Interview with Clifford Geertz
(by John Gerring)

Clifford Geertz is Professor Emeritus of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton New Jersey. John Gerring was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute, 2002-03. This interview was conducted on July 25, 2003, at the Institute. Transcription by Jennifer Jefferis; editing by John Gerring.

Gerring: 
It is perhaps fair to say that the quantitative side of political science has taken most of its cues from economics, while the qualitative side of the discipline has taken its cues from anthropology and history. For the latter group, there is no tradition more esteemed than interpretivism, and there is no one more esteemed within the interpretivist tradition than you. Your work is assigned routinely in courses and referenced continually in the political science literature. So it is of enormous interest to the discipline, what you think about all this. The question weíre struggling with is how to understand interpretivism in the context of political science and the social sciences more generally. Thatís the question I will be circling around one way or another as we go through this interview.
   Iíll say one other thing by way of preface. As the discipline of political science has become more self-consciously scientific, more quantitative, and so forth, I think there is a sense on the part of people, even people who do quantitative work, that something has been lost in the process. But I donít think weíre very clear on what exactly it is. Letís start on this question, then. Youíve lived through a lot of the history. It seems to me that there was a time back in the fifties and sixties when the different social sciences really were talking to each other quite frequently. The SSRC served as a focus for much of this interdisciplinary discussion, which I believe you were a part of . . .

Geertz: 
I think the inter-disciplinarity of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s owed a great deal to the war-time experience. During the war (I was just an ordinary seaman in the Navy), most of the faculty of the social sciences ñ the leading people, almost to a man and woman ñ were involved in one capacity or another. And so for the first time they were thrown together. This was particularly dramatic for anthropologists, because they were thrown in with political scientists and economists and engineers and everyone else. You would get someone working on propaganda, or some other thing involving the war effort, and it would be an anthropologist, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, you know. And for anthropologists, particularly, that was a radical change, because before that it was a very self-enclosed discipline concerning tribes and pre-history and so forth. All of a sudden, it was this general ferment. The war was short, three years or so for most people, so they came back and this experience changed their whole notion of what social science ought to be about. It was a very lively period, and I went to Harvard just as everyone came back to the academy. Interdisciplinarity was blooming forth all over. This was also the time when the big foundations ñ Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and so forth ñ were beginning to support social science on a major scale. SSRC was part of that but was not the only center of it. So this led to a tremendous concern with team research and the task of relating quantitative and qualitative work.
    The Social Relations department at Harvard is a good example of this. Sam Stouffer was there, along with Talcott Parsons, Harold Lasswell, Clyde Kluckhohn, Jakobson, and many others. Norbert Weiner was down the street at MIT. I donít say there was no abrasiveness, but they were all in the same business. People were interacting, and it transformed the social sciences. At that point, everything was mixed together. Not that individuals didnít go off every once in a while, but they could also get along. It was a period of great optimism. Social science was about to begin. And a great deal of it was interdisciplinary research. So it was a great period. And thatís where I was formed. I came in through philosophy and the humanities. There was plenty of room for that sort of thing at the time.
    Later on, when I moved to Chicago, the interdisciplinary, inter-method, conversation continued. David Easton was there, David Apter, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, the Rudolphs. They were all prima donnas. Everybody was doing his or her stuff. In fact, it was not so bad. They got along in a way because they did not have to deal with one another very often. The department was entirely run by a woman who was secretary of the department. She gave out the grants, and she just made sure that all the prima donnas got their share of the loot. And the prima donnas just taught and held forth, and they were big figures.

Gerring: 
It was a heroic time. Iím very fascinated by that moment in time. It just seems so . . . I donít know, so rich, so fertile in many ways compared with the segmentation of disciplines and sub-disciplines today. Iím curious whether you think that that moment of ferment was made possible by an underlying theoretical consensus, e.g., the theory of modernization, or something else.

Geertz: 
Parsons of course always wanted to have a general theory, but I donít really know how much it animated the others. I think it had more do with the war-time experience of working together. Academic life before the war, long before your time, was a very protected environment. Scholars did their work without being really in the world. The war brought them into the world and they never left it after that. You could no longer just sit in an office and know all there was to know about the Navajo.

Gerring: 
Subsequently, in the 1960s, it does seem to me that part of what happened was a de-legitimation of social science and a suspicion of the heretofore rather tight connection between government and the academy.

Geertz: 
Some of that is true, and the Cold War and Vietnam really did that. But it didnít lead back to the old system. People didnít retreat back to the ivory tower. Instead, we are faced with the question of scientism, which is another issue altogether, about which I donít quite know what to say. People had always thought of themselves as scientists, but they had a rather capacious notion of science. Now the difference between people is not whether they think theyíre scientists or not, but what they think science is. To some people itís only statistical tests, and thatís it. For other people, anything is science. Just go out and talk to people and come back and say what they said; thatís science. So the whole conception of what science is became problematic. Then you get to the 1970s and you get post-modernism and all that. By then the American anthropologists have 86 sections, psychology has 105 - itís total fragmentation, except that everybody doesnít stay in the fragments. I mean thereís almost no anthropologist that is only an anthropologist. People like myself, Mary Douglas, we do all sorts of things. Anybody in every field is sort of allpurpose. Itís very rare that you find someone thatís just in one of those little chapters.

Gerring: 
I think thatís true. However, by reference to the past, the career paths that you find to day are relatively narrow. Letís talk a little about interpretivism. This label, which now is very common, is actually fairly new, isnít it?

Geertz: 
Well, I myself never talk about interpretivism, but thatís all right, it doesnít matter. Itís hermeneutics that weíre really talking about. Thatís what it comes out of. I think the clearest statement is Charles Taylorís, in a famous essay in the Review of Metaphysics ["Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," Review of Metaphysics, 25 (1971), 3-51] in which he talks about the tradition of biblical interpretation. As Chuck says in this piece, the hermeneutic approach starts with the notion of something as unclear and tries to bring it into clarity. When I work in the field on anything, whether itís something sort of airy-fairy like religion or something more concrete like a market, I start with the notion that I donít understand it. Then, I try to understand it better by tacking back and forth between large and little things. And thatís what you really do when you "interpret." It is a little like when you learn a language that you donít know. During the first few days you get a few sentences and thatís about it. As you talk, get corrected, and correct others, you really begin to get into it, until eventually you master the language. And the same thing is true when youíre trying to understand foreign enterprises.
    I didnít understand why people were so fascinated with cockfights in Bali, because theyíre really rather boring to a Westerner. Itís just two chickens pecking at each other. And you have eight fights in an afternoon everyday. Itís one of those situations where if youíve seen one youíve seen them all. The cocks just go at it, eventually one is dead, and thereís blood all over the place. Itís exciting for the first two or three times maybe. But why are these people so absorbed in it? So the question that somebody like me asks, whether Iím an interpretivist or whatever the heck I am, is What is going on here? Something is going on here that I donít see, that I canít understand. What sort of story can I tell about this apparently meaningless activity? Well, perhaps this has to do with masculine competition, and so forth. That becomes the model. Itís the same process whether one is working with a marketplace, a ritual, or family life. The notion is that you start with something about which you have a slight grasp, like you do with a foreign language, but you really donít understand it.
    I studied a number of languages and the two that I think about all the time are Javanese and Arabic. Theyíre really quite different experiences. To make it simple-minded, if youíre learning Indonesian, it gives the impression of being easy. In a couple of lessons you can go out in the street and begin to talk. But itís a very subtle language and a lot of people who think they speak it well do not. They donít understand what is really going on. Arabic is the opposite. Itís so morphologically complex that although there are almost no irregularities you canít really say anything for the first year because you always get it wrong and it doesnít make any sense. However, anyone who has the patience to learn to speak Arabic correctly speaks it pretty well by the time they actually get to that point. Whereas a lot of people in Indonesian never get beyond the primary stage because they donít realize theyíre not very good at it. The point is, these are two different experiences. However, in both situations youíre starting with something you donít understand and slowly trying to learn to speak. Thatís the model I think of as emblematic of what you call interpretivism.

Gerring: 
So, interpreting an action or a set of events is like learning a language in a sense. Of course there is always the question of whether you know how to speak it or not and thatís . . .

Geertz: 
The way you learn how to speak it or not is also whether you can communicate, whether when you speak, people understand. It takes a long time to be able to tell a joke in Arabic, and if you get a laugh, well Ö And the same things true about working with cockfights. If you really can act so that you get intelligible responses from your informants; if you say things about the cockfight or the market or the ritual that they regard as intelligent, then you are obviously beginning to get a hold of it.

Gerring: 
I think telling a successful joke would be a good example of a fusion of horizons, in Gadamerís sense. So hereís a question related to that. I think itís true that when we think about interpretivism we often think of rendering the exotic familiar, or making sense of something that is ostensibly nonsensible. How does interpretivism deal with situations that seem commonsensical? Iím thinking about the question of what a political anthropology of American politics might look like.

Geertz: 
I was just reading a book by Sherry Ortner, an anthropologist, who worked on the graduating class of 1958 [New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ë58, Duke University Press, 2003]. I myself have never worked in the United States. Thereís no question that itís harder. You take so much for granted when you study your own kind. You have to de-familiarize yourself. You have to get the distance. You have to realize that you donít understand. Itís obviously hard to put yourself in the frame of "I donít get this." But otherwise thereís no real difference. Itís just that, somehow, you have to artificially make it strange. For political scientists, I think they just have to learn how to see, not the mystification of reality, but mystery in the sense that thereís a lot more there than ordinary concepts might suggest. I mean you can just read the papers and realize that.

Gerring: 
What do you find left out of standard social scientific accounts of contemporary politics that a more anthropological effort might illuminate?

Geertz: 
One example of this Putnamís book on Italy, where he talks about civic traditions [Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1993]. He is after something that most political scientists donít even think about. Iím afraid that "political anthropology" doesnít produce an image in my mind of anything in particular. 

Gerring: 
Yet, the appeal of Putnam to political science, and to sociology and economics, is the general theory of social capital. Itís not what he has to say about Emilia Romano. I raise that only because it raises a question that weíve talked about before, you and I, about whether or to what extent an ethnographic/anthropological/interpretive approach generalizes, wants to generalize, can generalize ó or whether itís more of a differentiating art.

Geertz: 
I donít think thatís the opposition I would construct. It isnít a matter of whether youíre just going to do particular studies or general studies. It doesnít work that way, at least for me. The enterprise of social science is inherently comparative. What you learn about one case you then try to look at another to illuminate both the differences and similarities. Letís say youíre interested in bazaar-like markets, which I first studied in Morocco. Now, thereís a whole range of studies of markets around the world, including Ted Bestorís recent work on fish markets in Japan [Tokyoís Marketplace: Culture and Trade in the Tsukiji Wholesale Market, University of California Press, forthcoming]. So thereís a beginning of a critical mass of studies of a general topic in particular settings ñ a big fish market in Tokyo, a clothing market in a small town in Morocco, and so forth. These are not going to be exactly the same, but they are very similar and they have to do with communication and the symmetry of markets. (I could go on for hours, thereís a whole theory on this.) As these cases are written, one begins to see similarities and differences among markets and it deepens oneís ability to grasp the one situation one started out looking at. I think Ted would say heíd learned something from reading my stuff on Morocco, and I have certainly learned something new from him. You donít start out with some general abstract theory of markets (or stratification) that holds everywhere. What you get is a richer picture of the variations and the similarities, the continuities and the differences, and some principles of markets and stratification systems that, even if they donít apply everywhere, apply often enough to be of some use. You donít have to explain everything to explain anything.

Gerring: 
What would be a good example of a generalization or a principle of that nature?

Geertz: 
Well, again we come back to the market example. I tried to argue that thereís a difference between a market search across a firm economy and in a bazaar. In the latter, the action is not between buyers or between sellers. Itís between a buyer and a seller who bargain with each other. In a firm economy, thatís not the case. You have advertising, you have set prices and the competition comes between the producers. So, the difference is that the information problem is different. The search problem is different. You have an intensive search rather than an extensive search. The used car market is like a bazaar. You have to know a lot about the car and the guy that sold it to you, because you have to pursue that particular case. If youíre buying a new refrigerator, a washing machine, or a box of cereal in a firm economy you simply compare prices, look it up in consumer digest and see which oneís the best, and you have advertising and the prices are the same. Itís not negotiated. To go and buy breakfast in Morocco means a trip to the market and negotiating with the negotiating party.

Gerring: 
So there is a general phenomenon which is instantiated in different ways across cultures. Letís move onto a question that is often raised in the context of intepretivism, the question of causal explanation. You know itís sometimes said that interpretivism is about describing things, or offering interpretations, which is a certain kind of explanation, but not causal explanation.

Geertz: 
This presupposes certain philosophical conclusions about what causation means. That aside, if you get interpretation right, I believe the causes will fall out. If you understand the cockfight, youíll understand why people are engaging in it, why things are happening the way they are happening. It must be clear, of course, whether youíre talking about a cause or a causal law. Thereís a big difference. Everything is caused. On the molar level there is no uncaused behavior. If I look at the cockfight and something happens, I donít say "Thereís no cause for this, it just happened." I donít write that way, and no one really writes that way. So that isnít what weíre doing. But the question about causal laws gets more complicated. Thereís one issue concerning the difference between causality and determinism. If you are familiar with Elizabeth Anscombeís work, you will understand that the search for causes is close to detective work. You come in and you find the pitcher has fallen to the floor and thereís glass. Did the cat push it, or did the wind blow it over? The one thing you know is that there is a cause. Itís on the floor and thereís milk all over. But whether the cat did it or the wind did it, or you put it down in a way that made it tumble later on -- there are evidently lots of possibilities. The point is, you need to have the story of what happened. But you donít have to have a causal law. Thereís no causal law that cats tip over milk.
    To be sure, you can correlate behavior. But this doesnít usually get you very far. An interpretivist tends not to ask that sort of question first. One is trying to get a story, a meaning frame to provide an understanding of what is going on. You want to understand what it is thatís motivating people, or cats, to do these (unaccountable) things. So we look for a motive and feelings and emotions and ideas and concepts and all that jazz, which you donít need to do if you take 70,000 people and see how their movements correlate with each other. I mean you could do that for traffic flows. Iím not denying that this can be done, or that it is not useful to do it, if you really want to figure out the traffic flows in New York. I donít think you should spend a lot of time asking each individual driver what they were doing. It might help to give some understanding but, in general, I would agree the way to do it is to pick a place and measure the number of cars that go by and correlate it with the time of day and find out how the traffic flow works. So itís not an opposition of that sort ñ correlation versus causation. Itís just that a sheer correlation between two peopleís behavior is not usually very interesting.

Gerring: 
Let me move on to a much bigger question. Canít we all live together? I mean, those who do interpretive work, and those who do a different kind of work. Iím not sure how this works in anthropology, but in our field people from different methodological fields are oftentimes at each otherís throats.

Geertz:
Yeah, thatís what this school (the School of Social Science) is dedicated to overcome. I think there has grown a kind of militancy in the social sciences. You see it in the evolutionary psychologists, you see it in the evolution theorists, you see it in economics. Here, people adopt a position and try to take things over. Once you get any group of people who eliminate everything else then it polarizes the situation, the opposition organizes, and you get civil wars. I would say you need a historical interpretivist approach to understand why it is there has been this methodological movement and where it comes from. My own sense is that it comes from a kind of utopian vision of science -- that somehow science is about to begin and theyíre going to finally set it all straight. Obviously, Iím not persuaded by this, but I donít try to stop them from doing it. They try to stop everybody else -- well, at any rate, some of them do. (A lot of them are really quite tolerant.) As a friend of mine says, the problem with the rational choice people is not what they do but that they practice it inside departments. I mean they just choose their own people and they make rational choices in terms of aggrandizing their own power, and I think thatís bad for academia, regardless of the field. I have some questions about rational choice theory (game theory), but I acknowledge its place in the academy. We have lots of people who do that sort of work here. But to say, "If youíre not doing game theory youíre not dong science," well that tends to make people unhappy. I donít think itís necessarily that much worse than in the past, but there has been a kind of militancy in the last ten years or so that I donít fully understand the reason for. The level of tolerance has declined a bit. Iím talking about scientism, science as an ideology. Itís still not clear what happens to turn good scientists into scientistics.

Gerring: 
Let me ask you one more question. This is a very open ended question and you may answer of course in any way that you wish. This newsletter is written primarily for political scientists and Iím wondering if you have any advice or thoughts on the study of politics.

Geertz: 
Well Iíve done a lot of study on it. Iíve written a book and Iím about to write another one. I think this is, again, a question of scientism. I would suggest that at least some people in political science ought to get away from toy problems and start addressing real ones. For example, can there be a functioning multiethnic state such as India or Nigeria? What do we know about this from 50 years of experience with extremist states? Certainly, not as much as we ought to. Political scientists should engage problems that are there. I donít mean practical problems in the sense that one should take up social work. But they ought to take problems as they come from the world. Take Adam Ashforthís recent work as an example [Ashforth, a visiting member at the School of Social Science, is at work on a book on witchcraft in southern Africa]. He goes to South Africa and finds that people have been driven to witchcraft everywhere ñ including Mandela, Tutu, and the politics of AIDS -- and he attacks that problem. I would suggest at least some of your people begin to do that more than they have. This means you have to be able to accept a lot more ambiguity, a lot more uncertainty. You never know quite what youíll find and when youíll be entirely wrong about what you thought was true. It is hard. Itís more complicated. There are no ready devices off the shelf that you can use. You have to make them up for yourself. You have to try to interpret the evidence, to understand what the hell theyíre saying when they talk about witchcraft. But thatís the advice I would give, to engage with the political world that one confronts. Thatís what Putnam did [in Italy], and [Robert] Dahl did in New Haven. They tried to talk about whatís going on there. It doesnít mean that none of the sharpened tools of social science wonít be useful, but I am always more concerned about arbitrarily simplified accounts that make it possible for me to show the exercising of some particular methodological skill. I think that doing something because you can do it or because thereís a technique for it or a program for it ñ this strikes me as a very bad way to spend a life.

online source: 
Qualitative Methods. Newsletter of the American Political Science Association, 
Organized Section on Qualitative Methods (Boston University/ Dept. of Political Science, Boston/MA/USA)

http://www.asu.edu/clas/polisci/cqrm/Newsletter/Newsletter1.2.pdf

Using this text is also subject to the general HyperGeertz-Copyright-regulations based on Austrian copyright-law (2001), which - in short - allow a personal, nonprofit & educational (all must apply) use of material stored in data bases, including a restricted redistribution of such material, if this is also for nonprofit purposes and restricted to the scientific community (both must apply), and if full and accurate attribution to the author, original source and date of publication, web location(s) or originating list(s) is given ("fair-use-restriction"). Any other use transgressing this restriction is subject to a direct agreement between a subsequent user and the holder of the original copyright(s) as indicated by the source(s). HyperGeertz@WorldCatalogue cannot be held responsible for any neglection of these regulations and will impose such a responsibility on any unlawful user.

Each copy of any part of a  transmission of a HyperGeertz-Text must therefore contain this same copyright notice as it appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission, including any specific copyright notice as indicated above by the original copyright holder and/ or the previous online source(s).