The Interpretation of Cultures

Between 1945 and 1968, 66 countries gained independence from colonial rule; in the aftermath of the formally political revolution, disillusion characterized the general atmosphere of these new states. This disillusion arose from the realization that throwing off colonial rule doesn’t resolve social, economic, and political problems. Newly independent nation-states are tasked with establishing a national identity, which takes the form of nationalist ideology. The “definition, creation, and solidification of a viable collective identity” (238) is a continuing theme throughout all phases of political revolution; Geertz demonstrates that it is a cultural revolution as well. 

Geertz distinguishes four phases of nationalism: formation and crystallization, triumph, the organization of the nation into a state, and the attempt to define and stabilize relationships to other states and within the state’s society. While the second and third phases are most conspicuous, the first and final phases are where most of the social change happens. According to Geertz, nationalist intellectuals launched political revolution by challenging traditional frameworks in an attempt “to transform the symbolic framework through which people experienced social reality” (239). The population rallies around the demand for freedom from colonial domination, creating a tenuous cultural unity that becomes apparent only after the independent state is actualized.

After achieving formal revolution, the newly independent state must define the collective and form a new “we.” This self-definition tends to weigh tradition (essentialism) and modernity (epochalism) against each other. Geertz argues that the question of “who are we” (242) as a nation is really a question of what cultural forms, or “systems of meaningful symbols” (242) we use to assign value and meaning to civil life. The tension between essentialism and epochalism “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” (243). This inherent tension demonstrates that ideology does not merely reflect social change, but rather is itself a process of social change—an assertion Geertz supports by using Indonesia and Morocco as examples. 

Indonesia, historically characterized by relatively tension-free and eclectic cultural traditions, saw the dissolution of this eclecticism from 1912 onward with the rise of nationalism. The drive to define a national character became a competition of cultural systems, intensifying tensions as cultural forms became politicized. The competing political factions embraced village populism, cultural elitism, or religious purity; the subsequent mass slaughter eroded national unity, demonstrating that the generalized modernist conception of a nation-state was not easily grafted onto the “native eclecticism of Indonesian culture” (246).

Morocco, historically characterized by extreme social particularism, saw similar dissolution at various levels of society. This was exacerbated by colonial rulers choosing the Alawite monarchy as the center of Moroccan political power. It was also intensified by the Alawite monarchy’s attempt to define Morocco’s national identity while keeping traditional structures: 

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 (247).

Tension arose from the elite attempt to draw legitimacy from the past and authority from the present, fusing essentialism and epochalism. Like with Indonesia, Morocco’s revolutionary and postrevolutionary history shows that tradition and modernity are not easily grafted on to one another.

Geertz now compares culture and ideology. Prior to the refined conception of culture as “a system of symbols by which man confers significance upon his own experience” (250), American social science saw culture as simplistic learned behavior. Geertz takes issue with the suggestion that culture is a pre-existing template flowing in one direction to shape, direct, and particularize society—a schema that fails to capture the more circular interaction of cultural patterns and social processes, a cycle that is quite evident in the study of ideology. 

Geertz argues that any conception of ideology must pay attention to inherent moral tension, instead of hiding “the interior sources of its enormous sociological dynamism” (251). Just as ideology and science offer different strategies to name the same situation, so here strategic difference is a part of ideology itself, reflected by the tension between essentialism and epochalism: 

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 so many new states; not its reflection, its cause, its expression, or its engine, but the thing itself (251-52).

Essentialism and epochalism are different strategies used to varying degrees in nationalist ideology to articulate the meaning of nationalism. Because they are different strategically, they look to different sources for that meaning. Nationalist ideology creates a framework in which people can orient themselves in the practical world by fusing essentialist and epochalist strategies. The process is dynamic: Ideology both grows from social change and guides it in a more bidirectional, circular flow than pre-existing simplistically linear theories of ideology suggest. Rather than condemning nationalism, social scientists should attempt to understand it by “trying to figure 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 beyond that the whole fabric of modern civilization” (254). Geertz argues that this understanding can only be reached by regarding ideology as a cultural system that has complex interworkings with social change. 

In Chapter 10, Geertz discusses the interaction between elemental ties, attachments, and sentiments based on tradition, and the development of an effective, national civil polity in the modern sense. For Geertz, the tension between a people’s desire to express individual agency and the desire to form a dynamic body prompts newly independent states to maintain traditional structures that give identity and meaning to the population. These traditional ties bestow a sense of belonging based on things like quasi-kinship, race, language, region, religion, and custom. The issue with these attachments, or rather the reason that they seem to lie in opposition to a unified civil polity, is that by their very nature, they have the power to shift people’s worldview of the polity, what they define as a nation, and its scope of reference. Unlike other competing loyalties, primordial attachments, because they alter one’s view of reality, stand alone as viable structures for nationhood in and of themselves. 

Geertz classifies “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” (263) by distinguishing between two types of discontents prompted by the establishment of a modern, civil order: one, political suffocation when kinship exists within a single state; and two, political dismemberment when kinship exists across nation-state borders. Because Geertz is analyzing the nation-state structure, he primarily focuses on political suffocation, providing a preliminary classification of the social patterns in which that suffocation exists.

The first pattern is a single dominant majority set against a single, strong minority. The second is a central geographical or political group set against smaller, somewhat opposed peripheral groups. The third is two bipolar, nearly balanced groups. The fourth consists of multiple groups with no distinguishable dominance. The fifth is multiple small groups with seemingly simple ethnic fragmentation that in actuality is complex. Geertz distinguishes these patterns because they vary in how kinship ties are articulated in the political arena:

The unfamiliar civil state, born yesterday from the meager remains of an exhausted colonial regime, is superimposed 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 (268-69).

While this development takes place within a postcolonial context, Geertz is adamant that colonial rule is not the cause of parochial conflicts and that the true culprit is the replacement of colonial rule with a single, autonomous nation-state with traditional attachments. Therefore, traditional conflict becomes an inevitable part of the process of becoming a new polity. While the tension can be moderated, it cannot be fully resolved, so the task of new states is to politically normalize traditional conflicts.

Geertz now moves to country-specific analyses of this political normalization, using the examples of Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, India, Lebanon, Morocco, and Nigeria. His discussion offers an orientation to their historical and sociopolitical contexts, an explanation of traditional ties, and identification of the apparent pattern that the national government body employs to normalize those traditional ties. In the concluding section of the chapter, Geertz provides concise descriptions of those patterns, noting that he is uncertain about the continued success of each country’s efforts to normalize and contain traditional conflict: 

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 (306).

After summarizing the patterns, Geertz questions if any general conclusions can be drawn about the process of integrative revolution, since the efforts in these countries vary based on the specificities of each situation. He then identifies what he believes to be the common tendency: “the aggregation of independently defined, specifically outlined traditional primordial groups into larger, more diffuse units whose implicit frame of reference is […] the whole society encompassed by the new civil state” (306-307).

That is, while the terms on which the integrative process is conducted vary, the process generally involves integrating traditional attachments into the political order so that traditional conflicts can be resolved, or at least moderated, in the political arena. In short, “The integrative revolution does not do away with ethnocentrism; it merely modernizes it” (308), making such ethnocentrism integral to the nation-state’s development into a modern civil polity. Therefore, traditional identifications and civil identifications should be seen as distinct, yet complex and interdependent. For Geertz, this complex interaction can reveal much about changing modes of self-perception and the process of political integration. 

Geertz proposes that thematic analysis is the proper framework for examining the relationship “[b]etween the stream of events that make up political life and the web of beliefs that comprises a culture” (311). For example, the interdisciplinary and multisubject essays of Culture and Politics in Indonesia (1972) frame culture as “structures of meaning through which men give shape to their experience” (312) and politics as “one of the principal arenas in which such structures publicly unfold” (312). Geertz suggests the same framing in his Chapter 10 discussion on the specific manifestations of newly independent states’ strategies to politically normalize traditional conflict. 

The book’s essays are united not only by this framing, but also by the unity of their analytic style, which “struggles to draw broad generalizations out of special instances, to penetrate deeply enough into detail to discover something more than detail” (313). That is, the book provides a model of thematic analysis and deals with the paradox between specificity and generality that characterizes anthropological study. With thematic analysis as the frame, it becomes possible to draw out the relationship between culture and politics. 

Indonesia is an exemplary location of study because of the country’s inheritance of multiple traditions throughout history. There are many symbols from which the population discerns meaning and which anthropologists can study. However, because the symbols are so variable, Geertz warns against drawing reductionist conclusions from tropes and images—this is best avoided by tracing “sociological links between cultural themes and political developments” (314). He asserts that Indonesia failed at totalitarianism and constitutionalism because the Indonesian ruling class refused to come to terms with its own cultural diversity. In other words, cultural conflict along regional, religious, customary, racial, and class lines did not yet have a formal political institutional structure in which they could be fought out or altogether eliminated. Thus, the Indonesian Revolution at the time of Geertz’s writing was characterized by “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” (317). 

The classic problem of the legitimacy of authority emerged when Indonesia attempted to dispel a sense of unfamiliarity from the national institution—an attempt that looked on the one hand like ending domination by foreign powers. On the other hand, Geertz posits that colonial rule aside, the modern state itself is alien to traditional conceptions of “justice, power, protest, authenticity, identity” (319), so the development of the modern state also involves a shift away from familiar frames of reference, i.e. traditional cultures. Here, it should be noted that Geertz implies that the nation-state is the only viable, maximal political structure. For Geertz, unrest in new state social polities is not due to colonialism, but rather the inevitable result of any attempted resolution to shift from colonial domination to independence. 

The shift of sensibility, or “social changing of minds” (319), which Geertz finds central to the study of new state politics, counters the assumption that nationalization of political order is a linear progression from outdated traditions to up-to-date modernisms. The population’s double goal of maintaining a rooted sense of self and keeping up with the times means welding traditional referents onto modern ones in the creation of the civil polity. In Indonesia, this produced

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 (321).

The situation was a crisis of meaning, to which the Indonesian elite responded by wrapping it in language of “common struggle, historic identity, and national brotherhood” (322). Geertz suggests that nationalist ideology in Indonesia, while an attempted response to the crisis of meaning, failed to resolve the crisis by providing a meaningful, generally acceptable framework within which the diverse cultural population could orient themselves. 

The failure is even more evident in the eruption of violence. Geertz tentatively posits that the recurring pattern of intercultural violence and thin nationalist ideology might produce “a change of awareness which may prove to be the largest step in the direction of a modern mentality they have yet made” (323). As it was ongoing at the time of Geertz’s writing, he could not assess the impact of the violence; he predicted that the violence might change Indonesians’ frame of mind, but society and structures of meaning, i.e. culture, would endure. Geertz saw culture being able to “survive, in an intellectual sense, the events of politics” based on “the degree to which [it is] well grounded sociologically (326).

Geertz framework includes the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, which elucidate the elements of frame of mind, structures of meaning, and sociological grounding. This framework provides more comprehensive and complex understanding of societies’ functioning and evolution.