Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz - Daniel L. Pals

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Chapter 9: Religion as Cultural System - Clifford Geertz

Cultural analysis is not “an experimental science in search of a law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures' The last theorist in our sequence is American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. If Evans-Pritchard was until his death the leading figure in British anthropology, many would say that Geertz held a similar place among anthropologists in America. For more than three decades from the early 19703 to his death in 2006, he was arguably among the most influential social scientists actively working. And like Evans-Pritchard, Geertz took a keen interest in religion, even though it is only one of many issues in cultural analysis that drew his close attention. The themes addressed in the numerous essays and noteworthy books published over the course of his career fall across the entire spectrum of human social life: from agriculture, economics, and ecology to kinship patterns, social history, and the politics of developing nations; from art, aesthetics, and literary theory to philosophy, science, and technology. The phrase “Renaissance man” is seldom used in the contemporary world of specialized learning, but it is not too far from accurate in describing Geertz’s remarkably wide circle of interests and investigations. His chief concern was to press for a serious rethinking of fundamentals in the practice of anthropology and other social sciences—a rethinking that bears directly on the enter— prise of understanding religion. With keen insight and a kind of baroque eloquence, he argued that human cultural activities are quite unusual and dis— tinctive things, and that we will therefore get little benefit if we try to “explain” them in the way scientists explain the nonhuman aspects of the natural world. Whether we like it or not, human beings are different from atoms and insects. They live within complicated systems of meaning, which anthropologists call “cultures.” So if we wish to understand these cultural activities, one of the most important of which certainly is religion, we must adopt a method that suits them. And that method is “interpretation.” In matters human, we are clearly better off if we abandon the “explanation of behaviors” approach that a natural scientist might apply to a colony of bees or species of fish and turn instead to the “interpretation of cultures.” Not surprisingly, that phrase forms the title of Geertz’s most famous book.

Although Geertz recommended this new approach for all of anthropology and social science, he himself led the way in applying it specifically to the study of religion, which he helped to revitalize in the process. Indeed, with perhaps the sole exception of Mircea Eliade, there is probably no American scholar who has done more than Geertz to show how valuable a well-crafted study of religion can be to an understanding of almost all other aspects of human life and thought. It is perhaps needless to add that this interpretive stance, which strives to see all religions through the eyes and ideas of the peo— ple who practice them, marks a further step on the path already entered by Weber, James, Eliade, and Evans-Pritchard. It marks a course that leads away from functionalism and reductionism and toward an accounting of religion’s distinctively human dimension: the ideas, attitudes, and purposes that create it.

Life and Career Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco, California, in 1926.2 After completing secondary school, then military service in World War II, he attended Antioch College in Ohio, where in 1950 he received his BA. degree in philosophy. From Antioch he went on to study anthropology at Harvard University. By this time, of course, fieldwork had become the cornerstone of anthropological training both in Britain and the United States, so while still a graduate student, Geertz chose to take his plunge. During his second year at Harvard, he and his wife Hildred traveled to the island of Java in Indonesia and remained there for two years, studying the complex multiracial, multireligious society of a single town. After returning to Harvard, he took his doctorate in 1956 from Harvard’s Department of Social Relations with a specialization in anthropology. He and his wife then set out on a second term of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, this time on the island of Bali. Like Java, Bali was a part of the new Indonesian Republic, which had been established late in the 19403, shortly after World War II and the end of Dutch colonial rule. Unlike Java, where Islam was the dominant faith, Bali possessed its own religion, a colorful and fascinating network of beliefs and rituals derived mostly from Hinduism. In both Bali and Java, Geertz’s first mission as an anthropologist was to do ethnographywto prepare detailed and systematic descriptions of these non-Western societies, noticing eSpecially how the different aspects of life Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 295 blended into a cultural whole. In the same way that Evans-Pritchard’s work among the Nuer and Azande formed a basis for his theoretical writing, this work in Java and Bali provided the foundation for most of Geertz’s later essays and analyses. In terms of religion especially, his close contact with these Indonesian communities served as both source and stimulus for many of his most original ideas. It led him early on to the view that if, as functionalists claim, a religion is always shaped by society, it is no less true that a society is shaped by its religion.

In 1958, after completing his fieldwork in Bali, Geertz briefly joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley; he then moved to the University of Chicago for ten years, from 1960 to 1970. In 1960 he published The Religion of Java, an extensive account of the beliefs, symbols, rituals, and customs found in the town where he had conducted his first term of fieldwork. This study exhibited an attention to detail rivaling that of Evans-Pritchard, but it also attempted to be more wide-ranging—and needed to be, for the society Geertz had chosen was considerably more complicated by the collision of cultures than were the largely isolated African communities of the Azande and the Nuer in the interior of the Sudan. In Java’s culture, Islam, Hinduism, and native animist traditions all claimed a place in the social system. Alongside his work on Javan religion, he pursued research on other aspects of society in the region. Agricultural lnvolution (1963) examined the ecology and economics of Indonesia and assessed its troubles and prospects in the postcolonial era. Peddlers and Princes, published in the same year, compared the economic life of a town in Java with another in Bali. And The Social History of an Indonesian Town (1965) told the story of the community in which Geertz had done most of his fieldwork—Modjokuto in Java—tracing the close interplay among economics, politics, and social life during the passage from colonial rule to independence.

We may recall that Evans-Pritchard’s one venture outside of tribal Africa occurred during his stay in Libya, when he studied the Muslim community of the Sanusi. Interestingly, after his work in Indonesia, Geertz made a similar move to expand his base of field research by doing further work in the Islamic culture of Morocco in North Africa. Beginning in the 19603, he made five field trips to this area, enabling him to observe a second Muslim religious community in a part of the world decidedly different from Southeast Asia. As a result, he was able, in Islam Observed (1968), to make a comparative study of a single major religion—Islam—as it had taken shape in two very different cultural settings. Later we can look more closely at this book.

In 1970 Geertz became the only anthropologist ever named a Professor at the famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he continued his research until his retirement. This singular honor, which brought him to the institution where Einstein once worked, did not come in recognition of his ethnographic research, which could have been done—if not quite as well—by a number of other professionals in the field. It occurred because in the decade of the 19603, while doing his ethnography, Geertz caught the attention of thoughtful people in many fields with a series of striking critical essays that addressed some of the most important theoretical issues in modern anthropology. In these probing, analytical discussions he set out his reservations about most earlier social science, claiming that many of its aims and methods were seriously misguided. In the course of these studies he was able to make a forcible argument for his newer style of “interpretive" anthropology. In America especially, Geertz’s theoretical writings have been read with interest not only by other anthropologists but by scholars across all fields in the academy and by more than a few thoughtful general readers as well. Though some have left their mark individually, most of these critical essays have made their main impression in gathered form, chiefly in the collection entitled The Interpretation ofCultures (1973), a work that was widely acclaimed, and in Local Knowledge (1983), a later assemblage that earned similar approvals. A proper appreciation of Geertz’s approach to religion requires that we pay attention to both sides of his work: the ethnographic and the theoretical.

Background: American Anthropology and Social Theory To understand Geertz’s perSpective, we should notice first that he acquired his professional training neither in Durkheim’s Paris nor Evans—Pritchard’s Oxford but at Harvard University in the United States. His ideas on culture and religion were thus developed under two main influences: a strong and independent American tradition of anthropology and a perspective on social science he encountered at Harvard under the prominent theorist Talcott Parsons.

Since about the turn of the twentieth century, a truly professional style of research in anthropology had been established in the United States under the leadership of the German immigrant scholar Franz Boas (1858—1942) and his younger contemporaries Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876—1960) and Robert Lowie (1883—1957). At the time when Tylor and Frazer in England were still promoting grand theories built on the comparative method, these pioneering figures had already seen its error and abandoned its ways. Ahead of their time and, like Evans-Pritchard, sharing the view of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884—1942) on the value of field research, they insisted that any general theory must be rooted in rigorous “particular” ethnography, the kind of study that centers on one community and may take years or decades to complete. In America, these men had natural access to the many tribal cultures of native American peoples, and they used it to good advantage, learning tribal languages and doing fieldwork in their communities. Boas made a lifelong study of the peoples along the Religion as Cultural System: Clrflord Geertz 297 Canadian Pacific coast; Kroeber and Lowie worked among the tribes of the American plains.. In addition to fieldwork, Boas, Kroeber, and Lowie stressed “culture” as the key unit of anthropological study. They insisted that in their field studies they were investigating not just a society—as some European scholars preferred to think—but a wider system of ideas, customs, attitudes, symbols, and institutions, of which society was only one part. “Society,” these Americans tended to think, was a term weighted too heavily toward the purely material and structural components of human communities, while the appropriate term for their more comprehensive concept, which searched for hidden attitudes and emotions that lay behind and within the social order, was “culture.” To some degree, the difference was verbal. For the most part Europeans seem to have meant by “society” and “social anthropology” something rather close to what American anthropologists meant by “culture” and “cultural anthropology.”

In her widely read Patterns of Culture (1934), Ruth Benedict, a talented student of Kroeber and Boas, explained that culture was the key to understanding even individual human personality traits. When in her fieldwork she noticed a difference of temperament between the gentle, restrained Pueblo Indians and more combative tribes like the Pima and Kwakiutl, she traced it to the funda— mental character of Pueblo culture, which stressed harmony, while the others did not. Such a view departed significantly from that of theorists in the school of Durkheim, who had considerably less interest in the psychology of individ— uals because it was not something concrete and objective in the way social facts like families and clans are. Benedict found individual psychology import— ant, for it showed that a culture was a pattern, a kind of “group personality” that each of its members held in the mind.

While still a student, Geertz seems to have absorbed ideas from Boas, Kroeber, and Benedict quite naturally into his own anthropological perspective. Though he chose Indonesia rather than any of the native American communities as his locale, he immediately enlisted in two substantial terms of fieldwork, as we have seen. In addition, he fully endorsed the American commitment to particular studies; they were much to be preferred over the bad science of general theories built on poorly gathered evidence. Anthropology, Geertz heartily agreed, must be ethnography before it can be anything else. Its focus must fall on specific places and peoples, so that general conclusions come, if at all, Only from these closely studied single instances. Further, and finally, he embraced the American view that the objects of anthropologists’ inquiries are “cultures,” not “societies.” He recognized that the door to other peoples’ lives could not be unlocked only by examining such social units as the family, kinship patterns, clan structures, or legal systems; it was necessary to search beyond these for the entire interconnected pattern of ideas, motives, and activities that we call a culture.

With regard to this last point, we should notice that Geertz did have some reservations about the newer stress on culture and showed rather more sympathy for the sociological approach of the French school than did others. For if, as Benedict claimed, culture was nothing more than a kind of group attitude, a communal “personality” passed on in the minds of individual persons, then there was really nothing very objective about it for the social scientist to study. In the American view, one tended to argue that individual behavior is an expression of culture, while defining culture merely as the way in which individuals have learned to behave.3 Such circular statements might be true, but they were not very enlightening. If the concept of culture was to be usable in scientific research, the French were right in saying that it had to refer to something objective, not just to elusive psychological states like the Pueblo “feeling of harmony” or another tribe’s attitude of aggression. In addressing this difficulty, Geertz found help in the work of Talcott Parsons, his Harvard teacher and at the time one of the leading sociologists in America.

American Social Theory: Parsons and Weber It is hard to know how direct his influence was, but Talcott Parsons seems to have affected Geertz in two ways. First, Parsons himself had come under the influence not of Durkheim primarily, as many others had, but of Max Weber, whom we have now had a chance to consider at some length. In the decade of the 19303, well before many Americans (including many professional sociologists) had even read Weber, Parsons had translated some of Weber’s works, most notably The Protestant Ethic, and had explored certain key themes of his agenda. So in the circle of Parsons’ students and readers, at least, there was familiarity with concepts like “worldly asceticism” and its connection with capitalism, with sociology construed as the study of rational human action, and especially with the method of Versrehen, which was of key importance in distinguishing Weber’s stress on the meaning systems that shape the actions of individuals from Durkheim’s focus on the determinative role of social structure.

In addition to serving as a channel for the ideas of Weber, Parsons provided Geertz with something else: a way of resolving the problem of culture as it had been left by anthropologists like Ruth Benedict. In The Structure of Social Action (1934), his most important book, Parsons built upon Weber and developed the view that all human groups function on three levels of organization: (1) individual personalities, which are shaped and governed by (2) a social system, which is, in its turn, shaped and controlled by (3) a separate “cultural system.” The last of these, which is a complex network of values, symbols, and beliefs, interacts with both the individual and the society, but for purposes of Religion as Cultural System: Clifi'ord Geertz 299 analysis it can be separated from them. To many, this thesis was a breakthrough. If Benedict’s idea of culture as a group personality was too vague and subjective to be of much scientific use, Parsons’ concept was not. A “cultural system” was an objective thing, a collection of symbols—objects, gestures, words, events, all with meanings attached to them—that exists outside the minds of individual people yet works inwardly to shape attitudes and guide actions. As we shall see soon, Geertz clearly shared this idea of a culture as an objective system of symbols, so much so that some observers prefer to call his approach not interpretive but “symbolic” anthropology.4 Interpretive Social Science: Principles and Precepts Weber, Parsons, and the tradition of American anthropology all provide components of Geertz’s perspective. To see how he assembles them into a complete program of interpretive anthropology, we can now turn to his own writings, especially the theoretical essays and other works published mostly in the two formative decades of his career, the 1960s and 19703. Since we obviously cannot cover all of these in our discussion and since some are theoretical and others ethnographic, it will be best if we work in stages. We begin by looking at two of Geertz’s best—known theoretical essays: the first explains his interpre— tive anthropology in general terms, and the second directs it specifically to religion. With these in hand, we then turn to some samples of the way in which Geertz applies his perspective to actual religions.

Culture and Interpretation: The Method of ”Thick Description”

In 1973 Geertz published his award—winning collection of essays entitled The Interpretation of Cultures. Most of these pieces had first appeared in various scholarly journals during the previous decade. But as an introduction to the others, Geertz provided a new essay that has since become the classic state— ment of his point of view. He entitled it “Thick Description: Toward an Inter— pretive Theory of Culture.” In it, he points out first that although the term “culture” has tended to mean many different things to previous anthropolo— gists, the key feature of the word is the idea of “meaning” or “significance.” Man, he says, referring explicitly to the perspective of Max Weber, is “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” If therefore we wish to do what anthropologists are paid to do, namely, explain the cultures of other human beings, we have no choice but to use a method that is described by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle as “thick description.” We must describe not only what happens but also what peOple intend by what happens.

bRyle gives the example of two boys: one experiences a muscular twitch at the eye while the other winks at a friend. In a purely physical, or “thin,” description, both of these movements can be identically described. But the minute we take into account the element of meaning, the significance of the physical motion, no two actions could be more different: the one means nothing, the other means a great deal. “Thick” description, which includes the meaning of the motion, shows the wink to be decidedly different from the twitch. It must be clearly understood, says Geertz, that ethnography, and so all of anthropology, is always a matter of thick description. Its aim is never just to describe the mere structure of a tribe or clan or the bare elements of a ritual. Its task is to discern meanings, to discover intentions, to detect the significance people attribute to their rituals, institutions, and beliefs.

It is important to notice that when we speak of “meanings,” most people think of something quite private—an idea in an individual person’s head. But a moment’s further thought makes it clear that there is nothing necessarily private at all about meaning. I cannot wink privately at you unless there is something public—a context of meanings—shared by both of us that enables you to take from the wink the same meaning I give to it. We should therefore understand that the culture of any society is just this shared context of meanings. Or, to use Geertz’s own words, “culture consists of socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them.”5 A culture is not something physical, but it is there—objectively there—nonetheless. And it is the one thing that, more than any other, anthropologists must try to reconstruct when they study a community or people of any place or time.

By the same token, we should notice that a culture is notjust about meanings, as if it were a purely self—contained system of symbols, like mathematics. Behavior, or action, must also be observed “because it is through the flow of behavior— or, more precisely, social action—that cultural forms find articulation.”6 This may mean that on some occasions the description of a culture will not always be completely consistent. People sometimes behave in ways that clash with the system of meaning prescribed by their own culture; or, perhaps more accurately, cultural systems sometimes present multiple and conflicting patterns within which people choose diverse courses of action. It also means that anthropologists can never do more than reconstruct what their subjects think and do by writing down their own best interpretation of it. Cultural analysis is, for the interpretive anthropologist as for every other careful theorist, always a matter of “guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions.”7 None of this difficult work can be done well unless it is done microscopically, so to speak. Interpretive anthropology attends to “ethnographic miniatures,” small-scale subjects like clans, tribes, or villages, whose cultural Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 301 systems can be mapped out in all the minute detail characteristic of each. For Geertz, this means too that any attempt to make broad, general statements about all of humanity must be viewed with the strongest suspicion. In the past, he notes, anthropologists have tended to say things like “Middletown, which I have studied, is the United States in miniature.” The answer to that is: In some respects it may be; in others it most probably is not. So such general statements are just as likely to mislead as to inform. Again, it is sometimes said that a certain society is a “test case” through which we can prove something about all others. Here we can cite (though Geertz does not) Durkheim’s “crucial experiment” with Australian totemism. But we need to ask: What kind of test case can we really make when almost none of the important conditions can be controlled? We can never compare two human cultures as we can—with a control—two laboratory cultures, placing them in identical dishes and adding a chemical to one and not to the other. The findings of any one such cultural test case, says Geertz, are “as inherently inconclusive as any others.”8 In light of all this, anyone interested in explaining human activities must understand that the day when scholars set as their goal some “general theory of cultural interpretation” is now past—and most likely gone forever. For the unavoidable fact is that analysis of culture is not “an experimental science in search of a law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”9 Does this mean that the interpretation of cultures can never give us wisdom that is of any general value? Well, not quite. But what we can learn from it, says Geertz, is probably more like the diagnosis a doctor makes in determining a type of illness from certain symptoms. Anthropology is never fully predictive, never able to offer the certainty that is available in fields like physics or chemistry, which center only on physical processes that follow the laws of motion or the rules of molecular reactions. The anthropologist cannot forecast with certainty what will happen in a culture, any more than a doctor can definitely predict that a child will catch or resist a virus. But like a diagnosis, a theory should in some measure try to anticipate what will happen elsewhere or be in some way applicable to other cases. In interpreting one culture, a theory ought in some way to be capable of being “tried out” on another, and then be either kept for further use or discarded. In that connection, anthropologists do have a variety of general ideas at their disposal—abstract concepts expressed in words like “struc— ture,” “identity,” “ritual,” “revolution, world View,” “integration,” and so on. These allow a theorist to stretch a single example into an idea that might apply in several or many cases. They may not seem like much, but in fact such concepts are extremely valuable, and in any case, they form the only kind of general observation a good theorist would ever want to make. Anything more ambitious might be interesting, but it is also likely to mark the return of the old mistakes: bad science pretending to be anthropology.

,5 ‘LCultural Interpretation and Religion If interpretive anthropology is a matter of seeking out the system of meanings and values through which people live their lives, then it stands to reason that in any culture religion will command serious anthropological attention. That Geertz firmly believes this is evident in the first study that came out of his fieldwork—and for that matter the first of his career—The Religion of Java (1960). This book is an ethnography in the best tradition of American anthro— pology; it is a particular study of a specific people whom Geertz came to know in depth through his immersion in their language and culture. It explores in detail the complex interweaving of Muslim, Hindu, and native animistic (the Javan name is abangan) religious traditions. And it looks at religion as a cultural fact in its own right, not as a mere expression of social needs or economic tensions (though these are certainly noticed). Through its symbols, ideas, rituals, and customs, Geertz finds the influence of religion to be present in every crevice and corner of Javan life. His study is so microscopically detailed, so closely tied to the particulars of Javan culture, and so careful to avoid generalizations that he might well have used it as the very model for the kind of “thick description” anthropology we have just seen him recommend. For that very reason, however, the book does not try to tell us very much of a theoretical nature about the aims of an interpretive approach to religion. Typically for him, Geertz chooses to do that instead with an essay, “Religion as a Cultural System,” first published in 1966 and later included in The Interpretation of Cultures. Though almost as celebrated as “Thick Description”

and just as widely noted or commented upon, this is not the easiest essay to understand or to summarize. But it is important, so we need at least to trace its outline.

Geertz begins by telling us, as his title indicates, that he is interested in “the cultural dimension” of religion. Here he also helps by providing a fairly clear and complete idea of what he means by a culture. It is “a pattern of meanings,” or ideas, carried in symbols, by which people pass along their knowledge of life and express their attitudes toward it. As there are within a culture many different attitudes and many different forms of knowledge to pass on, so there are also different “cultural systems” to carry them. Art can be a cultural system, as can “common sense,” a political ideology, an ethnic heritage, and the like.

What does it mean to say religion is a cultural system? Geertz offers an answer to this question in a single, heavily packed sentence. 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 of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.‘0 Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 303 This is not a description anyone is likely to find brief and clear, but it is not quite as forbidding as it first may seem. In-‘the rest of his essay, Geertz actually does us the service of breaking down his account (which serves as both a definition and theory) by explaining in detail each of its elements. We can start with the first. By “a system of symbols” Geertz means just about anything that carries and conveys to people an idea: an object like a Buddhist prayer wheel, an event like the crucifixion, a ritual like a bar mitzvah, or a simple wordless action, like a gesture of compassion or humility. A Torah scroll, for example, conveys to Jews the idea, among others, of God’s revelation. The image of a saint in a hospital room may convey the idea of divine concern for the sick. As we have seen before, the important thing about these ideas and symbols is that they are not purely private matters. They are public—things that exist outside ourselves in the same way that, say, a computer program exists outside of a computer as well as within it. As program codes can be examined and read objectively apart from the physical machines they are installed in, so religious symbols, though they enter the minds of private individuals, can be grasped apart from the individual brains that think them.

When it is said, secondly, that these symbols “establish powerful, pervasive, and long—lasting moods and motivations,” we can abbreviate this by saying that religion makes people feel things and also want to do things. Motivations have goals, and they are guided by an enduring set of values—what people think is good and right. The Buddhist monk feels a strong negative motivation, an aversion, when presented with a generous midwestem American steak dinner. For him, it is wrong both to eat meat and to eat in such quantity, because attachments to food weigh him down in his struggle for a better rebirth and ultimate escape from life in the natural world. His motivation here is a matter of morals, of choosing for himself the good over the evil. Jews wishing to see Jerusalem and Muslims hoping to visit Mecca will also arrange things so as to reach their goal, which is to attain the morally good experience of being in the spaces sacred to their traditions. Moods are more temporary than motivations, also less defined and less clearly directed. When Hindu pilgrims arrive at Benares 0r Christians at Bethlehem, they may well experience, even unexpectedly, a feeling of joy, an inner peace that inspires for a time and then gives way naturally, at a later time, to a different mood.

The power of these moods comes from their source; they are not occasioned by trivial or minor things. They arise because religion occupies itself with something truly important; it formulates “conceptions of a general order of existence.” By this Geertz simply means that religion offers ultimate explanations of the world. Its main interest is not to tell us about stocks and bonds, sports and games, fashions in clothing, or forms of entertainment. Its intent is to provide an ultimate meaning, a great ordering purpose to the world. Everyone knows when the disorder, the chaos of the world makes itself felt. It does so when people face things that, intellectually, they just cannot comprehend; when, emotionally, they face sufferings they cannot bear; or when, morally, they encounter evil they cannot accept. At these moments they see that what is collides with what ought to be.

On the one side, then, stand conceptions of the world, and on the other a set of moods and motivations guided by moral ideals; taken together, these two lie at the core of religion. Geertz abbreviates the two elements by referring simply to “world view” and “ethos”—to conceptual ideas and behavioral inclinations. He then adds that religion “(4) clothes these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” In simpler terms, this means that religion marks out a sphere of life that has a special status. What separates it from other cultural systems is that its symbols claim to put us in touch with what is “really real”—with things that matter to people more than anything else. And it is in rituals that people are seized by the sense of this compelling reality. In rituals, the “moods and motivations” of religious believers coincide with their world view in ways that powerfully reinforce each other. My world view tells me I must feel this way, and my feelings tell me, in turn, that my world view must be right; there can be no mistake about it. In ritual, there occurs “a symbolic fusion of ethos and world view”; what pe0ple want to do and feel they should do—their ethos—joins with their picture of the way the world actually is.

Geertz explains that a vivid example of this fusion, this blending of ethos and world view, can be found in one of Indonesia’s most remarkable ceremonies. On certain occasions the people of Bali stage a colorful performance of a great battle between two characters from their mythology: the fearsome witch Rangda and the comical monster Barong. As these two struggle, the audience itself gradually comes into the great Spectacle, with some members taking the parts of supporting characters and others swooning into states of trance. As the performance proceeds, it becomes clear that for the Balinese this drama is “not merely a Spectacle to be watched but a ritual to be enacted.”” At its height, the great drama of the performance, the intense emotion, and the crowd involvement bring the whole scene almost into chaos. The struggle always ends without a clear winner, but that is irrelevant. What is important is the way this theatrical event evokes from the Balinese the attitudes and emotions—a mixture of playfulness, exhibitionism, and fear—that are emblematic of their culture. In and through the turbulent, emotion-filled process of observing and joining this ritual, they experience a deep confirmation of their view of the world as an always uncertain struggle between the evil and the good. Further, these religious moods and motivations, fitted to the world View, carry over from the ceremony into the rest of society, giving all of Balinese life the features that set it apart from the lives led in other cultures.

Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 305 From all of this, we should be able to see again how unwise it is, in religion no less than any other sphere of culture, to leap toward quick general conclusions. Balinese religion is so distinctive, so specifically its own sort of thing, that there is hardly anything about it that we could turn into a general rule for all religions—other than the fact that all traditions somehow manage to combine, like the Balinese, both a world view and an ethos. Accordingly, as Geertz explains in his conclusion, any useful study of religion will always require a two-stage operation. One must first analyze the set of meanings found in the religious symbols themselves—a difficult task in itself. Then comes the even more difficult but equally important second stage: since the symbols are tightly connected to both the structures of the society and the psychology of its individual members, those connections must be traced along a continuous circuit of signals given, received, and returned. If we think of wires strung in a triangular configuration among three poles, one standing for symbol, another for society, and a third for individual psychology, we have a fitting image of the steady flow of influences and effects that pass among and through all three of these centers in any religious system.

Interpreting Religion: A Balinese Example If this is what Geertz’s approach to religion looks like on its theoretical side, what shape does it take when applied to actual cases? Although his writings on Bali, Java, and Morocco give us more than enough examples to choose from, we have Space here to consider just two: one, a short essay on religion in modern Bali, and the other, as noted, Gecrtz’s comparative study of Muslim culture in Indonesia and Morocco, published as Islam Observed (1968).

The article “ ‘Internal Conversion’ in Contemporary Bali” (1964) begins with an idea pr0posed (not surprisingly) by Max Weber. In one of his interesting comparative discussions (which we could only mention in our earlier chapter), Weber distinguishes between traditional and rationalized religions. We have already noticed the importance he attributes to the broad process of rationalization that has propelled the advances of Western civilization. Traditional religion, which is characteristic of primitive peoples, tends to gravitate toward magic and polytheism. The natural inclination in these “enchanted” cultures is to see divinity everywhere. There is a spirit in every rock and a ghost in every tree, while ritual, often with a magical purpose, frames almost every aspect of life. Primitive peoples find themselves so immersed in dealings with this spirit or that demon that they scarcely realize they even have such a thing as a reli— gion; such things are just what they always do.

Rationalized religion, by contrast, is what we find at the core of the great world religions. Though traditional elements are invariably included, Judaism and Christianity, as well as Confucianism and the Brahmin and Buddhist sages of India, all center attention on just one or a very few universal spiritual principles: the one God of the prophets, the Way of Nature, Brahman, the Supreme Spirit, or Nirvana (absolute nothingness). By a logic of one kind or another, rationalized religions execute a process of “abstraction,” lifting their ultimate being or cosmic principle above the little things of life. The effect of this “internal conversion” process is to leave ordinary life “disenchanted”—left bare of its helpful or spiteful little gods and the little ceremonies that connect people to them. Instead of these numerous everyday ceremonies and spells, rationalized religion offers everyone a single path to the divine, such as through mystical experience, which the sages of India taught, or through Judaism’s demand of obedience to the moral law. And in distinction from traditional cults, the followers of these rationalized religions are fully aware of what they are doing; they know quite self—consciously that they “have a religion.” They know, and are taught to know, that they are giving personal assent to an ordered system of teaching that embraces all of the world and life.12 Rationalized and traditional religions also differ in one other important respect: the way in which they deal with the great problems of life. Traditional religions, as Evans-Pritchard explained in the case of Zande witchcraft, address these great questions—what life means, why there is pain, why there is evil— in very particular, specific ways. They do not ask, “Why do people suffer?” They ask, “Why is my father sick?” And they look for very particular answers as well: “Father is sick because his enemy has used witchcraft.” Rationalized religions, however, always raise such questions to a cosmic scale; they include the whole world. In the case of suffering, they point not to a single witch but to Satan, who brought sin into the world, or to the dark, cool side of the Tao; they appeal, in short, to great realities that affect everyone.

Rationalized religions typically have appeared in periods of social upheaval, at those critical cultural moments when the local practices of magic and the traditional religions of field and village appear insufficient to meet the cultural and emotional demands placed on them. Christianity, for example, arose amid the great social turmoil caused in the ancient Mediterranean world by the rise and spread of Greco-Roman civilization. Confucianism appeared amid the chaos of China’s destructive ancient civil wars.

Granting the value of this broad conceptual framework, says Geertz, we can apply it to modern-day Bali. Anyone who approaches its culture with Weber’s contrasts in mind will at once notice several interesting things. Though in name it is Hindu, the religion of Bali is not the mysticism of India’s intellectuals but the everyday polytheism and mythology of its villagers; that is to say, it fits Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 307 Weber’s category of a traditional religion. There is in it almost no rationalized theology, whereas rituals and a sense of nearby divinity can be found every— where. There are thousands of temples in the landscape, and a person can belong to dozens of them at the same time. Often people have no idea which gods are worshipped in them, but for each one they insist that an appropriate ritual be performed exactly according to a set plan. The ceremonies, moreover, are also tightly woven into the social structure. Local priests who belong to the Brahmin caste find their high social rank reinforced by their special spiritual status; each “owns” a group of lower—caste followers who associate him with divinity, while he calls them his “clients.” In addition, one of the main enterprises of the various princes, kings, and lords on the island is to hold large— scale religious festivals, spectacles that require time-consuming labor, sometimes employing hundreds of peasants and other laborers. The ceremo— nies remind all people of their proper place on the social scale; the highborn host the celebrations, while the lowborn do the work. Finally, in the true manner of magical religions, the cult of death and witches, which we saw above in the dramatic combat of Rangda and Barong, penetrates to every aspect of Balinese life. Although over the years they have encountered both Christianity and Islam, the Balinese have never seriously considered conversion to either of these outside faiths. So their traditional religion has been able to survive the centuries largely untouched by the entry of any rationalized world religion.

As Geertz viewed it in 1964, however, Bali was an island confronted with dramatic social changes, many brought on by the coming of independence to all of Indonesia in 1949. Modern education, political consciousness, and improved communication had opened the channels of contact with the outside world. The growth of cities and of population had added to the pressure, so that what happened in ancient societies like the Roman empire when social turmoil brought the disenchantment 0f the world and the end of magical religion seems to have anticipated what was happening in modern Bali. If one were to look closely, in fact, it would seem that the people of modern Bali were at that very moment engaged in Weber’s process of internal conversion, transforming their traditional ways of worship into something that, gradually, was beginning to assume the features of a rationalized world religion. Geertz states that in the course of his fieldwork, he was particularly struck one evening when, at a funeral, an intense philosophical discussion of the meaning and purpose of religion broke out among certain young men of the town. Almost unknown in traditional cultures, such discussions are the hallmark of rationalized religion; yet here just such a vigorous exchange was taking place on the street in Bali. Almost as unheard of in a traditional situation is the development of scriptures, doctrines, religious literacy, and an organized priesthood. But there were signs that each of these things was now coming into Balinese culture. Interestingly, too, the nobles and princes, perhaps seeing their old privileges threatened by the coming of democratic government, had actually put themselves behind this initiative, hoping they could keep their status by being in the forefront of a new, more defined and self-conscious Balinese religion. The new movement, says Geertz, had only recently acquired the most visible badge of any rationalized faith: an organization. In opposition to the Indonesian government’s Muslim-dominated Ministry of Religion, Bali had recently chosen to establish its own, locally supported, purely Balinese ministry, which had assumed the task of certifying Brahmana priests and creating an authorized class of professional clergy.

In essence, Geertz explains, all of those processes and changes that Weber discovers behind the growth of the great rationalized religions of the world could be found in evidence on the island of Bali in the postwar era. Bali in 1964 seemed to stand where Rome did in the time of Jesus and China did in the days of Confucius. That being so, the question that comes naturally to mind is: Can any more general conclusions be drawn from Bali’s experience? Is there a theory to connect ancient Rome with modern Bali, and perhaps other places as well? Geertz does not propose one. What will happen in the future, he concedes, is something no one can predict. Nonetheless, if there is no theory, there is clearly much insight to be gained from general paradigms, and Ideal-types such as Weber’s, along with the promise that the case of Bali may help us further to apply and refine them. In conclusion Geertz observes, “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.”'3 Islam Observed Our second example of Geertz’s interpretive approach in action takes us into a larger subject, his comparison of two kinds of Islam. At the outset of Islam Observed (1968), he proposes, ambitiously enough, to lay out a “general frame— work for the comparative analysis of religion” and apply it to one faith, Islam, as it exists in the two quite different countries that his fieldwork enabled him to know best: Indonesia and Morocco.14 In addition to being Muslim, he notes, both of these cultures have in modern times passed through great social change. At one time traditional societies of rice farmers in the one case and herdsmen in the other, both became colonies of Western powers (the Dutch and the French) and have only recently won independence (Indonesia in 1949, Morocco in 1956). Religion, needless to say, has often been at the center of the social transformations that have come over both of these nations.

Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 309 The Classical Styles of lslam Morocco took shape as a Muslim nation during four important centuries from about 1050 to 1450 AD, when the society was dominated by aggressive tribesmen from the desert and strong-minded merchants in the towns. The two main figures in this culture were the warrior, or strongman, and the mystic, the Muslim holy man, who sometimes came together in the ideal form of the warrior-saint. Idris II, who built the city of Fez in the ninth century and was the first Moroccan king, cut such a figure; he was a fierce fighter and reformer who claimed direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Later in time, holy men so devout that they were known as “marabouts”—from the Arabic word murabit, “lashed” or “shackled” to God—attracted bands of followers who split the land into militant sects, each fiercely loyal to its sacred leader. In Indonesia, by contrast, Islam arrived later and took a different form. Long a prosperous farming culture whose abundant rice fields supported peasant, prince, and merchant alike, Indonesia had little use for the boldness and nerve that were key to survival in Morocco. The virtue prized above all was quiet diligence in the fields, a personality trait supported for centuries by Hindu- Buddhist ideals, which stressed meditation, inwardness, and personal composure. Not until the 13005 did Islam begin to reach the Indonesian islands, and then it came quietly through trading contacts and in a tolerant Indian form that allowed it to blend with the Hindu, Buddhist, and animist beliefs already in place. Indonesian Islam accordingly developed flexible features; it was “adaptive, absorbent, pragmatic, and gradualistic”——very different from the “uncompromising rigorism” and “aggressive fundamentalism” of Morocco.15 While the one evolved into something gradualist, liberal, and accommodating, the other took a shape that was perfectionist, puritanical, and uncompromising.

These characteristic religious attitudes, rigorous in the one case, relaxed in the other, Geertz calls “the classical styles” of Islam in each nation. Both are “mystical,” because they find religious truth through immediate contact with God, but there are significant differences, which Geertz explains through the stories of two legendary religious leaders. In Indonesia’s sacred legends, Sunan Kalidjaga is the hero said to have brought Islam to the island of Java. He was born into the court of a ruling family during the age of the great Hindu—Buddhist “theater states”—that is, at a time when the ruling classes, as members of the highest caste, were seen as the Spiritual elite of the country. In the royal and princely courts, elaborate religious ceremonies were held to demonstrate the political power and religious authority of the kings. As a young man, however, Kalidjaga cared little for religion until one day he met a Muslim mystic whose precious cane and jewels he tried to steal. The holy man only laughed at his foolish desire for material things and suddenly transformed a nearby banyan into a tree of gold, hung with jewels. Kalidjaga was so astounded by this miracle and the man’s indifference to wealth that he asked to become a Muslim as well, then proved his Islamic self-discipline by remaining in one place, in a state of obedient meditation, for an interval that stretched to several decades! He thus became a Muslim without ever seeing the Koran or visiting a mosque. Significantly, however, after embracing Islam, Kalidjaga did not abandon the theater-state culture of his childhood. Instead, he helped to establish a new royal city at Mataram, and there used his high personal position and the ceremonies of the king’s court to promote Islam, just as they once served the purposes of the older Hindu-Buddhist religion.

The legend of Kalidjaga is of course more than the tale of a man. It is the story of all Islam as it came to Indonesia, merged with the older religions, and adapted itself to the culture of the theater states. Such syncretism, or blending, of religions was very typical of Indonesia, but it did not last. It began to break down in the modern era, as Islam came to be the dominant faith of the mer— chants, whose power grew stronger, and as the Dutch, who arrived at the same time to colonize the islands, pushed the ruling class out of power. Under pres— sure from the European conquerors, the delicate mixed religion of these earlier days broke up into the three separate traditions—Hindu-Buddhist, Muslim, and native animist—that we find in Java today.

In a fashion similar to the case of Kalidjaga in Java, the features of Islam in Morocco can best be seen in the life of the Muslim holy man known as Sidi Lahsen Lyusi, one of the last of the marabouts, who lived in the 16003. Like the others, Lyusi too saw himself as “tied to God.” A wandering prophet, scholar, and pilgrim, he was a man of intense morality and great learning, a mighty figure who in Moroccan stories is revered as the saint who faced down a sultan. It happened that while a guest of none less than the Sultan Mulay Ismail, founder of the great Alawite dynasty, Lyusi one day began to insult his host by breaking all of the serving dishes in the palace. The purpose of this ungrateful display was in fact a noble one: a protest against the backbreaking labor the sultan imposed on his slaves. For this, the sultan expelled Lyusi from the palace and attempted later to kill him. But when he charged the holy man’s tent, his horse miraculously began to sink into the ground. At once the sultan admitted his wrongs, acknowledged Lyusi’s demand to be recognized as a holy man and a sherif, a descendant of the Prophet, and allowed him to go his way.

The quality that Lyusi triumphantly demonstrated in this confrontation was baraka: a kind of spiritual charisma. His supernatural power to stop the sultan’s horse was a sure sign that he possessed this divine blessing. Further, Islam’s other way of proving one’s authority is to be accepted as a sherif. Even though Lyusi performed a miracle, he required that the sultan recognize in him this second proof of his holiness as well. We thus find centered in this one holy Religion as Cultural System: Clzfiora' Geertz 311 man the great question that faced all of Islam in Morocco: How is the spokes— man for God to be known? Does baraka come simply through a holy man’s personal charisma and miraculous powers? Or must one be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad? Or are both required? In the tension between these two principles, Geertz explains, we can see one of the key issues that animated Moroccan Islamic culture throughout its history. Over time, the ruling families of the country established descent from the Prophet as the dominant principle, but the appeal of baraka—as expressed in the charismatic qualities of holiness, moral intensity, and wonder-working power—never disappeared. It remained very much alive in various cults of the saints and—significantly for later history——in popular opinion. The people tended to hold that the sultan should possess both qualities: personal religious charisma and descent from the Prophet’s line. As a result, both heredity and Spirituality had to be in evidence to speak or act with divine authority.

In both Indonesia and Morocco, then, the classical styles of Islam are “mystical”; they try to bring people into the immediate presence of God. But the stories of the Muslim saints show how different in form even mystical Islam can be. The passive “illuminationist” mysticism of Kalidjaga stands in sharp contrast to the aggressive “maraboutist” piety of Lyusi. To borrow from Geertz’s own definition, the religions of Indonesia and Morocco, though both Islamic, show decidedly different “moods and motivations.” On the Indonesian side, there is “inwardness, imperturbability, patience, poise, sensibility, aestheticism, elitism, and an almost obsessive self-effacement...; on the Moroccan side, activism, fervor, impetuosity, nerve, toughness, moralism, populism, and an almost obsessive self-assertion.”l6 The Scripturalist Revolt Whatever these differences, Islamic Indonesia and Morocco have in recent times both had to cope with two major challenges: colonial rule and the coming of modernization. In both lands the high point of colonial domination fell roughly in the century between 1820 and 1920. And in both, this experience made people distinctly more aware that they were Muslim while their Christian masters were not. Islam became identified with protest, nationalism, and the hope of independence. In the process, however, the faith itself began to change. The classical styles—Indonesian illuminationism and Moroccan maraboutism—found themselves under challenge from a powerful new movement that claimed to be very old. This was “scripturalist” Islam.

In the case of Indonesia, this scripturalist revolt took shape in the 18005, at the high point of Dutch control and at a time when national sentiment turned strongly against colonial powers. Inspired by new opportunities for pilgrimage to Mecca, Indonesians began to discover in Arabia a different, more rigorous and militant Islam, which soon came to be taught in newly founded schools. In these santri (Javanese for “religious student”) institutions, the older and more flexible illuminationist Islam was pushed aside to make room for the “purer,” original tradition, which centered on the example of the Prophet, the first caliphs, and above all the literal truth of every word in the Koran. Mosque and marketplace, moreover, were always natural allies; so in the growing number of trading centers throughout Indonesia, this new, scripture-based Islam rapidly spread, all the while contributing its strength to a growing nationalism and the cause of resistance to colonial rule. Interestingly, says Geertz, at almost the very same moment, scripturalism also made its appearance in Morocco. Known as the cause of the Salafi, or “righteous ancestors,” and led by fierce, passionate nationalists such as Allal Al-Fassi, this new movement had by 1900 come into open conflict with the older style of maraboutist—or “holy man”—Islam. As in Indonesia, these new scripturalists opposed both French foreign rule and the earlier classical Muslim style.

Scripturalist Islam in both Indonesia and Morocco thus provides a background to the struggle for national independence that engaged both countries throughout the middle years of the twentieth century. This struggle can be followed in the careers of the two national leaders at the time, Sultan Muhammad V in Morocco and President Sukarno in Indonesia. Muhammad V rode to power on the strength of the nationalism inspired by the scripturalist revolution in his country. Personally devout as he was, Muhammad V found himself nonetheless uneasy with the fundamentalism of the scripturalists. He preferred the olderstyle maraboutist Islam, which recognized the sultan as the chief holy man of the country. When, in the course of the 1950s, the French took a number of unpopular measures, Muhammad V refused to be their puppet and resisted. He was deposed and exiled, but two years later managed to return in triumph as head of the new, independent Moroccan state. In Muslim eyes, his defiance and devotion were clear proof of divine favor; he had shown the same baraka as Lyusi, and he measured up fully to the prized maraboutist ideal of the warrior-saint. Nonetheless, says Geertz, it is hard to see his success in uniting the old religious ideals with the new postcolonial age as anything more than a holding action against the running tide of scripturalist fervor.

Sukarno’s story in Indonesia is a less happy one, since it ends with his overthrow by the military in 1965. Yet in the long struggle that he led from the 19203 to the year of independence in 1949 and then as president of the new nation, we can see a similar mix of religious and political concerns. Sensitive to the religious diversity of his people and resisting both communism on the left and the Muslim scripturalists on the right, he tried to unify all parties with his famous Pantjasila (Five—Point) Creed: nationalism, humanitarianism, Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 313 democracy, social justice, monotheism. When this eventually failed, he made a last effort at unity that seemed to turn the clock back to the time of the hero Kalidjaga. He tried to revive in modern form the ancient “theater state,” building the world’s largest mosque, a colossal sports stadium, and a national mon— ument. He also instituted a number of grand state ceremonies.

In the last analysis, both Sukarno and Muhammad V knew well the power of religion in their societies; both sought to harness it constructively to the national cause. Significantly, both decided that an Islam of the classic rather than scripturalist style offered the best hope of success. Just as significantly, neither was completely successful. Although Muhammad V achieved more than Sukarno, Geertz claims that in neither case could the older forms of faith survive unchanged in the modern circumstance.