The Interpretation of Cultures

In Chapter 2, Geertz demonstrates how the concept of culture as a complex set of symbols lends understanding to the concept of humanity. He also discusses how culture acts as a control mechanism undergirded by particularity. 

Geertz points out that the concept of culture developed by classic anthropologists was connected to the dominant view of human nature from the Enlightenment idea that human nature is organized and unchanging. Although anthropology has attempted to depart from this view, it often construes variance as “mere accretions, distortions even, overlaying and obscuring what is truly human—the constant, the general, the universal” (35), rather than being significant to human nature. This persistent belief in homogeneity implies that there is a standardized humanity against which all deviations can be measured. It also implies that there is some invariable, single essence that defines humankind.

In reaction to Enlightenment era thought, an alternative view emerged in anthropology: “what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that it is inseparable from them” (35). While this view seemingly embraces variability, it does so in ways that Geertz finds inadequate— its cultural relativism and cultural evolutionism continue to emphasize the universal instead of the particular. Geertz critiques cultural relativism for stratifying "biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors” (37) as separate and autonomous layers of human life. This linear configuration, where biology is the lowest, foundational level and culture is the outermost layer, endeavors to establish a “consensus of all mankind” (38)—an idea that again counterproductively hearkens to Enlightenment thinking, with a slight difference:

For the eighteenth century image of man as the naked reasoner that appeared when he took his cultural costumes off, the anthropology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries substituted the image of man as the transfigured animal that appeared when he put them on (38).

The search for universals and empirical uniformities in anthropology relies on relating those universals and uniformities to “established constants of human biology, psychology, and social organizations” (38). This fails to establish and sustain the dualism between the universal and the variable that anthropology seeks for several reasons.

First, there is a logical conflict in claims about the universal. For a cultural feature to be empirically universal, the contents of the feature must be the same, but differences across what anthropologists consider universal make universal claims so generalized as to be meaningless. Geertz proposes instead that anthropologists avoid this cultural relativism by “facing directly and fully the diversities of human culture” (41) and “embracing them within the body of one's concept of man” (41). Here, Geertz demonstrates a logical consistency with his claims in Chapter 1 that anthropology should enlarge the universe of human discourse, not by creating vague generalities and abstractions, but by paying attention to the microscopic particularities that provide deeper understanding of the conversation. 

Second, separating the levels in the stratigraphic approach means that any attempt to bring the levels together happens by connecting cultural phenomena to “invariant points of reference” (41) in the social, psychological, and biological levels. The problem here is the levels have no defined interconnection; their relationships are merely correlations, “analogies, parallelisms, suggestions, and affinities” (43). For Geertz, it would be more useful to have an integrated approach that includes the cultural, social, psychological, and biological as different variables in a single frame of analysis, rather than distinct levels. Geertz argues that cultural analysis is not a linear endeavor. Understanding culture as a web of meaning requires a holistic perspective that gives light to networks of connection.

A holistic view, then, is found not in universals, but in specificities that reveal what it means to be human. Thus, the third reason the stratigraphic model is inadequate is its reliance on “the notion that the essence of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those features of human culture that are universal rather than those that are distinctive to this people or that” (43). According to Geertz, what is critical to science is whether phenomena “can be made to reveal the enduring natural processes that underlie them” (44). An integrative approach that looks at the relationships among diverse phenomena is required to draw clues about the concept of humanity from cultural analysis. 

Geertz dismisses cultural evolutionism as inadequate and proposes instead to view culture as a set of control mechanisms—humans depend upon these control mechanisms to order their behavior. Control mechanism theory assumes that human thought consists of the transmission of symbols, and that these symbols are a given: Although there may be additions, subtractions, or alterations to symbols throughout one’s life, the symbols nonetheless allow people to orient themselves within their experience; without these symbols, human experience would have no shape. With the addition of the control factor, Geertz builds on his earlier definition of culture as a web of meaning by suggesting that the specificity of the web is essential for human life, rather than ornamental or tangential.

Three recent developments in anthropology support the idea that culture is a control mechanism on which humans depend. One is the shift from the older view that biological evolution and cultural development occurred sequentially, to the view that cultural development and biological evolution occurred interdependently in a positive interactive feedback loop. Two is the discovery that the most dramatic evolutionary change occurred in the human central nervous system because of the body’s interaction with the system of symbolic meanings. This implies that humans’ biological evolution and separation from protohumans does not exist without culture. Three is the idea that what molds humans and sets them apart from nonhumans is not their capacity for learning, but rather the particular things they must learn—what Geertz defines as culture. Therefore, specificity matters because only a particular set of symbols transforms basic innate capacities to precise behaviors. Geertz’s asserts that specificity is the key to understanding the concept of humanity. 

Drawing the chapter to a close, Geertz returns to parallels between Enlightenment and classical anthropology: In their attempt to construct an archetypal human, they render difference and variance as a deviation from a normative, unchanging type. However, understanding the variance is key to understanding humans:

When seen as a set of symbolic devices for controlling behavior, extrasomatic sources of information, culture provides the link between what men are intrinsically capable of becoming and what they actually, one by one, in fact become. Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms of which we give form, order, point, and direction to our lives (52).

Cultural patterns are specific, so humanity is determined by particularity. Thus, anthropology requires moving beyond a search for similarities and types and into “the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals within each culture” (53). That means searching not for a singular essence, but rather for multiplicity, which enlarges the universe of human discourse and paves the path to the theories sought out by scientific study.