among themselves recede into the background, frozen through conduit thinking into the symbols from which the anthropologist generates his or her meanings. The anthropologist’s performance of code cracking occupies center stage; the dramas of natives’ lives, reduced to inert text, become a mere backdrop to the show.
All this is not to deny that the anthropologist, like the native, is an agent who makes meanings: ethnographic meaning-making is a prime task of our fieldwork and writing. But it is precisely natives’ dramas that we should feature in our ethnographies. We cannot do so without a responsible account of their meanings—an intensional account that is the product not of textual interpretation but of an engaged science.15 The issue of fidelity cannot be sidestepped. The object of cultural research is not to clarify a text but to infer as best one can the subjective worlds of other people, meaning-makers in their own right living complex, thoughtful, and emotion-filled lives.
The project makes some people uneasy. Much recent criticism of anthropology is predicated on the notion that cultural accounts are invasions, acts of imperious (or imperial) disrespect. Ethnography is in this view a genre of authoritarian “fiction” passed off as univocal truth (Clifford 1986, 1988; Tyler 1986; see also Geertz 1988).16 There is some sting in the accusations. Unquestionably, an anthropologist’s account is never transparent, always fashioned; it can be insensitive, disrespectful, or collaborative with imperial power; it can arrogantly lay claim to truth, violating the first principle of science, which is that any proposition is tentative. But why should provisional formulations of another’s subjective experience be thought of as intrinsically authoritarian or invasive?17 One could instead consider such formulations as respectful experiments in human imagination, for respect can equally well be viewed as a mode of interpersonal engagement that seeks to discover or cultivate in oneself hitherto unknown, unsuspected empathies or correspondences with others. That such correspondences can never be fully achieved; that they always bear the imprint of one’s own confusions, cultural biases, and idiosyncrasies; that power is an element of the relationships that bring them to light (as it is of all relationships); and that our own objectifications (ethnographic texts) elicit myriad, divergent meanings in readers are not arguments for abandoning ethnography. To the contrary, the very difficulty of stretching imagination and sensibility, all too apparent in the self-absorbed, blinkered nature of so many human transactions, is what makes ethnography compelling.
The idea that an objectification of someone else’s thought is substantially an act of aggression and domination—that words have something like direct physical force—seems strongly tinged with conduit thinking. In this view words are missiles of conceptual imperialism. The tendency to attribute great power to symbols, which are, after all, tokens of communication produced, manipulated, and given meaning by human beings, contributes to a second common distortion in culture theory.
The Second Distortion: Reifying (Deifying?) Culture
From at least the time of Durkheim (1964 [1895]) both sociology and anthropology have considered “culture”—collective representations, rituals, symbols, discourses, what have you—a powerful, even coercive, force on human thought and behavior. The conduit model dovetails nicely with top-down theorizing that strongly privileges social facts. It makes such theorizing good to think, lending it commonsense plausibility in the face of significant contrary evidence suggesting that knowledge is learned imperfectly, erratically, and variably by individual human organisms, and that such learning is not just a passive process. Children, for example, enter the world with no cultural knowledge whatsoever; they eventually become, after a long and arduous passage, imperfectly enculturated, quirky adults.18 The irregular, unpredictable, and discontinuous aspects of cultural “acquisition” and “transmission” seem apparent; any “fax theory” of cultural reproduction is patently inadequate (Strauss 1992: 9–10). Adult learning of culture, an exhilarating, painful experience familiar to all ethnographers, offers similar puzzles. Psychological anthropologists have perhaps paid too little attention to how ethnographers learn something of other cultures, but they have been right to draw attention, in studies of socialization, enculturation, and education, to traversal of the boundary between public and private, between symbol and meaning, in an effort to understand how natives come to fashion their points of view.
Interpretive ethnographies, on the other hand, seek powerful collective structures of meaning, congealed in public symbols, within which persons live out (often beyond the ethnography’s field of vision) their unique lives. Culture, a thoroughly social phenomenon, is divorced from, and trumps, psychology. Persons are constrained by culture but culture is in all significant respects independent of psychological or biological factors specific to persons.Consider the approach of our most persuasive, complex, and influential interpretive anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, probably best known for his claim, forcefully presented in essays dating from the 1950s to the present, that symbols, rituals, and performances can be read as texts (e.g., 1973a), with the anthropologist as literary critic (1973f: 9). Even in his earlier, more Parsonian papers such as “Religion as a Cultural System,” first published in 1966, Geertz expresses strong reservations about the utility of psychology for ethnographic analysis:
Symbols . . . are tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs. To undertake the study of cultural activity—activity in which symbolism forms the positive content—is thus not to abandon social analysis for a Platonic cave of shadows, to enter into a mentalistic world of introspective psychology, or, worse, speculative philosophy, and wander there forever in a haze of “Cognitions,” “Affections,” “Conations,” and other elusive entities. Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture. (Geertz 1973e: 91)
Stated briefly, a symbol is a “vehicle for a conception” (1973e: 91)—a conduit. “Systems of symbols” (90), or “culture patterns” (92), embody those conceptions—their meanings. Such systems, it is claimed, are amenable to analysis, at the “level” of culture; their interrelated meanings can be read without excursions into the marshes of psychology.19
To objectify Geertz’s work as I have above is, of course, somewhat unfair. In perusing The Interpretation of Cultures (1973c), I was struck by the fact that I could have selected passages that seem consonant with my own cognitive argument. I second Geertz’s characterization of anthropology as an imaginative science, his impulse toward comparative theorizing, and his insistence on the embeddedness of meaning in the flow of social life. Consider also his assertion, in the same early essay cited above, that symbols “have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves” (1973e: 93; emphasis added). This is toolmaker discourse, as is Geertz’s vivid claim that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun” (1973f: 5).
Yet, as Gananath Obeyesekere remarks, “In reading Geertz I see webs everywhere, but never the spider at work” (1990: 285). Like Obeyesekere, we remember not the dialectical relation between symbols and “psychological reality,” but that “culture is public because meaning is” (Geertz 1973f: 12). Geertz’s most influential theoretical formulations and empirical analyses are those based in the conduit model, which portray thinking as public, collective, and culturally singular: the insistence on the “social nature of thought” (1973d: 360); the brilliant, particularistic interpretations of the cockfight, the wajang, and the Balinese naming system. I would suggest that our perceptions of Geertz are distorted not through careless reading, though he is a demanding, subtle writer, but because he himself underplays the inkblot motifs in his writing and because we bring conduit understandings of communication to his work. We catch glimpses of alternative schemes, but Geertz registers most strongly with us when his writing articulates with and reconfirms our commonsense understandings.
Most interpretive anthropology—pick
