A Roseberry Future
Both treat, [Harris and Geertz], culture as product and not as production…[in which] both have removed culture from the process of cultural creation and have therefore made possible the constant reproduction of an antimony between the material and the ideal.
Essentially, Roseberry believes that Geertz himself has reduced culture into a narrowing view of textual analysis—and “deep plays.” And, that Harris’s cultural materialism is too reliant on outside “social forces” that are swelled up from the infrastructure, structure, and superstructure of culture, he quotes Harris:
The starting point of all sociocultural analysis for cultural materialism is simply the existence of an etic human population located in etic time and space. A society for us is a maximal social group consisting of both sexes and all ages and exhibiting a wide range of interactive behavior. Culture, on the other hand, refers to the learned repertory of thoughts and actions exhibited by the members of social groups (p. 19).
Therefore culture is a by product of production that has been reduced to, as he says, “Set of ideas, or less imaginatively, ‘a learned repertory of thoughts and actions.’” And, not “simultaneously see as production.” Roseberry perspective believes that Geertz has done this as well, but from the aspect of textual idealism. He accuses Geertz as being “elegant and elusive” in his “prose.” In essence, Roseberry is criticizing Geertz’s ability to write. In so being that, Geertz’s ability to convey the narrative of a culture at large draws in the reader to his brand of idealism. Roseberry says of Geertz that
Unfortunately, at no point does he say what he means as clearly and rigorously as does Harris. Instead he places his definitions in more elegant and elusive prose. For example: ‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs….’
This is apparently too “flowery” for Roseberry, and not firm enough in science as a definition of what culture is and how one view its production of the culture at large. Geertz’s view then for Roseberry is too much of the emic viewing of culture and too little objectiveness. Thus, for Geertz he sees culture as expansive and not reductionist, in which he says:
Culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulder of those whom they properly belong (p 531).
In other words, the viewing of culture has been primarily viewed from the etic view of the anthropologist trying to explain how humans behave in various environments, relationships, kinships, and adaptations of their perception of their viewing of the world. This “over the shoulder” perspectives limits anthropologist’s viewing. It is similar to a person seating in the backseat of a car telling the driver how to drive, when their view of the roadway is restricted. Therefore anthropology for Geertz must be seen through emic perspective, first through the eyes of the anthropologist acknowledging his own biases and introspections; and, then from the native viewer, through the guise of compilation and testimony. It is thus function of the anthropologist to bare witness, in a sense of a local historian, to incorporate themselves into the community that they are viewing. For instance, when Geertz went to study the Balinese, he writes of his and his wife’s experience the first few weeks there. How they felt like non-entities and “did not exist” to the people of Bali. It was until they behaved like natives, if you will, that they are seen as “human.” He recounts his adventure of him and his wife running away, like the natives, and behaving “gracefully,” when authority came to question them and their benefactors, who they were having “tea” with, of what they were doing there, after a cockfight had been raided up the road.
The natives found it quite amusing, but it also gave him away to be accepted within the community, he says:
In Bali, to be teased is to be accepted. It was the turning point so far as our relationship to the community was concerned, and we were quite literally “in.” The whole village opened up to us….Getting caught, almost caught, in a vice raid is perhaps not a very generalizable recipe for achieving that mysterious necessity of anthropological fieldwork, rapport, but for me it worked very well (p. 513).
Geertz continues, as he concludes his, “Deep Play: Notes in the Balinese Cockfight”
Functionalism lives, and so does psychologism. But to regard such forms as “saying something of something” and saying it to somebody, is at least to open up the possibility of analysis which attends to their subsistence rather than to reductive formulas professing to account for them (p 531).
In other words, culture is a narrative that runs deep; it is “shared” and is “sharing.” It is on the reflection, in which, the individual and individuals tempers reality into focus. To borrow a term from Victor Turner, it is the liminal moment when reality catches up to reality and crosses over. And, this is where Roseberry’s overall focus on Geertz’s textual analysis misses the point.
Admittedly, Geertz did not include all members of the society, such as women and children, this makes for a valid point. However, in describing Balinese cockfighting, what Geertz has done is tell the story of the adult males and how they view their culture. Albeit, a bit sexist, it is instructive in how the Balinese adapted to colonization by the Dutch in order to continue their “traditions” of cultural symbols and perceptions of how they viewed themselves in regards to material world; and, how that adaptation placed another layer of cultural text within the “ensemble” of the culture itself. For instance, “the enthusiasts” (of the cockfight) understands the rational of cockfighting. In that, like his description in “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory,” where winks and blinks can be conspiratorial, the “enthusiast” of cockfighting understands the structural sense of the cockfight; they intuit the melodrama, of the prestige, of the status, and use of gambling (and its role it plays) as opposed to the “addictive gambler.” In the cultural aspect of the cockfight class status seems to play a similar role in separating the have’s—and—the have—not’s in the sense of the cultural materialism, Geertz says:
Like any art form… the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have their practical consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived (p. 526).
Nevertheless, materialism is not the driving for the Balinese culture, according to Geertz, it the cockfight that achieves form of status. “Status gambling” and “money gambling,” which are not the same in Balinese culture, are adjoined as sociomoral code within the Balinese culture in how they view their perception of power that resides within their culture and community.
This is another criticism of Roseberry, via Raymond Williams, where he espouses that power is reflected in the “hegemony” of a class structure, but the antimony of materialism and idealism draws out these differences in how they view the overall template of their societies. Roseberry then infers that, “Dominant and emergent cultures are formed in a class-based social world, but they are not necessarily congruent with class division.” Or put another way, different strokes for different folks. It is as if Roseberry is trying to find a balance between idealism and materialism, and he dislikes the narrative in which Geertz’s textual analysis is deployed, and the coldness of materialism which is reliant too reliant of abject objectivity. And, this is the point of Geertz’s textual analysis, and the point that Roseberry misses, and which Taylor and Rebel expand upon that cultures are multifaceted, multidimensional, and multi-narrative, in which cultures reveal themselves and it is the purpose of the anthropologist to reveal as many layers or levels as possible, and in truth the seduction and future of anthropology
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