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PhilGoetz comments on Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Has anyone got opinions on Clifford Geertz? He's supposedly the most-influential American anthropologist. I began reading his famous book, Interpretation of Cultures, and I'm struck by how illogical it is. He has interesting insights into his own perspective, but he's consistently completely unable to comprehend anyone else's perspective. Odd, for someone who says that's the purpose of his own profession. He fails to draw even caricatures or straw men of behaviorism and cognitivism, his main opponents, and just says they're wrong, then tells entertaining stories until the reader forgets that he never dealt with them.
His big point is that culture shouldn't be seen as a body of knowledge that people in a culture have, but a "web of significance". As far as I can tell this is a distinction without a difference.
He emphasizes the importance of semiotics. This is not a good sign.
I read another chapter, on cockfighting in Bali, and I begin to understand him better.
When he dismisses cognitivism, he's probably thinking of Levi-Strauss. The introductory chapter which seemed illogical to me was probably not intended to be a logical argument of any kind, but a summary of his views. Geertz seems to have the common non-hard-science mystical view of human thought, as something not amenable to logical analysis, and a view of logic as reductionist. He seems, like I suspect Wittgenstein does, to think that a logical analysis of language means analyzing individual words, and that the information provided by context and by the ways the words are put together is somehow beyond the grasp of logic, and that language and human activity just can't be explained that way.
Yes, but that's because he was doing stuff in the 50s and 60s, when there were a lot of old theories that were ripe for refining and overturning. He made a name for himself by saying a lot of things that seem obvious to us today -- questioning structuralism and functionalism as dominant paradigms was big news in the day. I would say that his work on theory is not worth the trouble it takes to get through it, but I have a low tolerance for bushwhacking through tangled prose. When you get to applied cases, he does make more sense, and can be engaging. I remember Peddlers and Princes being worth reading, although I think he had a good number of page-long paragraphs there too.
I've read a little Geertz, and I think part of what he means is that a culture is people doing stuff, not a body of knowledge or a bunch of patterns which can be abstracted away from the people engaging in a culture..
It's the "not" that I have problems with. First, knowledge is abstract, by definition, so to say "not a body of knowledge which can be abstracted..." is the same as to say "not a body of knowledge". Next, the thing that he says culture is, must be completely implicit in the body of knowledge or the bunch of patterns, or else it would have an independent existence from the members of the culture, and be literally the soul of an ethnic group, made out of invisible culture-stuff, much like the consciousness-stuff that John Searle says our minds our made of.
They are different perspectives on the same information. Likewise the behaviorists have a different perspective which also accounts for all of the same information.
He doesn't even notice this. He doesn't seem to make any attempt to understand anyone else's perspectives. He just says they're obviously wrong, using so many words and digressions that the reader assumes, coming to the end of a long paragraph, that there must have been an argument in there somewhere. It's the same style of argument George Steiner uses.
I wonder if he's unable to understand anyone else's perspectives because of his perspective. He says that anthropology is about trying to understand someone else's perspective, but that cannot consist of understanding what they're thinking (what he calls the cognitivist fallacy).
I've read very little of the book so far! It's just... so very unpromising. So much fail in so few pages.
This is a common behavior among hedgehogs. I tend to just ignore it and figure out where this person's model works, and where it's overreaching.
As I understood Geertz, he wasn't talking about invisible culture-stuff, he was talking about tacit culture stuff. The tacit understanding is how people in a culture can make changes which are likely to be satisfactory to other members of the culture, and how members of a culture identify what fits.
If my theory is correct, it gets really complicated as a culture changes over long periods of time and as a result of contact with other cultures.