How can we explain the success of Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) in American sociology? On rereading Geertz today, it strikes me that we cannot only point to the limits of Parsonian accounts of values and the lack of culture elsewhere in the discipline at the time to understand why such relatively concept-free and eclectic essays could become the placeholder for “culture” in some circles.
To make Geertz central to the project of cultural sociology must have meant to ignore other resources that in theory should have been available. To the conditions of possibility of “Geertzism” in sociology mentioned above, we should thus add a certain othering of social constructionism and microsociology by proponents of the strong programme in American Cultural Sociology,1 a lack of consideration of alternative, earlier forms of hermeneutics, and a seeming lack of access to the writings of the sociological classics and, more particularly, to the work of Max Weber.
In what follows, I pursue a critical understanding of Geertzism in sociology in the context of the alternatives occluded within it. If Geertz was successful partly because of the ambiguity of his work, this ambiguity is not perfectly open. The celebration of Geertz in sociology is a symptom and has risked being a cause of a very selective interpretation of the history of the humanities and of sociology itself within sociology.
I hope to make the case that such a critical understanding of Geertzism is relevant also to those sociologists who are not particularly interested in the strong programme in American cultural sociology or even in American sociology in general. What is at stake is a sense of the range of options for cultural analysis, how interpretation is defined, what it is defined against, and whether and how it is possible to combine interpretation with observation and critique in the sense of situating social phenomena within the range of possibilities for how things could be otherwise.
2 “Interpretation” in Weber’s Answer to Dilthey
Geertz cites Weber and is seen to presuppose Weber. But his dialogue with Weber is very selective and not taken forward in terms of the cultural sociology that Weber had already developed. As a consequence, when Geertzism in sociology goes back to Dilthey what is also not considered is Weber’s answer to Dilthey.
When I reread Weber and Geertz side by side today, it does seem that the celebration of Geertz by trained sociologists must have meant that the way to Weber was cut off. In this case, however, unlike with the broader context of debates in the German humanities I sketched above, the issue surely was not a lack of access. Rather, the overclaiming of Weber by everyone and anyone may have acted as a barrier. Perhaps given Parsons’ claiming of Weber, Geertz’s reference to Weber was somewhat polemical in the first place. Indeed, Weber was claimed by almost everyone, including many who were not particularly interested in cultural sociology or issues of interpretation.
Weber, who is well-aware of Dilthey’s work, rejects and transcends the opposition between interpretation and observation that is important to Dilthey and this is important for how we understand interpretative research today (Brown, 1990). We can note here that Weber takes meanings very seriously but also observes and indeed observes at the same time as he interprets: we can speak of charismatic authority, for example, because it is in principle possible to observe people running after Jesus and because we can produce accountable attempts to reconstruct the meanings associated with Jesus and the act of running after him. We can then compare both aspects to other types of authority guided by meanings and look across history for these different types.
Some of Geertz’s scepticism towards typologising makes sense in the context of his dialogues with other anthropologists, who had at times been overenthusiastic. But speaking among sociologists, his assertion “I am more interested in the sociology of religion, than types of faith” (Geertz & Micheelsen, 2002, p. 5) is also somewhat paradoxical. And in this context, for Geertz to suggest that Weber couldn’t decide between science and cultural analysis (“the discussion about Weber is of course whether he really believed in a social science with a scientific approach to culture, or if he believed in an interpretive one” [ibidem]) is precisely to substitute a very unsubtle demand to take sides for a serious engagement with Weber’s answers to Dilthey and others.
There are reasons why a simplistic opposition between “experimental science” and “interpretative science” would have served Geertz well, and related but to some extent separate reasons for why such an opposition seemed attractive to sociologists. For the sociologists who are understandably frustrated with some of the scientism in the field, the Dilthey-Gadamer-Ricoeur-Geertz line allows a selective appropriation of the humanities without much engagement with research in the humanities themselves and with an often quite stark loss in the subtlety of the interpretation that is provided.
I think it is fair to say that we sociologists have tended to be worse custodians of the research heritage of the humanities than Geertz and Geertzian anthropologists, because we have reminded each other less that we should also be seriously engaged with “the local” or with “cultures” in the plural. This has been exacerbated in the early stages of the strong programme in American Cultural Sociology by a tendency of combining the historicist-positivism of Dilthey with a claim to causal analysis, showing again and again that culture matters vis-a-vis other factors.
Compared to Weber, this has often entailed a separation of cultural analysis from history, from practices and from other factors that causality has to be proven against. It also precludes critique in the meaning given to it in the humanities, of which Weber retains traces in his program of explicating the “so-und-nicht-anders-Gewordenseins der Welt” [“world’s being historically this way and not otherwise] (Weber, 1985).
3 A Fuller Range of Options for Cultural Research
What Geertz shares with the older traditions in the humanities, which I discuss here, is a holistic concept of culture (but see Paidipaty, 2020). This notion of culture played a productive role for the establishment of the humanities, providing a target for scholarly efforts, which could be pursued at some remove from instrumental concerns and evolutionary schemas. But alongside other problems with different versions, the concept has been in the way of developing a vocabulary of socio-cultural forms and with that, in the way of fully combining the humanities’ notion of critique with sociological concerns.
Geertz emphasises local performance and the specific objects of cultural practice, but interpretation always lead back to the whole. The precise relationship between these two poles in Geertz is contested with some saying there is too much contingency (Alexander, 1987) and some saying he is a functionalist, others admiring the dialectic between them (Alexander, 2008, p. 159). In any case, Geertz does not contribute by offering concepts for everything that is in between the part and the whole.
I have tried to argue that it is not necessary to oppose interpretation and attention to meaning with observation. To fully pursue interpretation, observation and critical classification within sociology we need to move beyond hermeneutics in the humanities and holistic cultural sociology by paying attention to a range of intermediary socio-cultural forms, which are interpreted and observed with a view to the interpretations that are a part of them. This is a project with a strong basis in classical sociological theory which today can draw from efforts in a range of theoretical traditions if and when they allow themselves to be part of a multi-paradigmatic discussion.
References
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Alexander, one if not the key architect of Geertzism, rejects microsociology as “individualist” (Alexander, 1987). This hostility is not shared by Geertz himself (Geertz, 2002, p. 4; Cossu, 2021, p. 364). The dogmatism in parts of the micro-sociological tradition will also have contributed to the initial lack of dialogue across cultural approaches in sociology.↩︎