The Interpretation Of Cultures (Basic Books Classics) by Geertz Clifford

Author:Geertz, Clifford [Geertz, Clifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786725007
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2008-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

Essentialism and Epochalism

The interplay of essentialism and epochalism is not, therefore, a kind of cultural dialectic, a logistic of abstract ideas, but a historical process as concrete as industrialization and as tangible as war. The issues are being fought out not simply at the doctrine and argument level—though there is a great deal of both—but much more importantly in the material transformations that the social structures of all the new states are undergoing. Ideological change is not an independent stream of thought running alongside social process and reflecting (or determining) it, it is a dimension of that process itself.

The impact within any new state society of the desire for coherence and continuity on the one hand and for dynamism and contemporaneity on the other is both extremely uneven and highly nuanced. The pull of indigenous tradition is felt most heavily by its appointed, and these days rather besieged, guardians—monks, mandarins, pandits, chiefs, ulema, and so on; that of what is usually referred to (not altogether accurately) as “the West,” by the urban youth, the troubled schoolboys of Cairo, Djakarta, or Kinshasa who have surrounded words like shabb, pemuda, and jeunesse with an aura of energy, idealism, impatience, and menace. But stretching out between these all-too-visible extremes is the great bulk of the population, among whom essentialist and epochalist sentiments are scrambled into a vast confusion of outlooks, which, because the current of social change produced it, only the current of social change can sort out.

As illustrative cases, compressed to the dimensions of historical anecdotes, of the generation of this confusion and of the efforts now being made to dissolve it, Indonesia and Morocco can serve as well as any. My reason for choosing them is that they are the cases I happen to know firsthand and, in dealing with the interplay between institutional change and cultural reconstruction, the degree to which one can substitute a synoptic vision for an intimate one is limited. Their experiences are, as all social experiences, unique. But they are not so different either from one another or from those of new states as a whole as to be unable to reveal, in their very particularity, some generic outlines of the problems faced by societies struggling to bring what they like to call their “personality” into a workable alignment with what they like to call their “destiny.”

In Indonesia, the essentialist element is, and long has been, extremely unhomogeneous. To an extent, this is true for virtually all the new states, which tend to be bundles of competing traditions gathered accidentally into concocted political frameworks rather than organically evolving civilizations. But in Indonesia, the outlands at once of India, China, Oceania, Europe, and the Middle East, cultural diversity has been for centuries both especially great and especially complex. The edge of everything classical, it has been itself shamelessly eclectic.

Up until about the third decade of this century, the several ingredient traditions—Indic, Sinitic, Islamic, Christian, Polynesian—were suspended in a kind of half-solution in which contrasting, even opposed styles

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