LOCAL KNOWLEDGE & FURTHER ESSAYS IN INTERPRETIVE ANTHROPOLOGY BY Clifford Geertz BasicBooksnary of Congres Catan in Pain Dat re, Cito paresis nce gpa lemme and inde 1 holo Addras anys te. Tie ONSI6G "1983 306 TOTS ISBN 0-46.00158-2 (loa) ISBN 0465041629 ape) Cops © 1983 by Basic Bons In. Pantin th United Sts of Aer, Design by Vint Tore 01009995..RRO-H.. 17 181920 Introduction Chapter Chapter Chapter y v x uv Contents & PART I Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination “From the Native’ Point of View": On the [Nature of Anthropological Understanding. PART IT ‘Common Sense a8 a Cultural System ‘Art as Caltaral System ‘Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on te Symboles of Power The Way We Think Now: Toward an Ethnography of Modern Thought 19 3s B 11 147PART IIL Chapter 8/ Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective Acknowledgments Index Contents 167 235 27 demande dans quel genre et cet pitce? Dane e pene om igue il mya pas le mot pour rire. Dans le genre tragique? a versea, a commisératon et es autres grandes passions n'y sont int excites. Cependant i ya de iE et Ly en aura, sans rileule que fase rie, sans danger que fate reir, dans toute ‘composition dramatique od est ser important, ole pode prendre ton que nous avons dan es fires sdiuss, to, "action vavancera parle perplex t par les embarras. Ori! se semble que cat actions dat lex plus communes dele ve, le geae que les aura pour objet doit tree plus ie et eps ‘end, Papell ce gene le genre sven Diderot, TideLocal KnowledgeIntroduction & When, a decade ago, I collected a number of my essays and rereleased them under the ttl, half genuflection, half talisman, The Interpretation of Cul- tures. thought I was summing things up; saying, a I sid there, what was I had been saying. But, a a matter of fact, I was imposing upon myself ' charge. In anthropology, t00, it so turns out, he who says A must say ‘and Ihave spent much of my time since trying tosay it.The essays below are the result; but Iam now altogether aware how much closer they stand to the origins of thought-ine than they do to the outcomes of it 1am more aware, 100, than I was then, of how widely spread this ‘thought -line—a sort of cross between a connoisseurs weakness for mance ‘and an exegete’s for comparison—nas become inthe social sence. In part, ‘his is simple history. Ten years ago, the propotl that cultural phenomena should be treated as significative systems posing expoitive questions was ‘much more alarming one for socal scentsts—allergic, as they tend to be, to anything literary of inesact—than itis now. In part, itis a result ofthe growing recognition that the established approach to treating such phenomena, laws-and-causes social physics, was not producing the tr- ‘umphs of predition, control, and testability that had for so ong been prom ied ints name, And in par, itis esl of intellectual deprovincalzation ‘The broader currents of modern thought have finally begun to impinge ‘upon what has been, and in some quarters sills, a snug and insular enter- rise. (OF these developments it is perhaps the last that isthe most important, ‘The penetration of the socialsciences by the views of such pl4 LOCAL KNOWLEDGE as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, or Ricoeur, such critics as Burke, Frye, Jamesoa, or Fish, and such all-purpose subversives as Foucault, Ha bermas, Barthes, or Kuhn makes any simple return toa technological con- ‘ception of those sciences highly improbable Of course, the turning away from such a conception isnot completely new—Weber’s name has always tobe called up here, and Freud's and Collingwood’ as wel. But the sweep oft is. Caught up in some ofthe more shaking originates ofthe twentieth century, the study of society seems on the way to becoming seriously irreu- tar tis certainly becoming more pluralistic. Though those with what they take to be one big idea ae still among us, calls for “a general theory” of just shout anything social sound increasingly hollow, and claims to have ‘one megalomanic, Whether this is because is too soon to hope for unified Science oF 100 late to believe in its I suppose, debatable. But it has never seemed further away, harder to imagine, or less certainly desirable than does right now. The Sociology is not About to Begin, as Talcott Parsons once half-facetiously announced. It is scattering ito frameworks, ‘As frameworks are the very stuff of cultural anthropology, whichis mostly engaged in trying to determine what this people or that take to be the point of what they are doing, allthis is very congenial to it. Even in its most universalist moods—evolutonary, dffsionist, functionalist, most recently structurait or sciobiologial—it as always had a ken sense of, the dependence of what is seen upon where i is Seen from and what it is seen with. To an ethnographer, sorting through the machinery of distant ‘ideas, the shapes of knowledges always inluctably local, indivisible from ‘ther instruments and ther encasement. One may vel this fact with ecu- smenical chetoric or blur it with strenuous theory, but one cannot rally make it go away. ‘Long one ofthe most homespun of disciplines, hostile to anything smack ing of intellectual pretension and unnaturally proud of an outdoorsman image, anthropology has turned out, oddly enough, to have been preadapted to some of the most advanced varieties of modern opinion. The contextual: ist antformalis,relativizing tendencies ofthe blk ofthat opinion, its tura toward examining the ways in which the world is talked about depicted, charted, represented—rather than the way it intrinsically i, have been rather easly absorbed by adventurer scholars used to dealing with strange perceptions and stranger stories. They have, wonder of wonders, been speaking Wittgenstein all along. Contrariwise, anthropology, once read Introduction 5 mostly for amusement, curiosity, of moral broadening, pus, in colonial sit tution, for administrative convenience, has now become «primary arena of speculative debate. Since Evans-Pritchard and his ineffable chicken ora- cles and Lévi-Strauss and hi knowing bricolewrs, some ofthe central issues of, a8 I put it below, “the way we think now,” have been joined in terms ‘of anthropological materitls, anthropological methods, and anthropologi- cal ideas ‘My own work, insofar asit s more than archival a function of anthropol- ogy much underrated), represents an effort to edge my way into odd corners ofthis discussion. All the esays below are ethnographically informed (or God knows, misinformed) rtetions on general topics, the srt of matters philosophers might address from more conjectural foundations, critics from ‘more textual one, or historian from more inductive ones. The figurative ature of social theory, the moral interplay of contrasting mentalities, the practical ificulties in Seeing things as others see them, the epistemological ‘status of common sense, the revelatory power of ar, the symbolic construc- tion of authority, the catering varousness of modern intellectual if, and the relationship between what people take as fact and what they regard as justice are treated, one after the other in an attempt somehow to under- stand how itis we understand understandings not our own “This enterprise, “the understanding of understanding,” is nowadays usu- ally referred to as hermeneutics, and in that sense what Iam doing fs well ‘enough under such a rubric, particularly ifthe word “cultural” is afixed. ‘But one wil not ind very much inthe way of “the theory and methodology of interpretation” (Jo give the dictionary definition ofthe term) in what fol- lows, for ¥ do not believe that what “hermeneutics” needs isto be refed into. para-science as epistemology was, and there are enough general prin- ‘ipes in the world already. What one will ind is a number of actual inter- pretation of something, anthropologizing formulations of what I take to ‘be some ofthe broader implications of those interpretations, and a recurring cycle of terms—symbol, meaning, conception, form, text . . . cul- ture—designed to suggest there is system in persistence, that all these 30 variously aimed inquiries are driven by a settled view of how one should ‘0 about constructing an account of the imaginative make-up of a society. ‘But if the view i settled, the way to bring it to practical existence and make it work surely isnot. The stuttering quality of not only my own efforts ‘Along these ins but of interpretive social science generally i a result not (si often enough suggested by those who like their statements fat) of