Geertz Smeertz

Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz died not long ago. The next day one of my profs sent a note to the religion and culture email list that was dripping with sadness. Something like: Clifford Geertz died last night (with a link to an article)...I thought you would want to know".

Now, I'm not one for undermining human dignity, but my mind went to Steven Lewis and kids with AIDs in Africa (kids with AIDs period - cut the colonial melodrama Andrew), and I thought -- yeah religious studies (the old guard anyway) has succumbed to a type of a political neo-romanticism. A friend of mine says they're all hippies who can't help reverting...I wonder. Anyway, they are retiring and their idols are, well, cashing in on the big pension in the sky...

When I was studying English, I was enamored with Michael Winter's One Last Good Look, a pseudo-fictional glance at Newfoundland, which was highly influenced by thick description. My wife was studying social theory, and I had a new jewel in my mouth - Geertz. High on a pedestal. I thought thick description was divine revelation, and Geertz was some sort of Gabreel.

A good prof of mine, ole (level headed) R. Mas burst that bubble. Sent us home to read Talal Asad on Geertz. Asad claims that Geertz reduces all life to text, leaving anthropology in a bit of a quagmire - having no person left to act (I've re-read Asad - his complaint about Geertz is more nuanced then I have portrayed it. It has more to do with Geertz' naivety about knowledge-power relations in pre-modern Christianity and contemporary Islam. Geertz' is influenced by protestant views on belief, separation of church and state and power in general). I tend to agree. After Asad, Geertz is dead.

Anyway, H. and I were going over Geertz' definition of religion for the upcoming comprehensive exam. If you don't know it already, here you are:

[A 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 (Geertz 1985: 4).

I was struck by what an absurd definition this was for an anthropologist to write. The system acts while the people have no agency. Their moods and motivations are implanted in them (similar to Foucault here) from an anthropomorphic system which formulates order clothed in an aura of factuality (clearly the natives are deluded)* and convinces the poor sods of some foolish mobile in the sky.

And the icing on the cake: this was considered science...

I call it poetry, and bad poetry at that.

[I realize that I may sound like a champion of science...I'm not. Nor do I disparage poets -- except perhaps Keats and Christopher Dewdney -- I'm just struck by the childish language games that are played in the social sciences about religion. But you know what? I still like Geertz' concept of deep play in the Balinese cockfighting article; however, I'm done with his definition of religion.]

* Asad critiques Geertz thus: "The paradox results from an ambiguous phenomenology in which reality is as once the distance of an agent's social perspective from the truth, measurable only by the privileged observer, and also the substantive knowledge of a socially constructed world available to both agent and observer, but to the latter only through the former" (52). This, Zizek would claim, is possibility of subjectivity - that representation and object are unequal.