Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz

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СКАЧАТЬ Referring to some recent discussions of my own (having to do, among other things, with the Balinese sense of self, which has—as I think you can gather from my text—a certain high peculiarity about it), he wondered how far this basic assumption was in fact valid. On the one hand, he seemed shaken in his confidence that the culturally distant was so readily available and doubted even whether he had, after all, really been able simply to understand, much less put to use, an Icelandic saga about a countryman’s gift of a bear to one king which another king coveted, through the customary device of putting himself in the countryman’s shoes. But, on the other, he seemed resolute, stubborn even, in his faith that however alien another people’s modes of thought and feeling might be, they were somehow connectible to the way we live now. He remained convinced that he could bring those Columbia students at least somewhat closer to Jane Austen, or perhaps more exactly, could expose to them how close, in some things anyway, they already were.

      Though this is not precisely the most comfortable position, nor even a wholly coherent one, it is, I think, the only one that can be effectively defended. The differences do go far deeper than an easy men-are-men humanism permits itself to see, and the similarities are far too substantial for an easy other-beasts, other-mores relativism to dissolve. Both literary critics and anthropologists—at least literary critics such as Trilling, still possessed, as he says, of the primitive belief that there is such a thing as life itself; and anthropologists such as myself, who think that society comes to more than behavior—pursue their vocations haunted by a riddle quite as irresolvable as it is fundamental: namely, that the significant works of the human imagination (Icelandic saga, Austen novel, or Balinese cremation) speak with equal power to the consoling piety that we are all like to one another and to the worrying suspicion that we are not.

      If we turn back to the Helms text, as well as to the sorts of “life itself it in some way refracts—the indigenous one toward which it reaches, the intrusive one out of which it arises, and the separated one from which we apprehend it—this deep equivocality emerges in virtually every line. As we read it, a series of instabilities—instabilities of perspective, of meaning, of judgment—is set up, the one pressing hard upon the next, leaving us, in the end, not quite sure where we stand, what position we wish to take up toward what is being said to us, and indeed uncertain about just what has been said.

      Some of these instabilities are, so to speak, intra-Balinese; they inhere in the structure of the ritual as such, form its theme and comprise its meaning. The conjunction (to which I have already alluded, and Helms, in struck wonder, keeps dazedly remarking) of an extravagant intensification of sensuous drama, an explosion of florid symbols and cabalic images, and a no less extravagant celebration of the quieter beauties of personal obliteration, a chaste hymn to annihilation, is, of course, only the most prominent of these. On the one hand, eleven-storey spangled towers, flowered arrows shot into fabric snakes, purple and gold coffins shaped as lions, incense, metallaphones, spices, flames; on the other, charred bones, entranced priests, somnambulant widows, affectless attendants, dissociate crowds, eerie in their picnic calm. Cocteau’s aesthetic coupled with Beckett’s.

      But beyond the instabilities the rite in itself contains (narrowly contains, as a matter of fact—something, along with its gravedigger humor, our text rather fails to convey), there are also those set up in the collision between all this and the bundle of presumptions and predilections brought to it by an unusually broad-minded but hardly culture-free nineteenth-century Danish sea-clerk. He is, as countless intruders into the masque-world of Bali have been since, hopelessly bewitched by the soft loveliness of what he sees. Those virescent terraces, those slippery paths, those gay dresses, those cataracts of long black hair—all still seduce the coldest eye, and they addle the romantic one altogether. Yet his outrage at what this gorgeous ceremoniousness is actually producing in the real world, or, anyway, the real world as a Jutland apothecary’s son conceives it—“three women, guiltless of any crime” suffering “the most horrible of deaths” for “affection’s sake, and in the name of religion”—is not only unsuppressible, it disarranges his whole reaction.

      The confusion of high artistry and high cruelty he thus confronts, a confusion Baudelaire would have relished and Artaud later on in fact did, is to him so shaking that it leaves him uncertain as to what sort of beings these gorgeously decorated pyrophiles marching about clanging gongs and waving pennants really are: “they looked little enough like savages”; “the surroundings bore an impress of plenty, peace and happiness, and, in a measure, of civilization.” His aesthetic sensibility, an extremely powerful one, going one way, and his moral, more than its match, the other, he has great difficulty deciding what properly to feel: the women are deluded, their courage magnificent; the preparations are ghastly, the silent plunges breathtaking; the rite a cruel superstition, the spectacle one never to be forgotten; the crowd is kindly, gay, graceful, polite, and unmoved by the sight of three young women burned living to a crisp. All the familiar predicates seem to be getting in one another’s way. Whatever relations beauty, truth, and goodness might have to one another in this cloud of smoke and sacrifice, they are, surely, not those of post-Napoleonic Scandinavia.

      They are not those of post-World War II America either, or not at least those of the right-thinking part of it. In a twist any true connoisseur of the modern earnestness led in beyond its depth must surely savor, Helms (having both drawn us toward the ritual by dwelling on its grace and propelled us away from it by dwelling on its terror) turns it, via an outcry against the oppression of women, into an argument for imperialism. It is in extirpating such foul plagues—foul and splendid—as this that the West earns its credentials to conquer and transform the East. The English in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, and presumably the Belgians, the French, and the rest where they are, are right and justified in replacing ancient civilizations with their own, for they are on the side of mercy and emancipation, against deception and cruelty. In the space of a few paragraphs, we get some of the most thoroughly entrenched tropes of the liberal imagination (an imagination, I’d best confess, I more or less share)—the cultural integrity of “simpler” peoples, the sacredness of human life, the equality of the sexes, and the coercive character of imperial rule—struck off against one another in a way that can only leave us at least unsettled. To have moved from the magic garden of the dreaming Orient to the white man’s burden, Gauguin’s world to Kipling’s, so rapidly and with such fine logic is but the last imbalancing blow the text delivers. It is not only the Balinese and Helms who seem morally elusive when we finish this remarkable account. So, unless we are willing to settle for a few embroidery mottoes of the eating-people-is-wrong variety, do we.

      The case is general. For all the peculiarities here involved, the decentering of perception the Balinese cremation generates as it is worked through first, second, third, and nth order interpretations, coming from all sorts of directions and going all which ways, is characteristic of any imaginative construction powerful enough to interest anyone beyond its immediate audience. (And, indeed, if it is not powerful enough to do that it probably will not have an immediate audience.) Such a construction has a career, and one itself imaginative, for it consists of a set of encounters with other such constructions, or rather with consciousnesses informed by them. Whatever role it comes to play in the lives of individuals and groups removed in either space or time from the social matrix that brought it forth is an outcome of that career. The truth of the doctrine of cultural (or historical—it is the same thing) relativism is that we can never apprehend another people’s or another period’s imagination neatly, as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering glosses that connect us to it but through them. Professor Trilling’s nervousness about the epistemological complacency of traditional humanism is not misplaced. The exactest reply to it is James Merrill’s wrenching observation that life is translation, and we are all lost in it.

      II

      Whatever use the imaginative productions of other peoples—predecessors, ancestors, or distant cousins—can have for our moral lives, then, it cannot be to simplify them. The image of the past СКАЧАТЬ