Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973

I. The Problem of Specifying the Concept of Culture

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to
demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. 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, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law
but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing
social expressions on their surface enigmatical. P. 5.

II. The Arbitrariness of Symbols, the Consequent Need for Interpretation and the
Problem of Conflicting Meaning Systems

Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of significationwhat Ryle called established
codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much
like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary criticand
determining their social ground and import. Here, in our text, such sorting would begin
with distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredient in the situation,
Jewish, Berber, and FrenchWhat tripped Cohen up, and with him the whole, ancient
pattern of social and economic relationships within which he functioned, was a confusion
of tongues. P. 9

Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of construct a reading of) a
manuscriptforeign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and
tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in
transient examples of shaped behavior. P. 10

III: Against EthnoscienceInterpretation is not psychology

Culture is public because meaning is. You cant wink (or burlesque one)( without
knowing what counts as winkingBut to draw from such truths the conclusion that
knowing how to wink is winking and know how to steal a sheep is sheep raiding is to
betray as deep a confusion as, taking thin description for thick, to identify winking with
eyelid contractions or sheep raiding with chasing woolly animals out of pastures. P. 12

IV: The problem of how to appraise different interpretations

We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in
any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that.
We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much
more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only
with strangers, than is commonly recognized.Looked at in this way, the aim of
anthropology is the enlargement of the univejrse of human discourse. P. 13-14
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culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or
processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be
intelligiblythat is, thicklydescribed. P. 14

The claim to attention of an ethnographic account does not rest on its authors ability ot
capture primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home like a mask or a
carvingthe determining questionis whether it sorts winks from twitches and real
winks from mimicked ones. It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically
thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against
the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.
It is not worth it, as Thoreau said, to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
P. 16

V: Against Abstracting Culture from Social Action (and against Levi-Struass):

As in any discourse, code does not determine conduct, and what was actually said need
not have been. P. 18

To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity in
which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autogenous principles of
order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a priori weltanschauungen, is to
pretend a science that does not exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found. Cultural
analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing
explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of
Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape. P. 20

VI: The Problem of Microscopic Studies: Jonesville-is-the-USA and Easter-Island-is-a-
Test-Case

The locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists dont study villagesthey
study in villages. P. 22

The methodological problem which the microscopic nature of ethnography presents is
both real and critical. But it is not to be resolved by regarding a remote locality as the
world in a teacup or as the sociological equivalent of a cloud chamber. It is to be
resolvedor, anyway, decently kept at bayby realizing that social actions are
comments on more than themselves; that where an interpretation comes from does not
determine where it can be impelled to go. Small facts speak to large issues, winks to
epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they made to. P. 23

VII: The Limitations of Theory with a Capital T

there are a number of characteristics of cultural interpretation which make the
theoretical development of it more than usually difficult. The first is the need for theory
to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give
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themselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be
effective in anthropology; longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic
bemusements with formal symmetry. P. 24

one cannot write a General Theory of Cultural Interpretation. Or, rather, one can,
but there appears to be little profit in it, because the essential task of theory building here
is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to
generalize across cases but to generalize within them. P. 26

VIII: The Essential Incompleteness of Interpretation

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it
goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its
most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify
the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. P.
29.

There is an Indian storyat least I heard it as an Indian storyabout an Englishman
who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an
elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an
ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And
that turtle? Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down. P. 28-29.

Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is
marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets
better is the precision with which we vex each other. P. 29

The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest
questions, but to make available to us answer that others, guarding other sheep in other
valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has
said. P. 30.