Unit 13

Clifford Geertz: Cultural Analysis

Contents
13.1 Introduction
13.2 The Interpretive Approach
13.3 The Definition of Religion
13.4 The Meaning of Symbol
13.5 Religion as a System of Symbols
13.6 Chaos and World-View
13.7 Belief and Faith in Religious Symbols
13.8 Conclusion
13.9 Further Reading
Learning Objectives
After you have read this unit your should able to:
z outline the interpretive approach;
z provide a definition of religion;
z discuss the meaning of symbol; and
z explain faith in religious symbols.

13.1 Introduction
Clifford James Geertz is Professor Emeritus of Social Science at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton (U.S.A.), where he has been on faculty
since 1970. He is well known for moving away from the scientific study of
social phenomena, as was promoted by Émile Durkheim and later A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown, and introducing a more metaphorical and literary style
to the field of anthropology. For him, anthropology is a ‘literary enterprise’,
a kind of writing, which shares many similarities with literature, history,
and philosophy (Inglis 2000).

13.2 The Interpretive Approach

Born in San Francisco (California) on 23 August 1926, Geertz served in the
navy from 1943 to 1945, and then studied at Antioch College, where he
majored in English, and then studied philosophy. After receiving the degree
of Bachelor of Arts in 1950, Geertz studied anthropology at Harvard,
from where he obtained his doctorate in Human Relations in 1956. From
the Massachusetts, he moved to Stanford (1958-9), the University of
California (Berkeley), the University of Chicago (1960-70), and then to
the Institute of Advanced Study, where he has been ever since, with joint
appointments at Oxford University (1978-9) and Princeton University (1975-
). An author of twelve books, and the editor and co-editor of numerous
others, Geertz has conducted his fieldwork in Java, Bali, Celebes, and
Sumatra in Indonesia, as well as in Morocco. In May 2000, he was honoured
at a conference held at Sefrou in Morocco, a country where he had done
his fieldwork. Geertz found this gesture highly gratifying, for he thought
16
that ‘anthropologists are not always welcomed back to the site of their Clifford Geertz: Cultural
field studies’. Analysis

Geertz is known for his interpretive approach (or what some call ‘symbolic
anthropology’), according to which the major task of anthropology is to
‘make sense’ of cultural systems. He has applied this approach for
understanding various aspects of social reality (such as kinship, ideology,
modes of livelihood, social change, distribution of power), but he is best
known for his focus on the meaning of religious symbols and for his
extensive ethnographic studies of religion in complex societies. Among his
most significant publications that deal with religion are The Religion of
Java (1960), Islam Observed (1968), The Interpretation of Cultures (1973),
and Local Knowledge (1983). One of his oft-consulted essays on religion
is ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, which was originally published in 1966 in
a volume titled Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion that
Michael Banton had edited and was later included in his collection of
essays, The Interpretation of Cultures.
Criticism of Approaches
Geertz opens his essay ‘Religion as a Cultural System’ with an observation
that the ‘anthropological study of religion is in fact in a state of general
stagnation’. To explain this, he makes a distinction between the
anthropological works on religion that were done before and after the
First World War and those that were done after the Second World War. He
finds that the former made significant advancement, but the latter were
rather sterile. No major theoretical advance has been made in the work
produced after the Second World War, except for a repetitious rendering
of the ideas of the founders of anthropology and certain empirical
enrichments supporting or disputing those ideas. Secondly, this work has
always looked at the writings of the scholars from sociology, anthropology,
and psychology, particularly the works of Durkheim, Max Weber, Sigmund
Freud, and Bronislaw Malinowski. None of them has considered the writings
from other disciplines like philosophy, history, law, literature, or the so-
called ‘harder sciences’. In fact, the founders of both sociology and
anthropology had closely read these disciplines for ideas and inspiration.
Box 13.1 Four Contributions
For a breakthrough of ideas in the study of religion, the point is not
that we abandon the thoughts of our founders. Geertz says that four
of their contributions have indeed enriched us, viz. Durkheim’s
distinction between sacred and profane, Weber’s method of
understanding social action from the point of view of the individual,
Freud’s parallel between personal rituals and collective ones, and
Malinowski’s distinction between religion and common sense. But they
should be treated as starting points, and we have to go beyond them,
placing them in the broader context of contemporary thoughts. At
this juncture, Geertz sets out his agenda, choosing the direction in
which he would like to contribute to the anthropology of religion.
The path Geertz chooses is to develop the cultural dimension of religious
analysis. He thinks that the concept of culture has suffered a great deal
because of the multiple meanings it has been given. When it becomes a
‘put-it-in-all’ concept, an ‘umbrella concept’, that is everything that human
beings have made and thought is ‘cultural’, its analytical power is weakened.
Thus, there is an urgent need to arrive at a definition of culture which is
unambiguous and does not have multiple referents. In his essay titled
‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, he espouses
a view of culture for which he is indebted to Weber. For Weber, man is an 17
Contemorary Theories animal who gives meaning to his actions. Man has spun around him the
‘webs of significance’, in which he is caught, which give him meaning.
Culture, for Geertz, refers to these ‘webs of significance’. The oft-
quoted definition of culture that he has offered reads as follows:
[Culture] 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.
Our job as anthropologists is to discover the meaning of actions of people
in different societies. Our approach, Geertz says, is not to discover laws
as experimental scientists do, but to ‘interpret’ human actions, to
understand their meaning. In other words, the concept of culture for
Geertz is ‘essentially semiotic.’

13.3 The Definition of Religion

Geertz begins with Durkheim’s idea of sacred, which defines religion and
sets it apart from other institutions that deal with ‘profanity’. The idea
of sacred is represented through symbols (material as well as non-material).
Religious symbols function to “synthesize a people’s ethos” and their world
view. In other words, the sacred symbols condition the people’s thought,
tone and tenor of their life, their moral and aesthetic styles, the way in
which they construct and order the universe around them, and the meaning
they attribute to their existence. Religious symbols have power derived
from some specific metaphysics or philosophy, which also presents to
people a specific cosmic (or ‘supernatural’) order. Religion endeavours to
adjust the human actions to the cosmic order and the images of the
latter are ‘projected onto the plane of human experience.’
That out of their collective imagination human beings have created a
cosmic order – sacred and transcendental – which they think constantly
influences them is not a new idea. Earlier theories have drawn up a
relationship between the cosmic order and human actions. But, Geertz
says, this has hardly been investigated from the point of view of how this
is actually accomplished. What we know is that it is accomplished in
communities annually, weekly, or daily – cosmic order is brought onto the
human and the human order is transcended, with people feeling the power
of the sacred cosmic order and feeling rejuvenated with new energy and
force. The envisaged meaninglessness of life, which may otherwise bother
people and make them anxious, is overcome – the cosmic order created
with sacred symbols makes the life profoundly meaningful, mirth-giving,
and worth-living. Geertz notes that the theoretical framework which would
provide an analytical account of the relationship between the cosmic order
and human experiences does not as yet exist in sociological studies of
religion as they do in other studies, for example, of lineage segmentation,
socialization, political succession, etc.
In order to reach such a framework, Geertz attempts a definition of
religion. Notwithstanding the idea that definitions establish nothing, Geertz
thinks that if they are carefully constructed, they can ‘provide a useful
orientation, or reorientation, of thought’. They can guide an analytical
enquiry with the explicitness they are expected to have. With these
introductory remarks, Geertz offers a definition of religion that, as we
said previously, is one of the most oft-cited definitions. Religion is, according
to Geertz,
1) a system of symbols which acts to
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2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations Clifford Geertz: Cultural
in men by Analysis

3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that
5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
Let us discussion this definition in detail, for it is central to Geertz’s
understanding of religion.

13.4 The Meaning of Symbol

As we see, the first concept to be explicated is that of the symbol.
Religion is a system of symbols, but it does not imply that it is the only
thing that deals with symbols. For Geertz, it is in fact culture which is a
system (or complex) of symbols, and religion being a part of culture is
‘symbolic’. But there is a difference between the religious symbols (which
are sacred) and the symbols that comprise other realms of society. Like
the concept of culture, symbol ‘has been used to refer to a great variety
of things’. It is a multi-meaning concept. From the forest of different
meanings that the term symbol has been given, Geertz identifies the
meaning he wishes to adopt for his study.
Symbol is used for any object, act, event, quality, or relation which
represents an idea. It acts as a ‘vehicle for a conception’, which is the
meaning of the symbol. The number six is as much a symbol as is the
Cross. Symbols are ‘tangible formulations of notions’. They are ‘abstractions
from experiences fixed in tangible forms.’ Following Kenneth Burke’s
example of the difference between ‘building a house’ and ‘drawing up a
plan for building a house’, Geertz distinguishes the symbolic dimension of
social events from empirical totalities. In the examples given above, the
former (‘building a house’) is the empirical totality, whereas the latter
(‘plan of the house’) is the symbolic dimension.
Box 13.2 Instinct and Environment
Cultural patterns, Geertz says, are ‘extrinsic sources of information’,
which means that they ‘lie outside the boundaries of the individual
organism’. Here, Geertz is referring to the same old distinction that
anthropologists make between ‘what is innate (instinctive) to human
beings’ and what they ‘acquire from their external environment’: in
other words, culture does not have a bio-genetic base, is learned,
shared among people, and transmitted socially from one generation
to the next. What is transmitted over generations is the ‘symbolic
source’, for it is in this that the entire knowledge is stored. Culture
does not only act as a ‘model for’ but also ‘model of’ behaviour. While
behaving according to the cultural demands, people also realize the
shortcomings, the lacunae, of their culture, which they change. Culture
is immensely modifiable.

13.5 Religion as a System of Symbols

In his other essay ‘Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols’,
Geertz writes:
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. 19
Contemorary Theories Religion provides the blueprint of social existence. In many societies,
religious symbols are uncritically held; they are beyond the pale of any
skeptical enquiry. Here, Geertz says that those individuals who do not
subscribe to the norms that the symbols formulate are regarded as ‘stupid,
insensitive, unlearned.’ Giving an example from Java, where he had done
his fieldwork, he says that small children, simpletons, boors, and the
immoral people are regarded as ‘not yet Javanese’, which actually means
‘not yet human’. Among them, the same word is used for ‘science’ and
‘religion’, which advises them to conduct their social life properly as
dictated by the set of norms and values.
Religious symbols are extremely powerful. They inspire in human beings
states that transcend them. Geertz gives the example of a Javanese
mystic, who stares fixedly into the flame of a lamp, because such a
practice instills in him self-discipline and control of emotional expression,
which is essential for leading a style of life that is expected of a mystic.
Or, to take another example, in a state of overwhelming emotions, a
man in distress, cries inconsolably before the idol of a personal guardian
spirit, seeking its favour, thinking that the true and candid display of
one’s mental condition is essential for divine intervention. States of this
type induce in the believer or worshipper a certain set of dispositions that
shape the quality of his experience. Geertz thinks that religion induces in
people two sorts of disposition, respectively called moods and motivations.
Geertz discusses both these concepts. By motivation is meant, in his
words, a ‘persisting tendency, a chronic inclination to perform certain
sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feeling in certain sorts of
situations.’ The acts, experiences, and situations are widely heterogeneous
as the two examples given above show. Motivations are not acts, i.e.
pieces of intentional behaviour; they are also not feelings. They are
‘liabilities to perform particular classes of act or have particular classes of
feeling.’
Action and Reflection 13.1
Describe a religions symbol to your friends and ask them to give examples
to elucidate tyour answer. Put down your findings in a notebook.
Motivations are distinguished from moods. Geertz notes that motivations
have ‘vectorial qualities’, whilst moods are ‘scalar’. Motives move in a
particular direction, but moods ‘go nowhere’, they only vary in intensity.
For example, the moods that sacred symbols induce, in different situations,
range from exultation to melancholy, from a boisterous display of joy to
listlessness, from self-confidence to self-pity. Moods result from certain
circumstances but they do not respond to any ends. Geertz writes: ‘Like
fogs, they just settle and lift; like scents, suffuse and evaporate.’ Thus,
motivations are meaningful with respect to the ends they are supposed to
achieve, whereas moods are meaningful with reference to the conditions
from which they spring.

13.6 Chaos and World View

How do we know that a particular set of symbols happens to be religious,
not secular, in nature? It is to be understood in terms of its purported
goals. Geertz helps us to understand this with the help of some examples.
A particular mood of awe will be interpreted as religious when it is inspired
by a conception of an all-pervading supernatural force, rather than a visit
to a Great Mall. Similarly, fasting is religious when the idea of a sacred
month or day motivates it rather than the perennial desire to shed off
20 excess weight. Religion comes into existence when its symbols formulate
the ideas of order, in fact a transcendental order. To quote Geertz: ‘A Clifford Geertz: Cultural
man can indeed be said to be “religious” about golf, but not merely if he Analysis
pursues it with passion and plays it on Sundays: he must also see it as
symbolic of some transcendent truths.’
Why does the idea of the transcendental truth – morally higher, supreme
and superior – come into existence? Why do human beings need the religious
symbols at all times and at all places? That religion is a cultural universal is
indisputable. The key to this question’s answer, Geertz thinks, lies in the
observations of S. Langer in his book titled Philosophy in a New Key.
Langer writes: ‘[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his
imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.’ Defining
chaos as ‘a tumult of events which lack not just interpretation but
interpretability’, Geertz thinks that there are at least three points when
human beings encounter such situation, a situation of chaos which brings
them to the limits of their powers of endurance and analytical abilities.
These three points are of bafflement, suffering, and a sense of difficult
ethical paradox, and in case they are not managed, they may lead to a
chaos which breaks in upon human beings.
Religious Paradoxes
Geertz thinks that of the three points that may drive human beings to
chaos, it is the issue of bafflement that has been least investigated, with
perhaps the sole exception of Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s work among the
Azande. The truth is that human beings do not wish to leave the situations
that cause bafflement unexplained, notwithstanding how simplistic (and
overarching) their explanations and clarifications are. In his fieldwork,
Geertz found that the Javanese were constantly using their beliefs to
explain phenomena, howsoever eerie and strange they might be. By this
process they were also convincing themselves that all events and phenomena
were ‘explainable within the accepted scheme of things’, and they should
not be left to themselves. Once, in Java, a peculiarly large umbrella-
shaped mushroom (what is known as toadstool) grew in the house of a
carpenter. Everyone from far and wide came to see it, and each visitor
had an explanation for it, irrespective of the ‘rightness’ or ‘suitability’ of
the explanation. The point is that the toadstool had important implications,
for it challenged the people’s cognitive ability, their understanding of the
world, and people would never like to succumb to these challenges. They
would come out with an explanation regardless of its veracity.
The second challenge to the meaningfulness of life is the problem of
suffering. It has been investigated more than the issue of bafflement
because the two main aspects of tribal religion, which anthropologists
have studied in a detailed manner, are illness and mourning, and both of
them involve a lot of suffering. The problem of suffering is not concerned
with the subject of avoiding it. Paradoxically, it is concerned with ‘how to
suffer’, how to bear physical pain, personal loss, defeats and betrayals,
and the agony and pathos of one’s nears and dears, without a wince.
Suffering is to be ‘suffered’, so to say, for it is divinely ordained – god
loves those who suffer. Suffering is not punitive; it is not a punishment; it
is to be interpreted as one’s test that the divinity periodically conducts.
Religion provides people with the method and ideology to bear and
withstand sufferings.
The discussion of the problem of suffering leads Geertz to the issue of
ethical paradox. If a man is unflinchingly devoted to divine commands and
subscribes conscientiously to the righteous way of life, then he should not
suffer. Why should god ‘subject a man to hell’ if he does not deviate from
divine instructions? But the truth is that sufferings descend on all, whether 21
Contemorary Theories or not they have been adhering to the right path. And, proceeding logically,
one would say that it should shake the faith of people in divinity. But that
does not happen. Religion renders ‘satisfactory’ answers to the presence
of evil in society. It makes ethical paradoxes meaningful – why the righteous
suffer, why simple fellows are deceived, why morally upright people are
defamed, why do the honest die in penury, or, in other words, why ‘rain
falls on the just’?
All the three problems, though different, have a basic similarity. They
intend to destroy the purported meaningfulness of the world by showing
that there is ‘no empirical regularity’ (with bafflement all around), ‘no
emotional form’ (with all suffering at one point or the other), and ‘no
moral coherence’ (with ambivalences and paradoxes that evil causes).
But what religion does at the face of these problems is to formulate, by
means of symbols, the images of a ‘genuine order of the world which will
account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and
paradoxes in human experience’. Religion does not deny the presence of
equivocalness in human life, but what it denies is that human events are
unexplainable, life is unendurable, and justice is nonexistent. Religious
symbols assert, time and again, with no grain of doubt that all events,
unexceptionally, are explicable; life can be led peacefully in spite of
sufferings; and justice never eludes the righteous. Religion both affirms
and denies, by submitting that human life cannot escape from pain,
ignorance, and injustice, but these states are ephemeral, they are fleeting,
like passing whiffs. That they can be eminently transcended is the message
of religious symbolism.

13.7 Belief and Faith in Religious Symbols

This leads us to a profound question: Why do people believe in religion?
Geertz notes that this question is often avoided in anthropology, and is
often relegated to a psychological enquiry. People come to believe in
religion because of their socialization. Right from the beginning they are
told of the moral worthiness and supremacy of certain beliefs, which
solve their problems and lay to rest their doubts, and in course of time
they are transmitted to the posterity. Underlying all this is the existence
of some authority that defines what is ‘worshipful’ (worthy of faith and
worship), and why it should be worshiped. Beneath every system of religious
symbolism there is a system of authority which legitimizes and protects
it. For example, in tribal religions, authority lies in the traditional imagery;
in the mystical ones in the force of the supernatural experience, the
experience of one-ness; and in charismatic ones in the attractive hold of
an extraordinary person. Even revelations have the immediate authority
of the person through whom they are communicated, besides of course
the final authority of the divinity which selects a person through whom
the ‘truth’ is revealed. Irrespective of its nature, the authority gives its
people what may be called the ‘religious perspective’. In other words,
one who comes to ‘know’ must first believe in what he comes to know.
Religion is ‘real for the believers’; for the non-believers (and the faithless),
it may be nothing more than mumbo-jumbo, a congregation of
irrationalities.
Defining the term ‘perspective’ as a ‘mode of seeing’, Geertz states that
the ‘religious perspective’ is one of the several perspectives that human
beings have to look at and analyze the world inside and around them. He
distinguishes the ‘religious perspective’ from the common-sensical, the
aesthetic, and the scientific perspectives. The religious perspective differs
from common sense because it moves ‘beyond the realities of everyday
22 life to wider ones which correct and complete them’. Religion does not
act upon the ‘wider realities’, but accepts them, and develops faith in
them. With respect to the scientific, religious perspective relies upon Clifford Geertz: Cultural
commitment for wider realities, rather than subjecting them to a Analysis
dispassionate analysis. And it differs from art because it does not disengage
itself from the question of facts as art does, but considers the things –
the wider reality – with which it is concerned as ‘real’, ‘factual’.
An important component of religion through which it establishes relations
with the wider realities is ritual, which Geertz defines as ‘consecrated
behaviour’. Through ritual performance, the veracity, the truthfulness,
of religious conceptions is reinforced. The idea that religious directions
are sound is also generated through rituals. They also produce the moods
and motivations to keep religion intact. Here, one may notice that for
Geertz also, as it has been for other anthropologists and sociologists,
religious symbols comprise the aspects of both beliefs and rituals.
Action and Reflection 13.2
Describe a ritual performance of your choice to other students. Ask
them whether it is related to religious conceptions of reality.
Individuals believe in the existence of powers beyond them. They have
myths, beliefs, stories, fictions about the origin of these powers. They
also know that the powers will influence their lives when some form of
communication (through rituals) is established with them. But, this does
not imply that people live in the world of religious symbols they have
created for all of the time. In fact, most men live in it only at moments.
The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts is the
reality of paramount importance for human beings. Against this
background, what religious rituals do is to ‘colour the individual’s conception
of the established world of bare fact’. In other words, religion does not
describe the world, and if at all it does, it does it obliquely and incompletely.
What it actually does is: It shapes the world of human beings, giving it a
new meaning.
One of the most common occurrences men face is their constant shift
from their day-to-day life to the world of ritual performances. When men
perform rituals, they are transported to a world that engulfs them almost
totally. In this, their beliefs appear ‘pale’, a ‘remembered reflection of
that experience’. So, while speaking of beliefs and rituals, we must keep
a distinction between them, for their respective individual impacts on
people differ greatly. Failure to keep this distinction has led to confusion,
leading some to argue about the presence of a ‘primitive mentality’ and
some to say that what science does in some societies is what religion does
in some others. Actually, they are talking about different realms of religion,
which though related have different implications for the experiences of
people.
For the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, religion is viewed as a
system of ideas and practices that offers a particular conception of the
world that people inhabit. Geertz writes:
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.
From this conception – the world as it emerges culturally – follow the
social and psychological aspects of religion. Indubitably, these different
aspects are interrelated in practice, but they can be separated for the
purpose of analysis, and scholars from different disciplines can pick up
different aspects of religion for study. 23
Contemorary Theories
13.8 Conclusion
One of the central points in Geertz’s thesis is that religious beliefs do not
merely interpret social and psychological processes in cosmic terms, they
also shape them. Religions differ in terms of the complexity with which
they do it. The complexity of religion is not dependent upon the scale of
evolution of a society. It is incorrect to believe that socially differentiated
and complex societies have complex religious system; the opposite might
be quite true. Geertz submits that the anthropology of religion recommends
two operations in its study: first, an analysis of meanings embodied in
symbols that constitute the religious system; and second, relating the
system of meaning with the other aspects of social structure and
psychological processes. Geertz’s objection to the contemporary
anthropology of religion is not that it is solely concerned with the second
aspect – that is, relating religion to the other parts of society, and examining
the contribution one part makes to the other – but that it has totally
ignored the first – that is, trying to understand the symbolic dimension of
religion. His submission is not that what the contemporary anthropologists
of religion are doing is wrong, but they are only providing a partial
understanding of the phenomenon. Moreover, their understanding becomes
woefully repetitive because the categories in which they are explained
are almost taken-for-granted types, say, for instance, the idea of social
integration. So, rites of passage produce solidarity in society in much the
same way as does the totemic worship. That is why, Geertz notes at the
outset of his study of religion that there is stagnation in the sociological
studies of religious phenomena. This stagnation can be overcome by infusing
religious studies with a symbolic analysis. Notwithstanding the criticisms
of Geertz’s approach (see, Asad 1983), his idea that religion is a system
of symbols and the job of anthropologists and sociologists is to understand
the contextual meaning of these symbols has made a breakthrough in the
study of religion.

13.9 Further Reading

Clifford Geertz 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures, Selected Essays.
London: Fortana Press
Inglis, Fred. 2000. Clifford Geertz, Culture, Custom and Ethics. Cambridge:
Polity Press

References
Asad, Talal. 1983. Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on
Geertz. Man (n.s.), 18: 237-59.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures, Selected Essays.
London: Fontana Press.
Inglis, Fred. 2000. Clifford Geertz, Culture, Custom and Ethics.
Cambridge: Polity Press.

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