QUESTION 8: THE LOCATION OF MEANING

The problem of meaning, representation, and culturespecifically their relationship and synonymic potentialis the source of numerous epistemological issues across the social sciences and humanities, but this is especially the case in symbolic and interpretive anthropology. Debates often take the form of a polemic against Geertzian thought in a species-for-genus synecdoche. In this essay, I will address the debate of locating, and thus the mediation of, meaning. I begin with an outline of Geertzs thought as represented in Deep Play. From this I split into two separate critiques and solutions. First, I examine Crapanzanos critique of Geertz, targeted at the Geertzs reliance on the Hamlet-like stories they tell to themselves about themselves. I find solution to this in the phenomenological anthropology of Jackson. The second critique is made of the temporal dimension and power dynamics lacking in Geertzs model: Keesing asks why Geertz failed to address time (not that he failed in his answer, but that he failed to address the issue at all). To examine this, I turn to Rabinows existentialist-Marxist ethnohistory of colonialism in Morocco. The appeals to the solutions are then summarized in a conclusion that directly addresses the location of meaning in body and time. In Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, Geertz applies "thick description" to the "deep play" of the Balinese Cockfight, in order to show that "the fight is at once a convulsive surge of animal hatred, a mock war of symbolical selves, and a formal simulation of status tensions, and its aesthetic power derives from its capacity to force together these diverse realities...joining pride to selfhood, selfhood to cocks, and cocks to destruction, it brings to imaginative realization a dimension of Balinese experience normally well obscured from view," (444). Most significant for Geertz is the way in which the social drama, or a social game, acts as a piece of art, where subjectivity is both embedded in and created by observance. The cockfight is, in these terms, a representation of how society should function for society. Geertzs beliefs are pulled from thick description, a methodology that attempts to engage with the seemingly contradictory existence between what is done and what is said is done, or as it is truly practiced, the disjunction between what is known is done and what is unknowingly known is done by insiders. "Believing, as Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning," (5). Culture is the 'code' that motivates actions, and it is through thick description of the quotidian that we uncover these codes. "...the point is that between what Ryle calls the therin description of what the rehearser is doing and the thick description of what he is doing lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsal of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn't do with his eyelids," (7). "Culture, this acted document, thus is public, like a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid. Though ideational, it does not exist in someone's head," (10). In this, Geertz believes that culture lies outside of the head, and is a text written through the interactions of people; opposed to the school of thought that suggests that culture is composed of psychological structures that guide individual's behaviors. Culture, because it is semiotic, is public, because it is only by convention, and thus in public space, that symbolic mediums, through which our interactions take place, exist. "As interworked systems of construable signs, culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly- that is thickly- described, (14).

Communication & Body Language: Crapanzano (1986) suggests that much of Geertzs analysis is
skewed by his rhetorical strategy of connecting with the audience, which simultaneously undoes his interpretive authority. Interpretation has been understood as a phallic, a phallic-aggressive, a cruel and violent, a destructive act, and as a fertile, a fertilizing, a fruitful, and a creative one. We say a text, a culture even, is pregnant with meaning. Do the ethnographer's presentations become pregnant with meaning because of his interpretive, his phallic fertilizations" (52). This quote calls attention to the fact that what is in the culture-text is put there by Geertz, and reflects better his own dispositions than the Balinese he writes about. Geertz uses connections in the western canon to highlight and hermeneutically decipher the Balinese cockfight, but his colorless, abstract metaphors subvert both his description and his interpretation. Indeed, they subvert his authority. [...] Geertz offers no specifiable evidence for his attributions of intention, his assertions of subjectivity, his declarations of experience. His constructions of constructions of constructions appear to be little more than projections, or at least blurrings, of his point of view, his subjectivity, with that of the native, or, more accurately, of the constructed native" (74). Crapanzano (1992) further attacks Geertzs theoretical apparatus in the book Hermes Dileema & Hamlets Desire. Where Hermes dilemma was that, as noted by Benjamin (1923), translation is about a deeper understanding of ones own text and not the one being translated, Hamlets desire is to be heard not by himself, but by an existent audience. For Geertz, should we consider culture a Shakespearian soliloquy, then the stories are not really for ourselves; Hamlet speaks to himself not for himself, but for a missing audience. Who would that missing audience be, but Geertz himself (or his wife is who is all but missing from his narratives). Such a critique returns us to Crapanzanos earlier statement on the pregnancy of symbols. To this end, Schneider (1987) has noted in response to Geertzs Art as a Cultural System, that turning cockfights into stories that Balinese tell themselves about themselves extends the realm of textuality beyond public codes, and into a realm where cracking the code is only truly done by the ethnographer. This issue arises from a double synecdoche made by Geertz: first that of trading culture as representation (part for whole), and thus (according to Aristotle argument against iconic doubles) outside of the represented, and second reducing culture to meaning (whole-for-part). But, the question we must then ask, is whether meaning lies outside of the individual or their actionsthat is, are actions, essential in doing the cockfight, part of the individual or outside of themselves? Are they habitus? Jackson (1983) recognizes such a problem in this type of understanding meaning, and instead locates meaning within action in his analysis of ritual. Bodily practices mediate a personal realization of social values, an immediate grasp of general precepts as sensible truths. Such a view is consistent with the tendency to effect understanding through bodily techniques, to proceed through bodily awareness to verbal skills and ethical views. Bodily self-mastery is thus everywhere the basis for social and intellectual mastery (329). As such, Jackson writes against anthropological discourses that define culture in terms of language or cognition (as is done by interpretive anthropology as a whole), and that leave bodily praxis as a secondary effect. Jackson mounts this critique through an analysis of womens initiation ritual in Zulu, suggesting, ritual meanings are not often verbalized and perhaps cannot be because they surpass and confound language (331). Ritual does not necessarily involve verbal or conceptual knowledge; rather, we might say that people are informed by and give form to a habitus which only an uninformed outside observer would take to be an object of knowledge. [] Initiation rites [among Zulu women] involve a practical mimesis in which are bodied forth and recombined elements from several domains, yet without script, sayings, promptings, conscious purposes, or even emotions. No notion of copying can explain the naturalness with which the mimetic features

appear. [] This is not to say that all mental forms should be reduced to bodily practices; rather, that within the unitary field of body-mind-habitus it is possible to intervene and affect changes from any one of these points (336). This mimesis, Jackson suggests, is circumscribed by the habitus, but ritual action allows people to realizeembodypotential for something not wholly expressible. By approaching cognition through the backdoor of action, it is possible to see that what the Kurako articulate about ritual is always only partial, but that they are fully aware of the action itself. Like ritual itself, the body is beyond the expression of words. Similarly, bodily practices are always open to interpretation; they are not, however, in themselves interpretations of anything. In this sense, techniques of the body transport us from the quotidian world of verbal distinctions and categorical separations into a world where boundaries are blurred and experience transformed. Dance move us to participate in a world beyond our accustomed roles (338). Actions not only speak in a different register than words, but they enable a different truth; not semantic truths, established by others at other times, but experiential truths which seem to issue from within our own Being when we break the momentum of the discursive mind or throw ourselves into some collective activity in which we each find our own meaning yet sustain the impression of having a common cause and giving common consent (339). Such a project leads to a radical re-conceptualization of anthropological understanding of ritual action as a way of acquiring social and practical skills without an a priori significance about their significance or function. For Jackson, then, Geertzs assessment relies too much on minds without bodies; there is nothing present to mediate the event to consciousness in Geertzs analysis. We find a solution to this is in Jacksons emphasis on the body as a separate domain, as something not simply textual. For Geertz, it is simply the habitus that affects change in the mind-body-habitus construct, while Jackson demonstrates that any of these three affect change. An analysis that considers the role of embodiment in the Cock Fight would allow for a compromise in Crapanzanos critique; it would locate meaning both inside and outside. Outside meaning would be that meaning for those outside the event, not to be confused with, but always in discourse with, the embodied meaning of ritual actors acting in ritual. This problem might also be fixed by moving beyond interpretive anthropologys infatuation with, and constant reducing of events to, text and language. Jacksons approach allow us to transcend the problem of meaning external to the body and external to time by addressing the meaning-in-now, the meaning that exists in what Heidegger (1927) called Gestell, through the body. This appeal resonates best in Schneiders (1987) response to the sacrality of text among interpretive anthropologists: Stripped of the metaphorics of textuality, culture often turns out to be saying very little. In mistaking meaning-as-significance for meaning-as-signification, we threaten to find that cultural practices acquire an integrity and profundity normally reserved for art (826), that is, culture resembles something other than the being-as-Being of its technological world (Heidegger 1927); it pretends to show us that there are different ways of being-in-the-world while denying that we are only one being among many beings in Being-ness.

Time & Power: Keesing (1987) argues that views of cultures as collective phenomena, of symbols
and meanings as public and shared, need to be qualified by a view of knowledge as distributed and controlled (259). This is based on Asads (1973, 1979) critique that symbolic anthropology has failed to account for what produces texts and how change occurs. Going further, Keesing suggests that we must understand culture not solely as webs of meaning, but webs of mystification that allow some people to know more than others. Meanings, we might better say, are not in the cultural texts, not inherent in cultural symbols, but evoked by them what symbols mean to native actors

depends on what they know (262). This constitutes a move from the hermeneutics of interpretive anthropology to the meaning-as-relation of semiotic anthropology described by Parmentier (1994). Keesings argument goes on to pull examples from his own work of analyzing meaning and hierarchy, but in the midst of his Marxist analysis, culture is turned into a simplistic system of false consciousness and oppression. However, the strong points he makes and his recommendations can be seen in the symbolic work of Rabinow (1976). Rabinow, in his analysis of colonialism in Morocco, notes the ways in which symbols are constantly, simultaneously, mobilized to create hierarchies and to tear those hierarchies down. However, a paradox exists: while social changes occur at a rapid pace, the meanings of symbols change at a much slower pace. One of my major assertions is that the symbolic formulations which are the vehicles of meaning changed much less rapidly than did the material conditions. The basic symbols- conceptions of saintliness, mediation, strength, generosity, bounty- have demonstrated an impressive continuity, whereas the material conditions varied in accordance with the tumultuous changes in Moroccan history, (99). This steadfastness allowed for the decolonization of Morocco, as different regimes moved in and out of the traditional definition of power and saintliness. Rabinow employs Sartres (1968) progressive-regressive model, which attempts to understand the actors view of his own social world. It involves analysis of the symbols which give meaning and through which understanding is possible, as well as the social and economic conditions within which these symbols operate; in other words, how experience is organized, (3). Further, he notes, Cultural symbols do not think themselves or play out their own codes; they exist in time, in particular societies, and they develop or disappear. Their meaning is made historically concrete through action. Although men do not fully gauge the implications of their acts, and the consequences often escape and return to haunt them, it is still men, not social systems, who produce social action (3-4). That is to say, as Wolf (1982) clearly states, colonialism is a relationship, not an agent. Rabinow begins his analysis with pre-colonial Morocco, where symbolic domination is already a part of daily life. People are expected to humble themselves before the sultan- both a political and religious leader. He comes to dominate their symbolic actions. Moroccan understandings of the French government during colonialism were regimented by this meaning system. The general principle for the government, of course, was to try to drain as much money and men as possible from the qaid and tribes- and to sustain symbolic domination- in order to increase its own wealth, power, and prestige, (34). The difference is that when the sultan achieved his claims to domination, it was usually because he had adroitly balanced competing factions in a region, countered or eliminated possible loci of dissidence, or united the competing factions against external opponents. Power (symbolic, military, economic, and personal), not force alone, was the name of the game, (37). During World War II, American forces unwittingly undermined the Frenchs power. The American forces contrasted rather strikingly to the French condition. [Further] the lack of an emphasis on symbols of hierarchy (again in contrast to the French) deeply impressed the Moroccan soldiers, (63). This allowed for a re-imagining of the possibilities of existence, and for the symbolic domination of the French by the Americans. The Americans approach resonated more closely with traditional notions of domination in Morocco (this is where his argument of the unchanging symbols and the hyperchanging social context enters). For the Moroccans, the Americans exemplified- unlike the French- virtues which are central to the Moroccan value system: shih (strength), karim (generosity), and even-handedness. The generosity of the Moqaddem Hamid, as we have seen, was not only the substance but the proof of his Baraka, (64). In this,

Rabinow is not arguing that the Americans were perceived as gods, rather, that they were iconically congruent- their internal symbols point to the same thing, Baraka. Central to Baraka is the concept of shih, strength, in opposition to ayyan, weakness. It is more primary than Baraka, a quality of being that one stands in awe of, a quality that is in itself worthy of respect, (65). If a man is shih, one fears him; if another man comes along with a better quip, a larger horse, or a bigger army, then the first man is no longer shih, he is ayyan. This is what happened during the war. The French, once powerful and mighty, were suddenly seen to be ayyan. The fear and respect which the French had elicited because of their strength was undercut; their force and vitality were decreasing and their vulnerability was increasing, (66). This plays back to the notion of power as held by the sultan- not merely extracted by force, but also through commitment to negotiation. The Americans fit better into the framework of power as defined by old cultural symbols, which allowed the Moroccans to imagine the French as weak, and imagine them as no longer shih, no longer dominant, and no longer in control. Given Geertzs completely ahistorical representation of the cockfight, it would be hard to imagine a redevelopment of the study, beyond the obvious examination of correlating societal change with changes in the cock fight (which is partially done by Geertz through the emphasis on its illegal nature). However, in order to hold true to the existential approach implied throughout Rabinows book, he would have to realize that an oppressive power will always linger in the ethos, and that it may actually be the cockfight, despite its liberatory potential, that oppresses people. I believe that Rabinows appeal to Sartres existential-Marxism would further highlight one of the problems engaged by Jackson: the primacy of language. Whereas Jackson claims that action represents a separate register for meaning making, Sartre (1956) has famously claimed Existence precedes essence (327). In other words, thought precedes action, however, the thought is only understood via the words and symbols already known. This means all comprehension of essence is limited to language. However, the discrepancy would be in terms of how one defines languageis it logocentric, or just a collection of symbols? Jackson, from this perspective, may be claiming that the language does exist, as ritual symbols, and that new conceptualizations of the selfa self liberationis acted through these symbols. It is this stance that Jackson (2005) takes in his later work.

Conclusion: Where Geertzs meaning is public, and located outside of the individual, the two
other authors featured here locate meaning differently: for Jackson, it is dialectically public and personal; and for Rabinow meaning is achieved through past actions, or tradition. Each it would seem, however, are united in their connecting culture and meaning: Geertz- culture is meaning, Jackson- meaning is the position from which one supposes a culture exists, and Rabinow- culture is the slowness of symbols changing ability to mean something through individual achievement. Thus, we might suppose, their work is united in attempting to understand culture as meaning, created, found or planted. In this essay, I have attempted to come to an understanding of the limitations of Geertz, and how various anthropologists work have critiqued and solved the numerous issues held within. As Needham (1963) has suggested in his preface to Primitive Classification, the intellectual value of an argument does not depend solely on its validity (xxix), and I believe that we must understand Geertzs work in this way; as one step in the path of studying the primacy of language in everyday lifebe it a language verbalized, embodied, or otherwise.

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