a strange romance

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A Strange Romance: Anthropology and LiteratureAuthor(s): Clifford GeertzSource: Profession, (2003), pp. 28-36Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595754 .Accessed: 14/04/2011 05:03

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A Strange Romance:

Anthropology and Literature

CLIFFORD GEERTZ

Puzzled, as I'm sure my fellow panelists were as well, when StephenGreenblatt conscripted them to this peculiar, somewhat whimsical enter

prise, about justwhat the topic of discussion was supposed to be, I thoughtto begin, in good Empsonian style, with a reflection on the ambiguities of

his title.Was this to be my own engagement with literature and the language arts as subjects of study?what a cultural anthropologist had to sayabout modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, the new historicism, hermeneutics, and the other veerings andinsurrections of recent theory, having lived through all of them? Or was itto be how my engagement with anthropology was itself literary?what role

my involvement with my literary tradition, rather intense for a social scien

tist, played inmy half-century effort to understand how Javanese, Balinese,and Moroccans went about earning a living, governing themselves, and

making sense of their existence? Should I be professional ethnographer asamateur critic or amateur critic as professional ethnographer?

The two are connected, of course, and both involve a certain presumption and some fairly serious trespassing, aswell aswhat the psychoanalystswould call exaggerated self-reference. But it is the second that seems tome

the more relevant inmy case.What I have to say about the ups and downs

of recent literary scholarship or criticism isnot, even tome, very interest

The author isProfessor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced

Study in Princeton, New Jersey. A version of this paper was presented at the 2002 MLA con

vention inNew York.

Profession 2003 28


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CLIFFORDGEERTZ |||29

ing. I have the usual mixed feelings?fascinating, but where the hell is it all

going??and nothing very helpful to add, except surtoutpas de zele. Therole that

my formation (I reallydon't know what else to call

it, Bildung perhaps; English is rather skittish about claims to cultural refinement). .. therole that my formation, which has been rather more on the humanities sidethan on the sciences side (an undergraduate major in literature and philosophy, I originally intended to become a novelist), has played inmy size-upand-solve anthropologizing is, I think, worthy of some reflection.

What is a Flaubert manque or, as someone has less kindly suggested, afauxHenry James doing in such a cold-fact discipline? Except that it is not

a cold-fact discipline, and it should not aspire to become one. Gainingsome sort of entree into various peoples' various ways of being-in-theworld demands not only that you have a reasonably distinct sensibilityyourself but also that you have some idea of what that sensibility is.Thisnot a job for the disembodied observer, and the methodologically overprepared need not apply. It is the encounter?sometimes the collision, occa

sionally an embrace, often a confusion, a nonplus, or a near miss?between

your sense of how matters stand, how, as we say, things should go, and the

sense of those whom you are struggling to understand that provides thebasis for whatever account of their lives you are able to give. The most im

portant instruments of cultural anthropologists are not tape recorders orvideo cameras?as valuable as they and other technical aids (polls, experiments, formal models) may be?but in-wrought perceptions. It is on their

ability to entangle those perceptions somehow with the equally cultural,equally in-wrought perceptions of the people they are studying that their

analytic reach, their power of witness depends.This is, as all sorts of people with rather larger ambitions for the social

sciences will be quick to tell you, dangerous doctrine. It raises the threat of

subjectivism, of relativism, of particularism, of a general failure to producerobust and reliable real-world knowledge. It turns us away from that shibboleth of shibboleths, the scientific method, toward an unregulated intu

itionism; away from the promise of a true, systematic, view-from-nowhere,prediction-making, program-producing Science ofMan. It substitutes va

grant insightsand sheer

assertions, producesa

cacophonyof

opinions.Rather like literature, actually.It is no part of my argument to deny that these are real perils, though

both their immediacy and their prevalence are commonly exaggerated bythe attack battalions of aggressive scientism. Instead of attempting to overcome the perils or hold them at bay by appealing to inappropriate ideals,ideals drawn from differently directed enterprises, operating under differ

ently formed conditions, and with different sorts of resources, we should


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30 III STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGY ANDLITERATURE

confront them head-on as an ingredient in the work as such. If it is an entan

glement of forms of life?the rub of various sensibilities against one another?that we're

dealing with,then

somethingrather closer to

graspinga

point than abstracting a lawwould seem to be involved. I once put this, in

something Iwrote, in terms of the anthropologist's reading other people'stexts over their shoulders {Interpretation 452). Itmakes the whole enterprisesound a lotmore surreptitious than it is, and less intrusive, but that is aboutthe size of it. And to read over shoulders effectively, conceptual, procedural,even substantive borrowing from literary studies would seem essential. The

dependence on images and figurations, what Coleridge called "speculative

instruments," from the natural sciences that has marked, and continues tomark, the social sciences needs to be supplemented by the introduction ofones from humanistic research and analysis?symbol, meaning, metaphor,plot, story, motif, interpretation?if we are actually to engage our subjectrather than merely attack it. So I have for some time now been arguing. Butthis perceiving of other people's perceivings, this reading of other people'sreadings, this texting of other people's texts turns out, as one might expect, tohave complexities and uncertainties?dare I say aporia??of its own. ReplacingNatur- with Geistes- before wissenschaft doesn't in itself get you all that far.

To be less gnomic, I turn to some concrete examples of the troubles I'veseen. Some years ago Iwrote a small piece on the Balinese cockfight, whichImade bold to compare in a suggestive, allusory, en passant sort of way tosome classics ofWestern literature, most notably Macbeth and Lear ("DeepPlay"). Itwas my notion that some themes of these tragedies by Shakespearewere caught up, in their own way and with their own inflections?that is,Balinese inflections?in the cockfight. Iwon't rehearse the argument hereor try to defend its cogency. That, it turns out, is altogether unnecessary, because what set off a fair volley of criticism was not whether what I said aboutBali or Shakespeare had any merit (the Shakespeare stuff concerning Macbeth and Lear came from Northrop Frye, so how could it be wrong?) but thesheer effrontery I displayed in daring to speak about them in the same

breath. What on earth, as one recent enrage?the author of awork deli

cately called How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our

Past?put it, could possibly justify comparing "a cheap low-lifeblood

sporton which foolish young men wager far more money than they could sensi

bly afford" to such monumental expressions of the immense and universalWestern spirit? Only, he thought, a settled nihilistic intent to undermine

morality, spread relativism, and "use the bizarre and exotic to destabilizeWestern cultural assumptions" (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 7, 8).

This sort of moral panic, authority at bay, can be left to take care of it

self. But a similar reaction?that what I am trying to do by bringing West


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ern imaginative creations into proximity with those of the South Seas orNorth Africa is to blur the line between barbarism and civilization to the

advantage of barbarism?was stimulated by a rather more developed pieceI did, also awhile back, on Balinese cremation ceremonies ("Found"). Herethe matter ismore complicated, and more telling, about exactly where it isthe procedure pinches, about justwhat it is that brings on all the wrath andaccusation. So it is worth perhaps a bit more discussion.

Shortly efore e died in 1973, ionelTrilling, whom I knew slightly ndmuch admired, wrote a typically winding, ruminating piece for the Times

Literary Supplement concerning the difficulties he had experienced in teach

ing JaneAusten to

today's collegestudents. The differences between their

sensibilities and hers, their times and hers, their language and hers were so

great as tomake the whole enterprise perilous at best?"problematic." Re

ferring to some work I had done on the Balinese sense of self aswell as to a

strange Icelandic saga he had been reading concerning amurderous jealousyamong chiefs brought on by amisdirected gift of bears, he wondered justhow far large cultural gaps could be bridged by reading, by writing, by thefree play of the moral imagination no matter how liberal.When a couple of

years further on Iwas invited to give amemorial lecture in his honor at Columbia University, I sought to address this issue by an example ofmy own, ofa gap even wider than that which yawns between sophomores and Austen?the gap between the treatment of widows in our society and their immolation on their husbands' funeral pyres in nineteenth-century Bali ("Found").

Borrowing a rhetorically inverted phrase, "found in translation," fromthe title of a James Merrill poem, a phrase expressing the remoteness tohim of his familial past, I quoted a long passage from aDanish sea trader

describing such an immolation (which as a further irony, Imight remarknow, took place just where that terrorist bomb went off a few months ago).The description was written around 1850. This man, alternately charmedand appalled, drawn in and disarranged by what he saw, recounted theevent at great length and in very fine detail, as though to convince himselfthat it was all really happening. The enormous, gaudy funeral tower "risingon crimson pillars to a finely carved coffin shaped like a lion." The swarm

ing crowd, friendly andlaughing?"They

looked littleenough

like sav

ages." The great mile-long procession, complete with music, dancing, andelaborate filigreed offerings to the gods. The entranced and immobile

Veda-chanting priest. The three women?mirror in one hand, comb in the

other?plunging "for affections' sake and in the name of religion"?intothe flames. "It was a sight never to be forgotten," he concludes, with a sudden turn from fascination to horror, from the bewitchment of the drama tothe reality of what it was enacting.


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far from being vehicles of intercultural communication and harmony, are

instead demonstrations of the moral vanity and self-indulgence of their

Western authors. (Windschuttle, "Ethnocentrism" 12)

Well, you can see the problem. Merely in presenting untoward, out-of

category material, material not easily bent to proprietous shape, one risks

being branded an enemy of progress, or worse. But despite all the holler

ing, the fear here isnot really of "indigenous illiteracy and superstition" orthe glamorization of barbarism. The most vain and self-indulgent of multiculturalized Western authors (and I am not the worst), smitten by exoticcustoms and dubious of some of our own, isnot going to try to sellwidow

burning to anyone. And the Balinese are neither illiterate nor, as these

things go in the world, particularly profligate, misogynous, or superstitious. The fear here is that in entangling our own sense of life and its "classic representations" with ones more than a little at angles to it and to them,

we will soweaken our convictions as tomake us unable to sustain them and

impress them with sufficient force on the world at large. It is the verydestabilization, the confusion of impulses that my honest sea captain felt

that in quoting him Iwanted my readers to feel too.Why do we teach JaneAusten, or Icelandic sagas, or Hindu funerals? Just that: to wound our

complacency, tomake us a little less confident in and satisfied with the immediate deliverances of our here-and-now imperious world. Such teaching

is indeed a subversive business. But what it subverts is not morality. Whatit subverts is bluster, obduracy, and a closure to experience. Pride, onecould say, and prejudice.

But enough of the long ago and far away.We are right now, in this

country and at this time in the process of trying to get, aswe say, some sortof handle on a cultural formation heretofore removed, distant, strange, and

ominous?namely, Islam (on which I have also worked).1 We are con

structing, live and in real time?rather hurriedly, as though we had better

get on with it after years of neglect?our image of what Muslims think, believe, do, and desire. Until recently, we barely possessed such an image be

yond vague and vacant notions about stallions, harems, deserts, anddervishes and some schoolbook

legendsabout the Crusades?an

ignoranceimmortally summed up by the Peter Arno New Yorker cartoon of a half

century or so ago showing a Stetson-hatted tourist leaning out of his roadster to ask a turbaned man prostrate in prayer by the side of the road:

"Hey, Jack, which way toMecca?"The reason for all the rush and for the dimensions it is taking is, of

course, 9/11. When it suddenly became apparent that the familiar threat

ening other that we had lost with the unlooked-for collapse of the Soviet


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34 I A STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGYAND LITERATURE

Union was about to be replaced by something even lesswell defined in our

minds; by something even further removed from the political history ofnineteenth- and

twentieth-centuryAmerica?Communism had, after all, a

Western pedigree at least, with roots in the Enlightenment and the French

Revolution; by in fact a creed of Arabs, Turks, Persians, Africans, South

Asians, Mongols, andMalays, rather off our spiritual map, a suffusing anxi

ety settled in.What are we Americans to think about an ideological competitor of

which most of us know barely more than the name and some plots andatrocities alleged to flow from its teachings? The result has been an

avalanche of books and articles by historians, journalists, political scientists,sociologists, anthropologists, and variously inspired amateurs designed to

give us a crash course in, as the phrase goes, understanding Islam. Jihad, aterm Americans encountered, if they encountered it at all, only in dime

novels, has become a prime subject of popular discourse. There are works

designed for that elusive figure, the general reader, on something called,

confusingly, reformism or modernism or fundamentalism?now even

Wahhabism?in contemporary Islam; on the teachings of the Koran; on

Sufi brotherhoods; on Islamic law, Islamic education; on the Sunni-Shi'isplit; on the deep meaning of the veil. And so forth and so on, into some

extraordinary corners indeed.There is, of course, a long tradition?sometimes called orientalism,

sometimes Middle Eastern studies?of Western scholarship on Islam, most

of itEuropean, most of it arcane. But we are now at the start of somethingentirely new: the formation of public-square, society-wide discussions?half apology, half debate, and riddled with grand assertions?of how we are

to think and feel about this sudden apparition on our cultural and politicalhorizon. We're going to be able towatch up close and while it happens the

building up in our minds of an enduring image or set of images of whatIslam andMuslims are all about, just aswe were able to watch, at a certain

remove, the holding of such an image or set of images of Bali and the Balinese in the mind of our rapt and troubled sea captain. The difference is

that this time the exotic is coming to us, and we are lesswell placed to dis

ciplineits

expressions.The evidence is all around us: in heated discussions

of "the clash of civilizations," of "what went wrong" with Islamic culture

(after the Renaissance, why no Reformation, let alone an Enlightenment?);in cliche-ridden TV biographies ofMuhammed; and in news magazine

pieces on the pilgrimage, the fast, fatwas, or houris in paradise.Perhaps one of the most striking indications that this image building is

going on, that it is not only an extensive process but also an intensely con

tested and, again, thoroughly destabilizing one?that is, destabilizing to


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us?is provided by a recent seriocomic affaire litteraire that involved justthe sort of entanglement of disparate sensibilities, cross-cutting ways of ap

proachinga text and

reachinginto its world, that I have been

talkingabout.

Imean the storm?or perhaps itwas only a cloudburst, and a seeded one atthat?over the teaching of the Koran at the University ofNorth Carolina,ChapelHill.

Well, itwasn't exactly teaching the Koran; itwas merely, once more, ex

posing it without warning labels and weather advisories to vulnerableminds?that is to say, to college freshmen. In the summer of 2002, driven

apparently by a rising concern to understand Islam, the university assigned

a translation of the early, so-called Meccan, verses of the Koran?thosethat supposedly initiated the prophecy?to its incoming class. Criticism,intense and unbridled, appeared almost immediately: from Franklin Gra

ham, the son of the Christian evangelist; from Bill O'Reilly, the residentMencken of the Fox network (he said itwas like teaching Mein Kampf);from, inevitably, William F. Buckley, Jr.; from, just about as inevitably, theWall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Daily News and various other news

papers, columnists, and soi-disant guardians of the public conscience. The

ACLU made nervous separationist noises. The university was sued by afundamentalist Christian group, normally concerned with anti-abortion

activities, on the grounds that itwas unconstitutional for a public univer

sity to require students to study a specific religion. And the state legislaturevoted, ex post facto, to bar funding for the project. The suit was eventuallythrown out by the courts; the university made the assignment optional; andthe enterprise proceeded, and apparently is proceeding, still ringed by debate and protest (see Falwell; Park; Robinson).

Our interest in all this is not that the controversy provides yet another

example of hard-shell provincialism and its exploitation by sophisticatedreactionaries but that it is, again, a complex and contentious literary en

gagement. The main complaint was that in selecting the early, lyrical"Meccan" verses, composed when the Prophet was just starting out, whenhe was powerless and isolated, rather than the later, fire-and-brimstone,jihad-breathing "Medinan" ones composed when, regrouping in exile, he

wasorganizing

an armedreturn,

the translator waspresenting

anoverly

at

tractive, even seductive image of Islam. John Walker Lindh was men

tioned; so was the British shoe bomber. The problem was not somuchwith Islam in itself aswith how it was represented, how it is to be broughtinto contact, like cockfights, immolations, or Jane Austen, with our own

understandings?"found in translation."I could continue this discussion with a consideration of the relations

among narration, narrative poetry, and revelation in the Koran; of the


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36 III STRANGEROMANCE:ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE

nature of the Koran as a text among texts and as spoken word; of the lin

guistic resources of the Arabic language and their literary employment. Butthat's for the future, as our encounter, not somuch with "Islam" aswith

Muslims, develops, however it develops. It is clear that merely listening toother voices in other rooms saying other things in other accents can be a

perilous business, liable to confuse our emotions, derail our judgments, andleave us both rattled and engrossed. But that iswhat listening to the voicesof our own literary tradition, Macbeth orMerrill, Lear or Faulkner, bringson as well: the sense that there ismore to things than first appears and thatour reactions are where we start, not where we end.

We may indeed end almost anywhere.

NOTE =

lA number of sentences in the following paragraphs are more or less identical to ones

found inmy general review of recent works on Islam inTheNew YorkReview of ooks,"Which Way toMecca?" That review was written after this talk was given, at a time when

I did not expect that t, he talk, ould be published. I apologize for the self-plagiarism.

WORKS CITED -

Arno, Peter. Cartoon. New Yorker 9 Apr. 1938: 18.

Falwell, Jerry. "University of North Carolina Requires Islam Studies." Jesus and TodaysIssues: Church and State. 2002. 13Aug. 2003 .Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Geertz, Interpretation

412-53.-. "Found inTranslation." Local Knowledge. New York: Basic, 1983. 36-54.-. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.-. "WhichWay toMecca?" New YorkReview of ooks 13June 2003: 27-29.

Helms, L. V Pioneering in the Far East. London, 1882.

Park, Michael Y. "University's Quran Reading Stirs Controversy." 6 July 2002.Au

darya Fellowship. IndiaDivine Communications. 13 Aug. 2003 .

Robinson, B. A. University Dispute re Islamic Book. Ontario Consultants on Religious Tol

erance. 12Aug. 2002. 13Aug. 2003 .

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacri

fice."Wedge 7-8 (1985): 120-30.

Trilling, Lionel. "WhyWe Read Jane Austen." Times Literary Supplement ar. 1976:250-52.

Windschuttle, Keith. "The Ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz." New Criterion 21.2

(2002): 5-12.-. TheKilling of istory: How Literary ritics nd SocialTheorists reMurdering Our

Past. New York: Free, 1997.

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