'' Sewanee Review 66 ( 1 958): 78-99.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
of perceptions from the former to the latter, a transfer which is at once
a description and a judgment. (Logically, the transfer could, of course,
as well go the other way; but, like niost of the rest of us, the Balinese
are a great deal more interested in understanding men than they are in
understanding cocks.)
What sets the cockfight apart from the ordinary course of life, lifts it
from the realm of everyday practical affairs, and surrounds it with an
aura of enlarged importance is not, as functionalist sociology would
have it, that it reinforces status discriminations (such reinforcement is
hardly necessary in a society where every act proclaims them), but that
it provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting
human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the
major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function,
if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese
experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves.
Saying Something of Something
To put the matter this way is to engage in a bit of metaphorical refocusing
of one's own, for it shifts the analysis of cultural forms from an endeavor
in general parallel to dissecting an organism, diagnosing a
symptom, deciphering a code, or ordering a system-the dominant
analogies in contemporary anthropology-to one in general parallel
with penetrating a literary text. If one takes the cockfight, or any other
collectively sustained symbolic structure, as a means of "saying something
of something" (to invoke a famous Aristotelian tag), then one is
faced with a problem not in social mechanics but social semantics.36 For
the anthropologist, whose concern is with formulating sociological principles,
not with promoting or appreciating cockfights, the question is,
what does one learn about such principles from examining culture as an
assemblage of texts?
Such an extension of the notion of a text beyond written material,
36 The tag is from the second book of the Organon, On Interpretation. For a
d iscussion of it, and for the whole argument for freeing "the notion of text . . .
from the notion of scripture or writing" and constructing, thus, !l general hermeneutics,
see P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven, 1 970), p. 20 ff.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 449
and even beyond verbal, is, though metaphorical, not, of course, all that
novel. The interpretatio naturae tradition of the middle ages, which,
culminating in Spinoza, attempted to read nature as Scripture, the
Nietszchean effort to treat value systems as glosses on the will to power
(or the Marxian one to treat them as glosses on property relations), and
the Freudian replacement of the enigmatic text of the manifest dream
with the plain one of the latent, all offer precedents, if not equally recommendable
ones.a; But the idea remains theoretically undeveloped;
and the more profound corollary, so far as anthropology is concerned,
that cultural forms can be treated as texts, as imaginative works built
out of social materials, has yet to be systematically exploited.as
In the case at hand, to treat the cockfight as a text is to bring out a
feature of it (in my opinion, the central feature of it) that treating it as a
rite or a pastime, the two most obvious alternatives, would tend to obscure:
its use of emotion for cognitive ends. What the cockfight says it
says in a vocabulary of sentiment-the thrill of risk, the despair of loss,
the pleasure of triumph. Yet what it says is not merely that risk is exciting,
loss depressing, or triumph gratifying, banal tautologies of affect,
but that it is of these emotions, thus exampled, that society is built and
individuals are put together. Attending cockfights and participating in
them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education. What he
learns there is what his culture's ethos and his private sensibility (or,
anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally
in a collective text; that the two are near enough alike to be articulated
in the symbolics of a single such text; and-the disquieting part-that
the text in which this revelation is accomplished consists of a chicken
hacking another mindlessly to bits.
Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence. The
cockfight is the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its
force, its fascination. Drawing on almost every level of Balinese experience,
it brings together themes-animal savagery, male narcissism, opponent
gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrifice-
37 Ibid.
38 Levi-Strauss' "structuralism" might seem an exception. But it is only an
apparent one, for, rather than taking myths, totem rites, marriage rules, or whatever
as texts to interpret, Levi-Strauss takes them as ciphers to solve, which is
very much not the same thing. He does not seek to understand symbolic forms in
terms of how they function in concrete situations to organize perceptions (meanings,
emotions, concepts, attitudes); he seeks to understand them entirely in terms
of their internal structure, independent de tout sujet, de tout objet, et de toute
colltexte. See above, Chapter 1 3 .
450 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
whose main connection is their involvement with rage and the fear of
rage, and, binding them into a set of rules which at once contains them
and allows them play, builds a symbolic structure in which, over and
over again, the reality of their inner affiliation can be intelligibly felt.
If, to quote Northrop Frye again, we go to see Macbeth to learn what a
man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese
go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost
obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like when, attacked,
tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes
of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.
The whole passage, as it takes us back to Aristotle (though to the Poetics
rather than the Hermeneutics), is worth quotation:
But the poet [as opposed to the historian] , Aristotle says, never makes any
real statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones. The poet's job
is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take
place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the
typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event. You wouldn't go
to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland-you go to it to learn
what a man feels like after he's gained a kingdom and lost his soul. When
you meet such a character as Micawber in Dickens, you don't feel that there
must have been a man Dickens knew who was exactly like this: you feel
that there's a bit of Micawber in almost everybody you know, including
yourself. Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain
for most of us loose and disorganized. But we constantly find things in
literature that suddenly coordinate and bring into focus a great many such
impressions, and this is part of what Aristotle means by the typical or universal
human event.39
It is this kind of bringing of assorted experiences of everyday life to
focus that the cockfight, set aside from that life as "only a game" and
reconnected to it as "more than a game," accomplishes, and so creates
what, better than typical or universal, could be called a paradigmatic
human event-that is, one that tells us less what happens than the kind
of thing that would happen if, as is not the case, life were art and could
be as freely shaped by styles of feeling as Macbeth and David Copperfield
are.
Enacted and re-enacted, so far without end, the cockfight enables the
Balinese, as, read and reread, Macbeth enables us, to see a dimension
of his own subjectivity. As he watches fight after fight, with the active
watching of an owner and a bettor (for cockfighting has no more inter-
39 Frye, The Educated Imagination, pp. 63-64.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 45 1
est as a pure spectator sport than does croquet or dog racing), he grows
familiar with it and what it has to say to him, much as the attentive listener
to string quartets or the absorbed viewer of still life grows slowly
more familiar with them in a way which opens his subjectivity to him­
self.�0
Yet, because-in another of those paradoxes, along with painted
feelings and unconsequenced acts, which haunt aesthetics-that subjectivity
does not properly exist until it is thus organized, art forms generate
and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display.
Quartets, still lifes, and cockfights are not merely reflections of a pre-existing
sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the
creation and maintenance of such a sensibility. If we see ourselves as a
pack of Micawbers, it is from reading too much Dickens (if we see ourselves
as unillusioned realists, it is from reading too little); and similarly
for Balinese, cocks, and cockfights. It is in such a way, coloring
experience with the light they cast it in, rather than through whatever
material effects they may have, that the arts play their role, as arts, in
social life.41
In the cockfight, then, the Balinese forms and discovers his temperament
and his society's temper at the same time. Or, more exactly, he
forms and discovers a particular facet of them. Not only are there a
great many other cultural texts providing commentaries on status hier-
4o The use of the, to Europeans, "natural" visual idiom for perception-"see,"
"watches," and so forth-is more than usually misleading here, for the fact that,
as mentioned earlier, Balinese follow the progress of the fight as much (perhaps,
as fighting cocks are actually rather hard to sec except as blurs of motion, more)
w ith their bodies as with their eyes, moving their limbs, heads, and trunks in gestural
mimicry of the cocks' maneuvers, means that much of the individual's experience
of the fight is kinesthetic rather than visual. If ever there was an example
of Kenneth Burke's definition of a symbol ic act as "the dancing of an attitude"
[ The Philosophy of Literary Form, rev. ed. (New York, 1 957), p. 9] the cockfight
is it. On the enormous role of kinesthetic percept ion in Balinese l ife. Bateson
and Mead, Balinese Character, pp. 84-88; on the active nature of aesthetic perception
in general, Goodman. Language of Art, pp. 24 1 -244.
4 1 All this coupling of the occidental great with the oriental lowly will doubtless
disturb certain sorts of aestheticians as the earlier efforts of anthropologists
to speak of Christianity and totemism in the same breath d isturbed certain sorts
of theologians. But as ontological questions are (or should be) bracketed in the
sociology of religion, judgmental ones are (or should be) bracketed in the sociology
of art. In any case, the attempt to deprovincial ize the concept of art is but
part of the general anthropological conspiracy to deprovincialize all important social
concepts-marriage, religion, law, rationality-and though this is a threat to
aesthetic theories which regard certain works of art as beyond the reach of sociological
analysis, it is no threat to the conviction, for which Robert Graves claims
to have been reprimanded at his Cambridge tripos, that some poems are better
than others.
452 TH E INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
archy and self-regard in Bali, but there are a great many other critical
sectors of Balinese life besides the stratificatory and the agonistic that
receive such commentary. The ceremony consecrating a Brahmana
priest, a matter of breath control, postural immobility, and vacant concentration
upon the depths of being, displays a radically different, but
to the Balinese equally real, property of social hierarchy-its reach toward
the numinous transcendent. Set not in the matrix of the kinetic
t;motionality of animals, but in that of the static passionlessness of divine
mentality, it expresses tranquillity not disquiet. The mass festivals
at the village temples, which mobilize the whole local population in
elaborate hostings of visiting gods-songs, dances, compliments, gifts
-assert the spiritual unity of village mates against their status inequality
and project a mood of amity and trust.42 The cockfight is not the
master key to Balinese life, any more than bullfighting is to Spanish.
What it says about that life is not unqualified nor even unchallenged by
what other equally eloquent cultural statements say about it. But there
is nothing more surprising in this than in the fact that Racine and Moli�re
were contemporaries, or that the same people who arrange chrysanthemums
cast swords.4:1
The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles,
which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of
those to whom they properly belong. There are enormous difficulties in
such an enterprise, methodological pitfalls to make a Freudian quake,
42 For the consecration ceremony, see V. E. Korn, "The Consecration of the
Priest," in Swellengrebel, ed., Bali: Studies, pp. 1 3 1 -1 54; for (somewhat exaggerated)
village communion, R. Goris, "The Rel igious Character of the Balinese Village,"
ibid., pp. 79- 1 00.
43 That what the cockfight has to say about Bali is not altogether without perception
and the disquiet it expresses about the general pattern of Balinese life is
not wholly without reason is attested by the fact that in two weeks of December
1 965, during the upheavals following the unsuccessful coup in Djakarta, between
forty and eighty thousand Balinese (in a population of about two million) were
killed, largely by one another-the worst outburst in the country. [J. Hughes, Indonesian
Upheaval (New York, 1 967), pp. 173- 1 83. Hughes' figures are, of
course, rather casual estimates, but they are not the most extreme. ] This is not to
say, of course, that the killings were caused by the cockfight, could have been
predicted on the basis of it, or were some sort of enlarged version of it with real
people in the place of the cocks-all of which is nonsense. It is merely to say
that if one looks at Bali not just through the med ium of its dances, its shadowplays,
its sculpture, and its girls, but-as the Balinese themselves do-also
through the medium of its cockfight, the fact that the massacre occurred seems, if
no less appalling, less like a contradiction to the laws of nature. As more than
one real Gloucester has discovered, sometimes people actually get life precisely as
they most deeply do not want it.
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight 453
and some moral perplexities as well. Nor is it the only way that symbolic
forms can be sociologically handled. Functionalism lives, and so
does psychologism. But to regard such forms as "saying something of
something," and saying it to somebody, is at least to open up the possibility
of an analysis which attends to their substance rather than to reductive
formulas professing to account for them.
As in more familiar exercises in close reading, one can start anywhere
in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else. One
can stay, as I have here, within a single, more or less bounded form,
and circle steadily within it. One can move between forms in search of
broader unities or informing contrasts. One can even compare forms
from different cultures to define their character in reciprocal relief. But
whatever the level at which one operates, and however intricately, the
guiding principle is the same: societies, l ike lives, contain their own interpretations.
One has only to learn how to gain access to them.
Acknowledgments
"The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," in
New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. J. Platt (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1 966), pp. 93- 1 1 8. Reprinted by permission
of The University of Chicago Press and © 1 966 by The University
of Chicago.
"The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind."' Reprinted with
permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., from Theories of
the Mind, edited by J. Scher, pp. 7 1 3-740. Copyright © The Free
Press of Glencoe, a Division of The Macmillan Company, 1 962.
"Religion as a Cultural System," in Anthropological Approaches to the
Study of Religion, ed. M. Banton (London: Tavistock Publications
Ltd, 1 966), pp. 1 -46. Reprinted by permission.
"Ethos, World View and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols." Copyright
© 1 957 by The Antioch Review, Inc. First published in The Antioch
Review, Vol. 1 7, No. 4 ; reprinted by permission of the edi­
tors.
"Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example," in American Anthropologist
6 1 ( 1 959): 99 1 -1 0 1 2. Reprinted by permission.
" 'Internal Conversion' in Contemporary Bali," in Malayan and Indonesian
Studies presented to Sir Richard Winstedt, eds. J. Bastin
and R. Roolvink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 964), pp.
282-302. Reprinted by permission of The Clarendon Press, Oxford,
England.
"Ideology as a Cultural System." Reprinted with permission of Macmillan
Publishing Co., Inc., from Ideology and Discontent, edited
by D. Apter, pp. 47-56. Copyright © 1 964 by The Free Press of
Glencoe, a Division of The Macmillan Company.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
"After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States"
from Stability and Social Change, edited by Bernard Barber and
Alex lnkeles, pp. 357-376. Copyright © 1 97 1 by Little, Brown
and Company (Inc.). Reprinted by permission.
"The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics
in the New States." Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing
Co., Inc., from Old Societies and New States, edited by
Clifford Geertz, pp. 1 05 - 1 57. Copyright © The Free Press of
Glencoe, a Division of The Macmillan Company, 1 963.
"The Politics of Meaning," Reprinted from Culture and Politics in Indonesia,
edited by Claire Holt with the assistance of Benedict R.
O'G. Anderson and James Siegel. Copyright © 1 972 by Cornell
University. Used by permission of Cornell University Press.
"Politics Past, Politics Present: Some Notes on the Contribution of
Anthropology to the Study of the New States." Reprinted by permission
from the European Journal of Sociology, VIII ( 1 967):
1 - 1 4.
"The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Levi-Strauss," in Encounter,
Vol. 28, No. 4 (April 1 967): 25-32. Reprinted by
permission.
Person, Time and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural A nalysis.
Yale Southeast Asia Program, Cuitural Report Series, # 1 4, 1 966.
Reprinted by permission.
"Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in Daedalus 1 0 1 ( 1 972):
1 -37. Reprinted by permission.
Poetry reprinted from "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," Collected Shorter
Poems 1927-1957, by W. H. Auden. Copyright 1 940 and renewed
1 968 by W. H. Auden. By permission of Random House,
Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Quotes from Levi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques, John Russell
translation, New York, 1 964, used by permission of George Borchardt
Literary Agents and Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd.
Index
Abako movement, 264
Abduh, 299
Abdullah, Taufik, 273, 3 1 1 , 3 1 2, 3 1 9,
320, 325
aborigines: Australia, 64, 1 25, 1 32, 347
Achilles puzzle, 1 94
Action Fran�ise, 1 97
Adams, R. M. • 330n
Africa, 220, 234, 257, 262, 265, 267;
language issues, 24 1 ; religions, 1 70-
1 7 1
agriculture: hydraulic, 329
Ahardane, M., 30 1
AI-Mghani, 299
Alawite monarchy, 246-247, 248
algebra: matrix, 359
Algeria, 234, 237, 243, 340
alienation, 5
Allport, Gordon W., 56, 51
Almond, G., 27 l n, 279n
Alorese, 1 25
al- Youssi, Lahcen, 300n
Ambedkar, B. R., 256n, 260n, 277,
279n, 292
Ambonese, 263
America-is-Jonesville, 2 1 -22
American Business Creed (Sutton), 1 93
American optimism, 53
Amhara, 263
Amharic language, 242
Anak Agung Gde Aguna, 4 1 0n
ancestor worship, 88, 1 22, 1 25, 355n
Andaman, cicada, 101
Anderson, Benedict, 3 1 1 , 3 1 2, 320, 322,
325
Andhra, 256, 290, 29 1
aneh, 101
Angkor, 330
Angola, 264
animal sacrifice, 125
animalism, 1 22
animism, 1 22
Annam, 262
anomie, 163, 1 64
anthropology, 352, 358; comparative
political science of peasant societies,
337; consensual man, 5 1 ; culture and
social structure, 143- 145; explanation,
27; functionalism and historical
materials, 144; functionalism and social
change problem, 142- 1 44, 1 69;
government in peasant societies,
330-3 3 1 ; idealist-materialist, 1 0; impressionist-positivist,
I0; linguistics,
354-355; logicomeaningful vs. causalfunctional
integration, 1 64, 1 69; mentalist-behaviorist,
1 0; motivational
integration, 145; reductionism, I I,
36 1 ; savages, 348-3 5 1, 352-353,
358-359; segmentary states, 338-
34 1 ; study of religion, 87-89, 125;
totemism, 1 22, 353-3 54, 355, 45 In;
typological approach, 5 1 -52; value
analysis, 1 4 1
anthropomorphism, 57
anti-Semitism, 206
Apache, 1 25
aphasia, 17
Apter, D., 273n, 299n
'ar, 8, 1 3, 1 8
Arabic language, 25 1 , 242
Arabs, 297-299; Atlantic Plain, 267;
Morocco, 263
Arapesh: enumeration, 60, 6 1
archaeology: developmental cycles of
prehistoric states, 330
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Aristotle, 1 4 1 , 4SO
Armenian Catholics, 293
Armenian Orthodox, 293
Aron, Raymond, 199, 200n
art, 82, 88; as significant symbol, 48
Ashanti, 239, 264, 267, 269, 273, 330,
339
Ashby, W. R., 401n
Ashford, D., 279n, JO i n
Asia, 220; religions, 1 70- 1 7 1
Assam, 289, 29 1 , 293
atheism: heroic, 100
Atlas mountains, 298
Adas tribe, 267
attitude: vs. perspective, I IOn
Auden, W. H., 143, 443
Auerbach, 8., 208
Australia: aborigines, 64, 12S, 1 32,
347; bull-roarers, 3S4; marriage
rules, 43
Australopithecines, 47, 48, 63-64, 67,
74; cranial capacity, 63-64
authority: religious, 1 10, 1 1 8
autism, 6 1 n
Awolowo, Obafemi, 303, 304, 30S
Ayoub, V., 279n, 29S
Azande, 1 00; granary collapse, 123,
1 24; witchcraft, 1 3 1
Azerin Turks, 2S7
Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 23S, 303, 304-30S
Aztecs: human sacrifice, 40, 43, 1 22,
1 32
Bacon, Franc�, 34, 40
Baganda, 263, 264, 267
Bagehot, W., 229
Baghavad Gita, I06
Bahai, 1 8 1
Da-Da, 103, 104
Balewa, Alh�i Sir Abubakar Tafawa,
30S
Balinese, 263, 360, 3 6 1 , 400; absence
of climax, 403-404; ceremonialization
of social relations, 398-400, 406;
cocks and cockfighting, 4 12-4S3;
cosmology, 421n; courtesy, 400; cremations,
1 86, 33S; cultural chanaes,
409-4 1 1 ; cultural foundations, 33 1 -
33S; definition of madman. SO; d�persion
of power, 33S-336; dramaturgical
statecraft, 3 3 1 , 334-33S, 337,
341; and the Dutch, 33 1, 336, 337;
elite, 1 86, 1 87; exemplary center,
33 1, 332-333, 334, 337, 341 ; gamblina
on cockfights, 4 1 S-432; holidays,
394, 398, 420, 438; irrigation,
33S; legitimation, 332; lek, 40 1-402;
local market system, 432n; lunarsolar
calendar, 392, 396-398; Njepi,
398, 420; odalan, 39S, 396; permutational
calendar, 391 -394, 39S-396,
406; radical aesthetic�m. 400; sakti,
l i S; sexual differentiation, 4 1 7n;
shame vs. guilt, 400-402; sinking
status, 33 1 , 333-334, 34 1 ; social
structure, 3 3 1 , 335-337; stage fright,
402-403; time awareness, 389-39 1 ,
404, 406, 409, 4 1 0
Balinese person-definitions, 36S, 368,
389, 390n; birth-order names, 368,
370-372; kinship terms, 372-375,
386, 406; personal names, 368-370;
public titles, 368, 38S-389, 406; sex
markers, 38Sn; status titles, 368, 380-
384, 386, 387; teknonyms, 368, 37 1 ,
375-379, 406; Varna system, 382-
384, 386, 387; see also person-cate­
gories
Balinese religion, 17S-176; aristocracy,
1 86; Bali-ism, 1 86, 1 87, 1 88, 1 89n;
Brahmana caste priests, 178- 1 80,
184, 1 88; bureaucratization, 1 89;
conversion to other beliefs, 1 8 1 -
1 82; cult of death and witches, 176,
1 80- 1 8 1 ; Hinduism, 1 86, 1 88; holy
water, 1 77, 179, 183, 1 84; internal
conversion, 1 82- 1 8S ; local Ministry
of Reliaion, 1 88- 1 89; ordination,
of priests, 1 88; political and ritual
system, 1 79; publishing programs,
1 8S- 1 86; Rangda-Barong ritual combat,
1 14- 1 1 8, 1 19, 122, 1 80- 1 8 1,
1 83, 403; Republican Ministry of Rel
igion, 1 87-1 88, 1 89n; sanctification
of social inequality, 176, 1 77-1 80;
temple system, 176- 1 77, 1 88- 1 89,
39S; tooth filing, 1 84, 1 86, 336;
trance, 36, 43, l i S, 1 1 6, 1 1 7, 176,
1 77
Baluchis, 262
Bandaranaike, S. W. R. D., 23S, 27 1 , 272
Bandung Conference, 236
Banaladesh, 263, 26S, 292, 293
Bantu: bride-price system, 43
Baraka, 263, 288
Barbour, N., 21Sn, 219n
Batak, 262
Bateson, 0., 102n, 1 14n, 1 1 8n, 180n,
3 34, 379, 401 n, 403n, 4 1 3, 4 1 7, 420n
Beach, F. A., 1Sn, 16n
Becquerel, A. H., 44
bees: dance, 94
Index
behavior: and brain size, 73-76, 83
behaviorism, 208
Belgium, 260n
belief: religious, 109, 1 19- 1 2 1 , 127, 143
Bell, C., l iOn
Bellah, Robert, 173n, 1 74n
Bello, Alh!Ui Sir Ahmadu, 303, 305
Belo, Jane, 1 14n, 1 16, 377n, 379n,
403n, 4 1 7, 420n
Belsen, 109
Ben Barka. Mehdi, 249
Ben Bella. A., 235
Benda, H., 320n
Bendix, R., 1 7 1 n, 1 73n, 1 15n
Benedict, Ruth, 44
Bengal, 263, 265, 289, 29 1, 293, 304n
Bentham, J., 422, 433, 434, 446n, 45 1 n
Berbers, 263, 265, 267, 273, 275, 297-
299, 301, 302; anarchism, 53; in
Marmusha area. 8, 9, 14, 1 5, 28
Berelson, B. R., 439n
Berlin, I., 258n
Biafra. 323
Biaelow, L., 279n
Bihar, 29 1
Bihi, Addi ou, 300n
birds: social behavior, 69n
birth-order names, 368, 370-372
Black, M., 441n
Blackmur, R. P., 208
Black Nationalists, 205
Bloch, Marc, 44, 329, 361
blood ties: and nationalist, 261 -262
Boas, Franz, 353
Bolivia. 349
Bolshevism, 197, 199
Bombay, 290, 29 1
Boole, G., 356
Boomkamp, C. van Leeuwen, 435n, 442n
Bororo, 347, 349; as a parakeet, 1 2 1
Bourauiba. H., 235, 265
Bovary, Madame, 16
Brackman, A. C., 322n
Brahma. 126
Brahmanism: philosophical, 1 73, 1 75
Brahmans, 174, 239; Madrasi, 1 1 3
Braidwood, R., 330n, 339n
brain size: and behavioral complexity,
73-76, 83
Brazil, 347, 348-349
bride-price system: Bantu, 43
Brooks, C., 208
Bruner, J. S., 70n, 82n
Buddha, 347
Buddhism, 175, 1 8 1 , 253n, 287, 288,
356; Tibetan, 40; Zen, 40
Buaanda. 330
Bullock, T. H., 72n, 73, 74
Bunyoro, 263
Burckhardt, Jakob, 326, 409-410
bureauaatization: Bali, 1 89
Burke, E., 2 18, 2 19n
Burke, K., 29, 9 1 -92, 141, 208, 2 12,
230, 45 1 n
Burma, 237, 239, 263, 264, 266n, 267,
268, 276, 279, 290, 29 1 , 292, 306;
Buddhism, 287, 288; lanauaae. 287;
recent political developments, 286-
289
Bums, D. H., 242n
Bushmen, 125
Busoga. 330
cabbalism, 30
Caesarism, 22 1
Caka calendrical system, 39 1 n
calculation, 76, 77
calendar: Caka, 391n; lunar-solar, Bali,
392, 396-398; permutational, Bali,
39 1-394, 395-396, 406
Calvinists, 40
Cambodia. 243
Camus, A., 220n
Canada. 260n, 277
Cassirer, E., 29, 92n, 208
Castro, Fidel, 235
Cavell, Stanley, 1 3
Cayal, R., 70
central nervous system: evolution of,
46, 48-49, 53, 68, 70-73, 83
ceremonialization: of social relations,
398-400, 406
Ceylon, 243, 257, 265, 266, 268, 276;
independence, 270-27 1 ; primordial
problems, 27 1 -273; Tamil-Sinhalese
rivalry, 27 1-272
chaos: and religion, 99- 100
Chapman, L. F., SOn
charisma, 5, 23
Chartres cathedral, S0-5 1
Childe, Gordon, 330
chimpanzees: copulation, 76n, 77; symbolization,
66
Chin: in Burma, 286-287, 289
China: religions, 173
Chinese: in Indonesia, 53, 266; in Malaya.
265, 269, 307; in Southeast
Asia, 268
Christian charity, 98
Christianity, 1 30, 172, 1 8 1, 1 82, 1 87,
1 88, 267, 307, 45 1 n
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Christians: in Lebanon, 293, 295, 296
Christian S<:ience, 103
Churchill, W., 220, 23 1 , 232
churinga, 9 1
Cis-Jordan, 273
clan system, 353
class logic, 354, 356
Cochin, 262, 267
cockfighting: Balinese, 4 1 2-45 3
code: ethnographic, 9
Codere, H., 407n
coelenterates, 72
Coleman, J., 257, 27 1 n, 279n, 302
Coleridge, S. T., 208
communal feast: Java, 147- 148, 149,
1 5 3, 1 54, 1 5 6, 1 60, 1 6 1 , 1 62, 1 63,
1 64, 1 65, 1 67, 168- 1 69
communication theory, 35 1
communism, 1 94, 1 97, 245, 280, 282,
29 1 , 322n, 323
computer, 30, 44, 74, 250, 354
Comte, A., 1 99
Confucianism, 40, 1 72, 173
Congo, 234, 256, 262, 264, 268, 323
consensual man1 5 1
consensus gentium, 38-39, 40, 4 1 , 43
conversion: internal, 1 82- 1 85
Coon, C., 297
copulation: chimpanzee, 16n, 77
cosmology: Balinese, 427n
Coulburn, R., 329n
courtesy: Balinese, 400
Covarrubias, M., 1 14n, 116n, 40 1 n
Craik, K., 93n, 94
cremation: Bali, 1 86, 335
Cromwell, Oliver, 43
Crow Indians, 1 22
Crowley, J., 2 1 2n
Cuduveo, 347, 348, 35 1
cult: of death and witches, Bali, 176,
1 80- 1 8 1
cultural universals: consensus gentium,
38-39, 40, 4 1 , 43; core-element requirement,
39, 43; fake universals,
40; invariant points of reference, 4 1 ,
42-43 ; substantiality requirement,
39-4 1 , 43; as tailored, 42; underlying-necessities
requirement, 39, 4 1 -
42
culture, 89, 9 1 -92, 1 1 3- 1 14; analysis
of, 18-20, 25, 29-30; apparatus of,
339-340; Balinese person-definitions,
3 65-389; biological evolution and
cultural development, 37, 46-5 1 ,
67-69, 76, 8 3 ; changes in, 409-41 1 ;
computer programs for, 44; conservative
and political radicalism, 3 19-
323; as control mechanism, 44-46,
52; critical-point theory, 62-63, 64-
65 ; culture patterns, 2 1 6-2 17, 363;
defined, 89; difference in kind vs.
degree, 66, 69; discontinuity, 407-
408; diversity of, in Indonesia, 244-
245; foundations of, 33 1 -335; as
human nature prerequisite, 49-5 1 ;
integration, 404-407; as learned behavior,
249-250; octopoid systems,
408; Parsons' view, 249-25 1 , 254;
patterns of, and religion, 92-93, 94,
99, 1 00; person-categories, 363-364;
and politics, 3 1 2, 3 1 4, 3 1 9, 32 1 ; protoculture,
47; relativism of, 37, 40,
4 1 , 43-44; semiotic concept, 5, 24,
29-30; and social structure, 143-
1 45, 3 6 1 -363; as super-organic reification,
1 1 ; symbol systems, 5, 1 7-
1 8, 45-46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 2 1 5-220,
250-25 I, 254; time-scale of appearance,
65-68
Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Holt,
ed.), 3 1 1 , 3 1 2
culture theory, 25-26, 28; clinical inference,
26, 27; diagnosis, 27; as essentially
contestable, 29; predictive,
26
cybernetics, 45, 208, 25 1 , 35 1 , 356
Cyprus, 266, 268
Cyrene<:ia, 267
Dahm, B., 3 14n
Dahomeans, 275n
Dale, A. M., 104n
Dart, R. A., 63n
Darwinism, 208
death: cult of, Bali, 1 76, 1 80- 1 8 1 ; and
religion, 1 62- 1 63, 1 64
de Jouvenel, B., 3 1 8
De Maistre, J., 2 19n
De Mille, Cecil B., 3 1 8
de N6, L., 70
description: thick vs. thin, 6-7, 9-10,
1 2, 1 4, 1 6, 25, 26, 27, 28
Deutsch, J. A., 78n
Deutsch, K., 257n
De Vore, B. 1., 68
Dewey, John, 45, 58, 18n, 19n, 365
De Zoete, D., 1 1 4n
Dickens, Charles, 450, 45 I
dining customs, 42, 53
Dinka: divining, 103; Divinity withdrawal
myth, 106- 1 07, 1 08
Index
dispassionate tranquility, 96
divination, 1 03, 125
Divinity withdrawal myth, 107
Dobuan culture, 49
Drager, H. H., 447n
Dravidians, 264, 274, 290, 293
Druse, 293, 294, 29S
Du Bois, Cora, 1 80
Duleng, 307
Durkheim, E., 87, 88, 109, 1 42, 1 63,
203, 3 1 6, 405
Dutch: in Bali, 33 1 , 336, 337
Dwi-Tunga), 280, 284
ecclesiasticism, 22 1
Eckstein, H., 200n
ecology, 208
education: higher Indonesian, 274; as
universal, 42
Egba, 307
Egypt, 243, 26S, 297, 298, 3 1 6, 330
Einstein, A., 100- 101
Eisenstadt, S . M., 329
Elementary Forms of the Religious Ufe
(Durkheim), 142
Eliot, T. S., 208
Emerson, R., 257, 261n, 279n
emic analysis, 14
emotions: symbolic models, 79-82
Empson, W., 208
end of ideology, 199
Enlightenment: concept of human nature,
34-35, 39, 49, S l , 52, 1 99, 356
enumeration, 60, 6 1
epochalism: vs. essentialism, 240-241 ,
243-249, 25 1-252
Erasmus, 362
Eskimo, 1 32
essentialism: vs. epochalism, 240-241 ,
243-249, 25 1 -252
Ethiopia, 263, 266, 330
ethnocentrism, 24
ethnography: algorithms, I I ; descriptive,
S, 9- 10; formalism, I I ; inscribing
of social discourse, 1 9-2 1 ;
interpretation, 1 5 - 1 6, 18, 19-20, 23;
mega-concepts, 23; microscopic, 2 1 -
22, 23; modes of presentation, 1 9n;
natural laboratory concept, 22-23;
research as personal, 13; and social
discourse, 1 8-20; subjectivism, I I;
thick vs. thin, 6-7, 9- 10, 1 2, 14,
1 6, 25, 26, 27, 28; verification, 1 6
ethnology, 27-28, 346, 35 1
ethology, 208
ethos: Java, 136- 1 37; and world view,
126- 1 27, 1 3 1, 1 32, 140- 1 4 1
461
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 100, 172, 338-
339, 36 1 n
evil: problem of, 105 - 108, 1 30- 1 3 1 ,
140, 1 72
evolution: of central nervous system,
46, 48-49, 53, 68, 70-73, 83; and
cultural development, 37, 46-S I,
67-69, 76, 83; of Homo sapiens,
47-48, 53; of mind, SS-6 1 , 62, 82,
83; in Pleistocene, 63, 67-68, 69
exemplary center: Indonesia, 33 1 , 332-
333, 334, 337, 341
existentialism, 356
explanation: scientific, 33-34
extrinsic theory: of thinking, 2 1 4-2 16,
2 1 7, 362n
Fairbairn, G., 279n, 288n
Fallers, L. A., 229n, 23 1 n
family: beginning of, 48; as universal,
42
Fanon, F., 239
Fascism, 1 93, 197
Favre, H., 279n, 299n
Feith, Herbert, 222n, 227n, 273n, 279n,
322n
Fernandez, J. W., 407n
feudalism: comparative, 329
Fez, 299
Finnegan's Wake (Joyce), I S
fire: discovery of, 48
Firth, R., 1 1 3n, 36 1n
Fischer, L., 3 14n
Fishman, J. A., 241 n, 242n
Fitz-Barnard, L., 44Sn
Ford, C. S., 76n
Forester, C. S., 77
Forster, E. M., 289
Fortes, M., 144n
Fortune, R. F., 9Sn
France, 298, 299, 3 1 1
Frazer, J. G., 142
Freedman, M., 279n, 307
Free Thai movement, 264
free-will, 7 1
French: i n Marmusha area, 7-9, 14,
I S, 1 7, 1 8- 1 9, 28, 29; rationality,
53, 1 30
French Revolution, 2 1 9
Freud, S., 6 1 , 87, 88, 203, 328, 449; primary-secondary
thouaht processes, 61
Freudianism, 207, 208
Frodin, R., 279n
Frye, Northrop, 446, 450
Fulani, 262, 330
Fuller, L. L., 432n
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
funeral rites: disrupted, 1 5 3 - 1 62; Java,
1 5 2
Gabon, 215n
Galanter, E. H., 51n, 18n, 2 14
Gallqher, C., 242n, 219n
Gallie, W. B., 29
pmbling: on cockfights, Bali, 425-432
gamne theory, 208, 3S6
Gandhi, Indira. 264, 290n
Gandhi, M. K., 235, 243, 292
Geertz, C., 28n, 64n, 95n, l l 4n, 1 52n,
1 76n, 189n, 222n, 236n, 268n, 299n,
3 1 2n. 3 14n, 3 68n, 372n, 380n, 386n,
436n
Geertz, H., 368n, 372n
Geiaer. Theodor, 1 97
Gelgel: Bali, 332, 333, 334
genetics: molecular, 45
Gerard, R. W., 10n, 12n, 73, 74
Gerstenhaber, M., 78n; 2 14
Ghana. 239, 243, 264, 267, 273, 339
Ghosh, Atylya, 290
ghost beliefs, 366n
Ginsburg, N., 219n
Goffman. Ervina. 424, 436
Goldina, W., 49
Gombrich, E. H., 441n
Goodenouah, Ward, 1 1
Goodman, N., 444n, 446n, 441n, 45 1 ,
4S2n
Goody, J., 99
Goris, R., 393n, 394, 432
Gowan, Yakubu, 306
Granit, R., 82n
Graves, Roben, 45 I n
greater Somaliism, 264
Greece, 266, 268
Greek Catholic, 293
Greek Qnhodox, 293, 294
Green, A. L., 2 1 8n
Guernica, 9 1
Guevara, Che, 237
Guided Democracy, 28 1 , 282, 3 17, 32 1 -
322
GlQerati, 263, 269, 290
Gunawan, B., 322n
Guyana, 234
Haeckel, E. H., 6 1 n
Hallowell, A . I., 6 1 n, 64n, 65n, 19n
Hanna, W., 227n, 219n
Harlow, H., 68n
Harries, L.• 24 1 n
Harris, S. E., 1 93
Harrison, S., 256n, 219n, 29 1 n
Hartmann, H., 6 1 n
Harvard Law, 7 1
Hasan, Moulay, 261, 300
Hassan II, 248, 301
Hatta, Mohammed, 280, 281
Hausa, 262, 263, 268, 303, 304, 306
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 54
Hebb, D. 0., 7 1 , 1Sn, 16n, 11n, 19, SOn
Hegel, G. W. F., 37
Heine-Geldem, R., 222n, 332
Henle, P., 2 10n, 2 1 2
Herskovitz, M. J . , 4 1
Hertz, F., 251n
Himalayan polyandry, 43
Hindi language, 242
Hindu-Balinese reliaion, 1 86
Hinduism, 1 1 3, 1 25, 115, 188, 253n, 275,
276, 290, 292, 306, 384; in Java,
147-153; moral determinism, 1 30;
obsessiveness, 53; ritualism, 40-43
Hindu period: Indonesia, 222, 223
Hirschman, A., 236n
Historian's Craft (Bloch), 361
Hitler, A., 232
Hitti, Phillip, 293
Hogarth, w., 447
Holbein, H., 362
holidays: Bali, 394, 398, 420, 438
Holloway, R. L., 64n
Holt, C., 3 12, 3 1 3, 3 16, 3 1 8, 323, 325,
326
Holy Trinity, 126
holy water: Bali, 1 77, 1 79, 1 83, 1 84
Homans, G., 373n
hominoid: defined, 64n
Hooker, R., 358
Hooten, E., 64n
Hooykaas, C., 41 8n, 435n, 442n
Hopi, 49, 125
Hopkins, G. M., 2 16
Horowitz, N. H., 2 1 1n
Howells, W. W., 63n, 64
Huahes, John, 322n, 452n
Hull, Clark L., 56, 70
human nature, 67, 83; bioloaical factors,
37, 38, 39, 4 1 , 42, 44; culture as prerequisite,
49-5 1 ; Enlightenment view
of, 34-35, 39, 49, 5 1 , 52, 1 99, 356;
psychological factors, 37, 38, 39, 4 1 ,
42, 44, 53; social factors, 3 7 , 3 8 , 39,
41, 44, 53; "stratigraphic" concept,
37-38, 4 1 , 44, 46; uniformitarian
view of, 35, 36, 4 1
humanness: Javanese concept, 52-53,
1 29
human sacrifice, 40, 43, 1 22, 1 32
huntina and aathering, 47, 48
Huntinaton, Samuel P., 247-248
Index
Husein, Zakir, 292
Husser!, E., 1 2, l i On, 364, 367n
Hyman, S. E., 208n
latmul, 102
�. 239, 303, 304, 306
Ice Age, 47, 49, 67-68
ideal: advocatory explanation, 205; cathartic
explanation, 204, 205
idealism, 1 20, 208, 249
ideology: of businessmen, 198, 200; cultural
symbol systems, 2 1 6-2 18; defined,
193- 194; end of, 1 99; in Indonesia,
224-229; interest theory, 201 -
203, 207, 2 10; as map, 220; moral,
2 1 8n; morale explanation, 204, 205;
in the new states, 220-22 1 ; power of
metaphor, 2 1 0-2 1 1 , 2 1 3n, 220; vs.
science, 230-23 3; solidarity explanation,
204, 205; as something shady,
196-200; strain theory, 20 1 , 203-206,
207, 2 10, 2 1 1 , 2 1 3, 2 19-220; superstition,
1 99, 200; symbolic formulation,
207, 208-209; Taft-Hartley Act,
as slave-labor act, 209-2 1 3 ; vs. tradition,
2 1 8-2 19; war is hell, 2 1 1, 2 1 2
imaginal thinking, 77-78, 2 14-2 15
imprint learning: animal, 94
Inca, 330
incest taboo, 68
India, 1 1 3, 173, 182, 1 86, 237, 257, 26 1,
262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 278, 279,
304n, 306, 307, 323, 340, 382-383;
census, 275; communists, 29 1 ; language
issue, 24 1 , 255-256, 270, 274;
National Congress Party, 290-293 ;
recent political developments, 289-
293
Indians: in East Africa, 268; in Malaya,
307
Indians, American: Apache, 125; Arapesh,
60, 6 1 ; Crow, 1 22; Hopi, 49,
125; Kwakiutl, 4 1 , 407; Navajo, 98,
104- 1 05, 1 30, 1 32; Oglala, 1 27- 1 28,
1 38; Omaha, 354; Plains, 53, 94-95,
1 1 9; Pueblos, 23, 330, 406; Sioux,
1 27- 1 28, 1 38; Zuni, 40, 4 1 , 43
Indonesia, 22, 28, 237, 243, 256, 261,
262, 263, 265, 266, 268, 270, 275, 278,
279, 286, 306, 307, 339, 409; archipelagic,
3 1 5 ; Chinese, 53, 266; Christians,
1 87, 1 88; Communist Party,
245, 280, 282, 322n, 323; cultural conservatism
vs. political radicalism,
3 1 9-323; cultural diversity, 244-
245; culture and politics, 3 12, 3 1 4,
3 19, 32 1 ; Dutch, 224, 32 1, 336, 337;
Dwi-Tunggal, 280, 284; effects ofmassacres,
323-326; exemplary state,
224, 225, 226, 228, 3 3 1 , 332-333,
334, 337, 34 1 ; Guided Democracy,
28 1 , 282, 3 1 7, 32 1 -322; higher education,
274; Hindu period, 222-223;
ideological conflicts, 224-229; Islam,
1 87, 1 88, 224, 225, 246; language issue,
242; legitimacy, 3 1 7-3 19; Manipoi-USDEK,
227, 228; massacres,
1 965, 1 89n, 246, 282, 3 1 5, 322-323,
323-326, 4S2n: mass uplift, 32 1 ; nationalism,
224, 245-246, 252-253,
257; Outer Islands, 263, 267, 273,
280, 28 1 , 307; PanUasila concept, 225,
226, 227, 322; politics of meaning,
3 1 6; Protestants, 1 87; republican, 224;
thematic analysis, 3 1 1 -3 1 3
Indus, 330
information theory, 45, 354, 356
initiation rites, 88, 125
instinct, 15n
integration: of culture, 404-407; logicomeaningful
vs. causal-functional, 145-
146, 1 64, 1 69
integrative revolution, 277-279, 285,
306-3 1 0; see also nationalism
intelligence testing, S
interest theory: of ideology, 20 1-203,
207, 2 10
introspection, 58
invertebrates: nervous system, 72
kan, 257, 262, 264, 267
kaq, 257, 264, 267, 296
irrigation, 329; Bali, 335
lrawaddy Valley: people, 267
Islam, 1 8 1 , 1 82, 187, 188, 224, 225, 245,
246
Israel, 173, 266, 296
Istiqlal, 299, 300, 301
Italians: relision, 1 25
Jahweh, 174
James, William, 99, 365
Janowitz, M., 88
Japan, 3 1 6, 340; militarists, 2 1 1-2 1 2
Jastrow effect, 2 1 5
Java, 49, 1 75- 1 76, 189n, 223n, 224,
263, 267, 268, 3 1 2, 3 1 5, 320, 3 3 1 , 332,
334, 409
Javanese: concept of humanness, 52-53,
1 29, disrupted funeral, 1 53 - 1 62;
elites, I SO, 1 64, 1 65, 1 66; ethos and
world view, 1 36- 1 37; etiquette, 1 36;
funeral rites, 1 52; Hinduism, 147-
1 53 ; marriage rites, 1 52; Marxism,
148- 1 53 ; Modjukuto town, 1 46, 1 49,
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Javanese (cont'd)
ISO, IS I, I S3, I 64, I67; Moslems,
I47- I S3; mysticism, 95, I I9; nationalism,
I66; political parties, I SO- IS3;
political vs. religious meanings, I67;
problem of evil, I40; quietism, I22;
rasa, I24, 1 34-136; self-control, 13 1;
shadow-puppet play, 1 32- 134, I37-
140; slametan, 147- 148, 149, 153,
1 54, 1 56, 1 60- 1 65, 1 67, 1 68-169;
song, 106; tjotjog, 129- 1 30; tranquility,
1 35-1 37; uncanny toadstool, 101;
wqjang, 1 32- I 34, 137- 1 40
Jay, R. R., 322n
Jennings, lvor, 27 1 n
Jews, 205, 293; i n Marmusha area, 7-9,
I3, 14, 1S, 17, I 8- I9, 2 1 , 29
Jinnah, 235, 239
Job, Book of, 106
Johnson, Samuel, 35
Jones, H. P., 322n
Jonesville-is-the-USA, 2 I
Jordan, 266, 273, 323
Jourdain, M., 202
Judaism, 173
Juynboll, H. H., 42Sn
Kachin, 298, 307; mask, 123
Kafka, F., 8 1
Kahin, G . MeT., 22Sn, 273n, 279n, 320n
Karens, 239, 263, 264, 268, 287, 288,
289
Kashmir, 266
Kasuvubu, J., 264
Kayah State: Burma, 287, 288
Kaysen, C., 1 93
Keita, 235
Kenya, 267
Kenyatta, J., 235
Kerala, 29 1
Khaldun, Ibn, 1Sn
Khan, Yahya, 293
Khmer language, 242
Kierkegaard, S., 120
kinship obligations, I2S
kinship terms, 372-375, 386, 406
Kluckhohn, Clyde, 4, S, 39, 40-4 I, 42,
62n, 72, 98n, 104n, 143
Klungkung, 333
Koch, D. M. G., 320n
Koen�araningrat, R. M., 436n
Kontum-mali, 102
Korn, V. E., 11Sn, 336, 4 18n, 42Sn,
436n, 4S2n
Kris, E., 61n
Kroeber, A. L., 39n, 40, 62n, 63n, 6Sn
kula, 20
Kurdistan, 257
Kurds, 262, 264
Kwakiutl, 407; exhibitionism, 4 1
La Barre, W., 79n
Lacouture, J., and S., 279n, 300n
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 22 1
Langer, Suzanne, 3, 8 1n, 89, 9 I n, 99IOO,
1 1 1 n, 208, 2 IOn, 2 1 6n, 444n,
447n
language, 64; dispositional terms, 59, 60;
enumeration, 60; as significant symbol,
48
language issues: and nationalism, 24 1-
2•3, 2SS-2S6, 262, 270, 274, 287
Laos, 2S7, 264, 267
lA Pensee, Sauvage (Levi-Strauss), 33,
3S 1, 3S2, 3S6, 3S7, 3S9
Laqueur, W. Z., 2S7n
Lashley, K. S., 57, 70n, 7 1 n, 77n
Laski, Harold D., 340
Lasswell, H. D., 200n, 209n
Latin America, 220; language issues,
242n
Lazerfeld, P. F., 439n
Leach, E. R., 143n, 144
Leacock, Stephen, 89
leadership: and nationalism. 235-236,
237
Lebanese: in West Africa, 268
Lebanon, 262, 263, 267, 279, 306, 307;
census, 275; Christians, 293, 295, 296;
Moslems, 293, 295, 296; recent political
developments, 293-297; U.S.. intervention,
295-296
Lectures on the Religion of the Semites
(Robertson-Smith), I42
Lee Kwan Yu., 235
Leighton, D., 104n
Leites, N., 200n, 207n, 3 I2n
lek: Bali, 40 I-402
Lev, Daniel, 3 1 2, 3 I9, 322n, 325
Levenson, Joseph, 405
Uvi-Strauss, Claude, 1Sn, 33, 34, 345,
361n, 449; in Brazil, 347-35 1; cerebral
savage, 358-359; Rousseauism,
356-358; science of the concrete,
35 1-353; socio-logic, 353-355
Levy-Bruhl, L., 61n, 120
Lewis, B., 229n
Lewis, W., 273n, 279n
Li An-che, 407n
Libya, 267
Liddle, G. William, 3 12, 320, 322n, 325
Lienhardt, G., 103, I06- I07, I08
linguistics: structural, 30, 35 I, 3S4-3SS,
356, 359
Index
living fossils, 61
logic: class, 354, 3S6; in cultural analysis,
404-405; mathematical, 35 I ;
symbolic, 356, 359
Logos, 1 74
Lord of the Flies (Golding), 49
Lorenz, K., 68n, 15n, 94n
Lovejoy, A. D., 34-35
Lowell, Robert, 54
Lowenstein, R., 61 n
Lowie, R. H., 95n
Luethy, H., 3 14n
Luther, Martin, 362
Lyautey, L. H. G., 1 8, 298
McCarthy, J., 220
McCarthyism, 197
Machiavelli, N., 38 1
Macintyre, A., I I On
McPhee, W. N., 439n
McVey, R. T., 322n
Madariaga, Salvador de, 99
Madhya Pradesh, 29 1
Madjapahit Conquest, 330, 332, 333, 334
Madras, 274, 290, 29 1, 304n
Maghrib, 1 5n, 301
Magic, Science and Religion (Malinowski),
1 42
Maharashtra, 263, 290, 29 1
Makhzen, 298, 299, 339
Malaya, 237, 239, 256, 262, 263, 264,
265, 267, 268, 270, 278, 290, 306, 307,
324, 3S4; Alliance, 283-286; Chinese,
Matay, and Indian elements, 265, 269,
283-286, 307; recent political developments,
283-286; school system
control, 274
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 1 6, 40, 87, 88,
1 03, 1 08n, 1 20, 1 32, 142, 143n, 144,
1 62, 1 63, 407
mana, 98, 1 1 5, 1 26
Mandelbaum, D., 209n
Manipol-USDEK, 227, 228
mankind: psychic unity of, 22, 36, 62,
65, 69
Mannheim, K., 194, 196, 197n, 198,
2 1 9n, 230
Manus, 1 19, 1 22; seance, 95; secret sin,
1 3 1
Maori, 132
Mao Tse-tung, 264
Marmusha area: mer.rag, 1-9; sheep
raid, 1 0, 1 1, 1 2, 13, 1 8, 2 1, 23, 26;
sheikh, 8, 12, 1 5, 17, 19, 29; trade-pact
system, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 1 8
Maronite, 293, 294, 295, 297, 307
Marquis, Don, 108n
marriage, 52; as universal, 39-40, 42,
43
marriage rites: Java, 1 52
Marwaris, 304n; in South India, 268
Marx, K., 195, 199, 20 1 , 205, 23 1n, 328,
329, 347, 356, 449
Marxism, 29, 206, 207, 208, 22 1, 224,
245, 249, 253, 27 1 , 330; in Java, 148-
153; and nationalism, 253n
Mascou, P., 34, 35, 39
materialism, 120, 170- 1 7 1 , 249
Maya, 330, 339
Mazzini, G., 249, 258
Mead, G. H., 45, 365
Mead, Maraaret, l Sn, 60, 69n, 1 14n,
1 18n, 1 80, 328, 401n, 403n, 4 1 3, 4 1 7,
420n, 446n, 45 1n
mechanism, 56, 57, 58
mega-concepts: in ethnography, 23
Mekong Lao, 267
Mendeleev, D. I., 35 I
mentalism, 55, 56
Merleau-Ponty, M., 366n, 444n
Merton, R., 143n, 194n
Mesopotamia, 330
metaphor: power of, 2 1 0-2 1 1, 2 13n,
220
metaphysical anxiety, 1 00- 1 02
Mexico: Valley of, 330
Miller, G. A., 51n
Mills, C. Wright, 200n, 202n
minahassans, 263
Minangkabau, 307, 3 12, 3 1 5, 320
mind, 55-6 1 ; evolution of and culture,
55-6 1 , 62, 82, 83; naked, 56; primary
vs. secondary functions, 6 1 ; and thinkina,
82-83
Mirrorfor Man (Kluckhohn), 4
models: of and /or, 93-94, 95, 1 14, 1 1 8,
123
Moliere, J. B. z., 452
monkeys: learning capacity, 82n
Mons, Burma, 288, 289
Montagu, M. F. A., 69n
moods and motivation: religious, 96-
98, 1 1 2, 1 18, 1 22
Moore, G. E., 1 4 1
moral circumspection, 96
morale: and ideology, 204, 205
moral ideology, 2 1 8n
Mormonism, 1 8 1
Morocco, 22, 28n, 256, 261, 263, 265,
279, 306, 307, 339; Alawite monarchy,
246-247, 248; Arab-Berber conflict,
297-299; census, 275; Hassan II,
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Morocco (cont'd)
248; Muhammed V, 23S, 247, 248,
299, 300, 301; nationalism, 2S2-2S3;
recent political developments, 297-
302; Riffian Berbers, 273; trade-pact,
7, 12, 13, 14, 1S, 18, 19
Moros, 263
Morris, C. W., 208
Moslems, 187, 2S3n, 267, 292; in Java,
147- lS3; in Lebanon, 293, 29S, 296
Moslem Socialism, 301
Mount Meru, 222
Muhammed V, 23S, 247, 248, 299, 300,
301
Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 1 1 6
Murdock, G. P., 39
Murray, H., 72
Mysore, 290
mysticism, 9S, 1 19, 174
myth, 82, 88, 107, 1 2 1 ; as significant
symbol, 48
Nadar, Kamaraj, 290
Nadel, S. F., 103, 361n
N aga, 289, 293
Nambikwara, 347, 349
Napoleon I, 193
Nasakom, 322
Nasser, G. A., 23S, 26S
Nasserism, 296
Nasution, A. H., 282
National Congress Party: India, 290-
293
nationalism: blood ties, 261-262; censuses,
27S; custom, 263; dress, 276;
essentialism vs. epochalism, 240-
24 1, 243-249, 2S 1-2S2; haziness of
term, 2S1-2S9; ideology, 220-22 1;
Indonesia, 224, 24S-246, 2S2-2S3,
2S1; integrative revolution, 277-279,
306-3 10; Java, 166; language issue,
24 1-243, 2SS-2S6, 262, 274; leadership,
23S-236, 237; Marxism, 2S3n;
Morocco, 2S2-2S3; new middle class,
236, 248; new states, 22 1, 234-238,
2S 1-2S4; official insignia, 276; outside
interference, 237; phases of, 238-
241; primordial attachments, 2S9-
261, 262, 263-269, 27 1 -273, 274,
276-277, 278, 282, 283, 28S, 286,
288, 289-293, 296-297, 300, 302,
303, 30S, 306-3 10; race, 262; regionalism,
262-263; religion, 2S3-2S4,
263; school system control, 274-27S;
voluntary associations, 276
native models, ISn
natural selection, 4
Navajo, 98, 1 30, 1 32; curing rites, 104-
10S; religious concepts, 40
Nazism, 193, 197, 199, 220
Negritude, 262
Nehru, J., 23S, 243, 2SS, 2S6, 260, 261,
272, 290, 292, 304n
neurology, 4S
New Deal, 2 1 1
Ne Win, 288, 289
new middle class, 236, 248
Newton, Isaac, 34, 39, S1
Nietszche, F. W., 449
Nigeria, 237, 238, 239, 2S7, 262, 263,
267, 268, 270, 274, 276, 278, 279,
307, 3 1 6; recent political developments,
302-306
Nilotes, 239
nirvana, 98
Nissen, H. W., 68n
Njepi: Bali, 398, 420
Nkrumah, K., 23S, 273, 340
Nolte, R., 273n
noun: as dispositional term, S8-60
Nyasalanders, 21Sn
Nyrere, J. K., 23S
objectivism, SS
octopoid systems: ofculture, 408
odalan: Bali, 39S, 396
Oedipus complex, 23, 42
Oglala Indians, 1 27-128, 138
Omaha Indians, 354
operationalism, .S, 208
Opium of the Intellectuals (Aron), 199
ordination: of priests, Bali, 188
original sin, 109, 124
Orissa, 290, 29 1
Outer Islands: Indonesia, 263, 267, 273,
280, 281 , 307
Pakistan, 237, 238, 239, 263, 26S, 266,
267; language issue, 274
Palestinians, 266; commandos, 296-297
pan-Africanism, 264, 26S
pan-Arabism, 264, 26S, 273, 29S, 296
pan-Indonesia, 410
pan-Islamic movement, 26S
Pantjasila concept, 22S, 226, 227, 322
Paraguay, 348
Pareto, V. , 200n
Park, R. L., 279n
Parmer, J. N., 219n
Parsons, Talcott, 4 1 , 82n, 89, 144n, 14S-
146, 17 1 n, 198, 199, 200n, 203, 2 17n,
249-2SO, 2S 1, 2S4, 270n, 361n, 366n
Patel, V., 2SS, 2S6
Pathans, 262
Index
patterns of culture, 2 1 6-2 17, 363; and
religion, 92-93, 94, 99, 100
Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 44
Pauker, G., 279n
Pavlov, I., S6
peasant societies: comparative feudalism,
329; comparative political science of,
337; cultural apparatus, 339-340;
developmental cycles, of prehistoric
states, 330; government, 3 30-3 3 1 ;
hydraulic agriculture, 329; segmentary
states, 329, 330, 338
Peirce, C. S., 208
Percy, Walker, l i On, 1 2 1, 208, 2 1 0-
2 1 1 , 2 1 3n, 2 1 S, 447n
Persians, 267
person-categories, 363-364; consociates,
36S, 367, 369, 370, 3 7 1 , 389, 390-
391, 399, 402, 409; contemporaries,
36S-366, 367, 389, 399, 409; predecessors
/ successors, 36S, 366, 367,
39 1, 399; see also Balinese person-def­
initions
perspective: vs. attitude, l i On
Philippines, 243, 262, 263, 264, 267; language
issue, 24 1
philogenetic development, 72-73; brain
size and behavioral complexity, 73-
76, 83
Philosophy in a New Key (Langer), 3
Piers, G., 40 1 n
Pigeau, Th., 42Sn
Plains Indians, S3, 94-9S, 1 1 9
Plato, 200n
Pleistocene, 63; and human evolution,
67-68, 69
Pluvier, J. M., 320n
Polanyi, Karl, 329
Poles: religion, 12S
populism, 1 86, 22 1, 24S
Portugal: African territories, 234
positivism, 1 19, 132, 199, 208
Postman, L., 82n
Pribram, K. H., S7n, 72n, 7Sn
priests: Bali, 1 78- 1 80, 1 84, 1 88
primates: social brain, 68-69
Primitive Man as a Philosopher (Radin),
127
primitive-mentality problem, 1 20
primordial attachments: and nationalism,
2S9-261, 262, 263-269, 27 1-273,
274, 276-277, 278, 282, 283, 28S,
286, 288, 289-293, 296-297, 300,
302, 303, 30S, 306-3 10
Pringgodigdo, A. K., 320n
production: economic, 4
property: as universal, 39
Protestantism: ascetic, 172
Protestants, 1 87
Providence: as universal concept, 40
psyche, S7
psychic unity of mankind, 22, 36, 62, 6S,
69
psychologism, 17
psychology: attitudinal control of perception,
82; comparative, 208; evolution
of nervous system, 70-73; personality
theory, 364; philogenetic
development, 72-73, 73-76, 83
publishing programs: Bali, 1 8S- 186
Pueblos, 23, 330, 406
Pu!Qab, 27S , 289, 290, 293
puppet play: Java, 1 32- 1 34, 137- 140
Pushtu, 26S
quietism, Java, 122
Racine, Jean, 3S, 4S2
racism, 22 1
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 101, 142
Radin, Paul, 104, 1 27-128, 17Sn
Rahman, Teunku Abdul, 286
Rangenekar, D. K., 27 1n
rationalism: Greek, 173
Razak, Tun Abdul, 286
reading: aloud, 76-77
realism: magical, 173, 17S; naive, 1 1 1
reasoning: directive, 78-79, 8 1
recapitulation theory, 61 -62
Redfield, R., 143, I SO, 3 6 l n
reductionism, 1 1 , 60, 120, 14S- 146,
2 1 6-2 17, 3 6 1
reflex arc , 70
regionalism: and nationalism, 262-263
Reichard, G., 104n, l OS
reiftcation: super-organic, I I
R�ahstan, 290, 29 1
Ranga-Barong ritual combat, 1 14- 1 1 8,
1 1 9, 1 22, 1 80- 1 8 1 , 1 83, 403
rasa: Java, 1 24, 134- 1 3 6
religion, 12S, 170- 1 7 1 , 173; aesthetic
perspective, 1 1 1 ; &historical approach,
143, 146; anthropological study of,
87-89, 12S; authority, 1 10, 1 18; belief,
1 09, 1 1 9- 1 2 1 , 127, 143; Bororo
and parakeet. 1 2 1 - 1 22; chaos, 99-
100; common-sense perspective, I l l ,
1 1 2, 1 19, 1 2 1 , 122; cultural acts, 9 1 -
92; cultural dimensions, 89; cultural
performances, 1 1 3 - 1 14; culture defined,
89; culture patterns, 92-93, 94,
99, 100; and death, 1 62- 1 63, 1 64; defined,
90; dispositions, 9S-96, 98, 1 19;
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
reliJion (cont'd)
Divinity withdrawal myth, 1 07; ethos
and world view, 126- 1 27, 1 3 1, 1 32,
140- 14 1 ; evil, problem of, 105-
108, 1 30- 1 3 1 , 1 72; gene vs. symbol,
92, 93, 94; Javanese tjotjog, 129-
1 30; legal-moral code, 174; metaphysical
anxiety, 100- 1 02; models of
and for, 93-94, 95, 1 14, 1 18, 123;
modernization of, 170- 1 7 1 ; moods
and motivations, 96-98, 1 1 2, 1 1 8,
1 22; mysticism, 1 74; myth, 1 2 1 ; and
nationalism, 253-254, 263; Navajo
curing rites, 1 04- 105; Oglala and the
circle, 127- 1 28; original sin, 1 24;
problem of meaning, 108, 1 09, 1 72,
173; pure vs. applied, 1 2 1 ; RangaBarong
ritual combat, 1 14- 1 1 8, 1 19,
1 22, 1 80- 1 8 1 , 1 83, 403; religious
perspective, 1 10, I l l, 1 1 2, 1 19, 1 2 1 ,
122; ritual, 82, 1 12- 1 1 4, 127, 143,
2 1 6; sacredness, locus of, 1 73-174;
sacred symbols, 98, 99, 1 04, 1 08, 1 12,
1 1 3, 1 27, 1 29- 1 3 1, 1 40- 1 4 1 ; scientific
perspective, I l l , 1 12; as source
of stress, 1 64; symbol defined, 9 1 ;
symbols and group ethos, 89-90;
traditional vs. rationalized, 1 7 1-1 15;
as universal, 39-40, 43, 108n; and
values, 1 3 1 , 140- 141
Rey, L., 322n
Rhodesia, 275n
Ricoeur, Paul, 19, 448n
Rif tribe, 267, 273, 298, 302
ritual, 40, 43, 82, 1 12- 1 1 4, 1 27, 143,
2 1 6; cultural performances, 1 1 3- 1 14;
groupings, 88; as significant symbol,
48
Roberts, C. F., Jr., 279n
Robertson- Smith, W., 142
rodents: copulation, 76n, 77
Romans: religion, 1 25
Rondot, P., 279n
Rousseau, J. J., 349, 356, 357, 358
Rousseauism, 356-358
Ruport, A., 445n
Russell, B., 1 00
Russell, John, 341n
Rustow, D., 275n
Ryle, Gilbert, 6, 7, 9, 28, 55, 51, 58-59,
60, 77n, 95n, 208, 2 14n, 2 1 6n, 362n
Sabah, 285
sacredness: locus of, 1 73- 174
Saint-Just, L. de, 220n
sakti: Bali, 1 1 5
Sanskrit, 369n, 397 n
Santayana, G., 87, 1 1 2
Sapir, Edward, 208, 2 1 2
Sarawak, 285, 286
Sarekat Islam, 320
Sartono, Kartodirdjo, 3 1 2, 3 19, 322, 325
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 340
Saussure, H. B. de, 356
savages, 348-3 5 1 , 352-353, 358-359
Scheerer, M., 56n
Scheler, M., 364
schematism, 1 7
Schneider, D., 373n
Schoenberg, A., 447
school systems: control of, 274-275
Schumpeter, J., 200n
Schutz, Alfred, l i On, I l l, 364-365,
39 1 n
science: of the concrete, 35 1-353; vs.
ideology, 230-233
Scott, G. R., 445n
seance, Manu, 95
segmentary states, 329, 330, 338-34 1
semiotic concept, of culture, 5, 24, 29-
30
Senahor, L. S., 240
sex markers, Balinese, 385n
sexual differentiation: Bali, 417n
sexual practices, 75-76, 1 1 8
shadow-puppet plays: Java, 1 32- 1 34,
137- 1 40
Shakespeare, William, 35, 36; historical
plays and wqjang, 134
shamanism, 1 22
shame vs. guilt: Bali, 400-402
Sham'un, C., 295, 296
Shannon, C., 356
Shan States, 257, 287, 289
Shaplen, R., 322n
Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 292
shelter: as universal, 40
Sherman, W. T., 2 1 1
Sherrington, C., 56, 70, 7 1
Shi'a, 293
Shiis, 257, 267
Shilluk, 338-339
Shils, E., 89, 144n, 197, 199, 200n, 23 ln,
249, 258n, 259n, 290n, 361n
sickle-cell anemia, 44
Sikhs, 239, 263, 289, 293
Silverstein, J., 279n
Simpson, G., 66n
sin: secret, 1 3 1
Singapore, 285
Singer, M., 1 1 3, 36ln, 401 n
Sinhalese, 257, 265, 266, 268, 276
Sinhalese-Tamil rivalry, 27 1 -272
Sinnzusammenhang, 406
Index
Sioux, 1 27- 128, 138
Sjahrir, S., 269
Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake, I S
Skinner, G . W., 279n, 322n
Skinnerian behaviorism, S
slametan: Java, 147- 148, 149, 1 53, 156,
1 60- 1 65, 1 67, 1 68- 1 69
Smith, C. W., l 04n
Smith, T. E., 219n
Smythe, H. and M., 219n
social activity: thinking as, 360-36 1
social change, 142- 144, 1 69
social contract, 349
social inequality: sanctification of, Bali,
176, 1 77- 1 80
socialism, 197
social isolation, 68n
social science: common language, 4 1 -
42, 44; convergence of disciplines,
327-329; cultural relativism, 37, 40,
4 1 , 43-44; elegance, 33
social structure, 33 1 , 335-337, 36 1 -3 63
socio-logic, 353-355
sociology: of knowledge, 1 97, 2 12; latent
function, 206; reductionism, 2 1 6-
2 1 7; and science of symbolic behavior,
208-209, 2 1 3; scientific, 195;
structural-functionalism, l 42- 144, 1 69,
448, 453
solidarity: and ideology, 204, 205
Solomon, P., BOn
Solow, R., 30
Somalia, 243, 268
Sorel, G., 200n
Sorokin, P., 1 45
Sous; 267
South Africa, 63, 260n, 277
Southall, A., 329n
South Celebes, 336
Soviet Union, 2 1 2, 264
Spain, 298, 299
speech, 66, 77
Spies, W., l l4n
Spinoza, B., 1 4 1 , 449
spirit worship, 125
stage fright: Bali, 402-403
�ark, Werner, 196, 197
statecraft: dramaturgical, 33 1, 334-335,
337, 34 1
status titles, 368, 380-384, 386, 387
Steig, w., 98
Steinberg, L., 88
Stevens, W., 447
strain theory: of ideology, 201, 203-206,
207, 2 1 0, 2 1 1, 2 13, 2 19-220
"stratigraphic" concept: of human nature,
37-38, 4 1 , 44, 46
stress: religion as source of, 164
subjective behaviorists, 57
subjectivism, 1 8, 29-30, 56, 51, 58,
l iOn
Sudan, 239, 257
suffering, problem of, 1 03- 1 05, 1 06,
1 07, 172
Suharto, 282, 322n
Sukarno, 1 87, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229,
235, 239-240, 246, 261, 280, 28 1 ,
282, 3 1 3, 3 14, 3 1 7, 3 1 8, 3 1 9, 322n,
323, 340, 409, 4 1 0n
Sullivan, Anne, 77
Sumatra, 188, 3 14, 3 1 5, 320, 409
Sundanese, 263
Sunnis, 40, 257, 267, 293, 294, 295
superego, 58
superstition, 1 99, 200
Sutton, Frank X., 1 93, 200n, 201n, 203n,
204, 209-2 1 0, 2 1 1, 328, 3 3 1 , 338
Swahili, 242
Swellengrebel, J. L., 175n, 1 82n, 185n,
1 87n, 332n, 395, 427n, 452n
Switzerland, 260n, 277
symbolization: chimpanzee, 66
symbol systems, 5, 17- 1 8, 45-46, 48,
49, so. 52, 207, 208-209, 2 1 5-220,
250-25 1, 254; defined, 9 1 ; vs. gene,
92, 93, 94; and group ethos, 89-90;
myth, 48; sacred, 98, 99, 1 04, 1 08,
1 12, 1 1 3, 1 27, 1 29- 1 3 1, 140- 1 4 1 ;
symbolic behavior, 208-209, 2 1 3;
verbal, 209n
Syria, 264, 295, 296
Szinyei-Merse, Elizabeth, 64n
Tafilelt, 300
Taft-Hartley Act, 209-2 1 3
Talbot, P., 274n, 279n
Tamil, 239, 256-257, 265, 266, 276,
289, 290, 293
Tamil Nadu, 293
Tamii-Sinhalize rivalry, 27 1 -272
Tanganyika, 262
Tantrism, 1 3
Tao, 174
Taylor, 0. H., 4 1
teknonyms, 368, 37 1, 375-379, 406
Telugu, 256
temple system: Bali, 176- 1 77, 188- 1 89,
395
Teotihuacan, 330
Thailand, 257, 264, 265
Thakin Nu, 287
Thakins, 287
thematic analysis, 3 1 1 -3 1 3
Theory of Legislation (Bentham), 432
470 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Theravada countries, 266n
thermodynamics: second law, 4
thinking: calculation, 76, 77· directive
reasoning, 78-79, 8 1 ; and
'
emotions,
79-82; extrinsic theory, 2 14-2 1 6,
2 1 7, 362n; imaginal, 77-78, 2 14-
2 1 S; and mind, 82-83; reading aloud,
76-71; reflective, 78; as social activity,
360-361
Thompson, W. R., 1Sn, 16n, 19n, SOn
Thoreau, H. D., 16
Tibet, 330
time-awareness: Bali, 389-39 1 , 404,
406, 409, 4 1 0
Tinker, H., 276n, 279n
Tiv, 268
Tobias, P. V., 63n
Tobin, J., 193
Tobo Bataks, 263
Togalese, 27Sn
Tolstoy, Leo, 37
Tonkin, 262, 267
toolmaking, 47, 67
tooth-filing: Bali, 184, 186, 33S
Toradja, 12S
totemism, 122, 3S3-3S4, 3SS, 4S ln
Toure, Sekou, 23S
trade: as universal, 40, 42
trade-pact system: Marmusha area, 7,
12, 13, 14, I S, 1 8
tradition vs . ideology, 2 1 8-2 1 9
trance: Balinese, 36, 43, l i S, 1 1 6 1 1 7
176, 1 77
' '
Tripolitania, 267
tripping vs. tumbling: by clown, S8-S9
Tristes Tropiques (Levi-Strauss), 34S,
347, 3 S I, 3S6, 3S7, 3S9
Trobrianders, 40, 1 32; Oedipus complex
23
'
Tunisia, 243
Tupi-Kawahib, 347, 349
Turkey, 264, 266, 268
Tyler, Stephen, 12
Tylor, Edward B., 4, 47, 99, 1 00, 101,
142
Uganda, 229n, 263, 264, 267
Ulster, 260n
unconscious motivation, 4
uniformitarian view: of human nature,
3S, 36, 4 1
Union of Fascists: U . K., 1 97
universals, 38-43; fake, 40
U Nu, 23S, 286, 287, 288, 289
uranium, 44
Urdu, 274, 27S
utilitarianism, 208
Utrecht, E., 322n
Uttar Pradesh, 290, 29 1
value analysis, 1 4 1
values: and religion, 1 3 1 , 140- 1 4 1
van der Kroef, J . M ., 322n
vanity, 96
Varna system, 382-384, 386, 387
verstehen approach, 14
Vico, G. B., 2SO
Vietnam, 234, 262-263, 267
Vishnu Murti, 3 1 3
voluntary associations, 276
von Frisch, K., 94n
Von Neuman, J., 3S6
wqjang: Java, 132- 1 34, 1 37- 140
Walker, James, 127
Wallerstein, 1., 267, 276n
war is hell, 2 1 1, 2 1 2
Warren, A., 208n
Washburn, S. L., 6Sn, 61n
Waterbury, J., 248n
Weber, Max, S, 81, 88, 104, l OS, 108,
13 1 , 1 7 1 , 1 72, 1 73, 174, 1 84, 249, 2SO,
2S3, 3 14, 328, 329, 330, 364 366n
367n, 40S, 406, 434
' '
Weiner, M., 27 1n, 27S, 276n, 279n 3S6
Weiss, P., 7 1
'
Welleck, R., 208n
Wertheim, W. F., 320n, 322n
Westermarck, E. A., 1 3
West New Guinea, 32S
White, L. A., S8n, 63n, 66n, 19Sn 200n
20Sn
' '
Whitehead, A. N., 34, 203, 2S I
Whorf, Berijamin L., 208
Willey, G., 330n, 339n
wink, 6-7, 9, 10, I I , 12, 1 6. 23, 26. 28
Winstedt, Richard, 1 70, 1 89
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Weber) 328
Wissler, Clark, 39
'
witchcraft, 1 3 1 , 143, 172, 176, 1 80- 1 8 1
406
'
Wittfogel, Karl, 329, 330, 338
Wittgenstein, L., 1 2, 13, 17, 208, 40Sn
wolf-children, 68n
Wollheim, R., 444n
Wriggins, H., 272, 276n
Yeats, W. 8., 443
yoga, 1 74
Yoruba, 303, 304, 307
Yucatan, 143
Ziadeh, N. A., 279n
Zionism, 220
Zufii: rain dance, 40, 43; restraint, 4 1