Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz

flowered arrows shot into fabric snakes, purple and gold coffins shaped as lions, incense, metallaphones, spices, flames; on the other, charred bones, entranced priests, somnambulant widows, affectless attendants, dissociate crowds, eerie in their picnic calm. Cocteau’s aesthetic coupled with Beckett’s.

      But beyond the instabilities the rite in itself contains (narrowly contains, as a matter of fact—something, along with its gravedigger humor, our text rather fails to convey), there are also those set up in the collision between all this and the bundle of presumptions and predilections brought to it by an unusually broad-minded but hardly culture-free nineteenth-century Danish sea-clerk. He is, as countless intruders into the masque-world of Bali have been since, hopelessly bewitched by the soft loveliness of what he sees. Those virescent terraces, those slippery paths, those gay dresses, those cataracts of long black hair—all still seduce the coldest eye, and they addle the romantic one altogether. Yet his outrage at what this gorgeous ceremoniousness is actually producing in the real world, or, anyway, the real world as a Jutland apothecary’s son conceives it—“three women, guiltless of any crime” suffering “the most horrible of deaths” for “affection’s sake, and in the name of religion”—is not only unsuppressible, it disarranges his whole reaction.

      The confusion of high artistry and high cruelty he thus confronts, a confusion Baudelaire would have relished and Artaud later on in fact did, is to him so shaking that it leaves him uncertain as to what sort of beings these gorgeously decorated pyrophiles marching about clanging gongs and waving pennants really are: “they looked little enough like savages”; “the surroundings bore an impress of plenty, peace and happiness, and, in a measure, of civilization.” His aesthetic sensibility, an extremely powerful one, going one way, and his moral, more than its match, the other, he has great difficulty deciding what properly to feel: the women are deluded, their courage magnificent; the preparations are ghastly, the silent plunges breathtaking; the rite a cruel superstition, the spectacle one never to be forgotten; the crowd is kindly, gay, graceful, polite, and unmoved by the sight of three young women burned living to a crisp. All the familiar predicates seem to be getting in one another’s way. Whatever relations beauty, truth, and goodness might have to one another in this cloud of smoke and sacrifice, they are, surely, not those of post-Napoleonic Scandinavia.

      They are not those of post-World War II America either, or not at least those of the right-thinking part of it. In a twist any true connoisseur of the modern earnestness led in beyond its depth must surely savor, Helms (having both drawn us toward the ritual by dwelling on its grace and propelled us away from it by dwelling on its terror) turns it, via an outcry against the oppression of women, into an argument for imperialism. It is in extirpating such foul plagues—foul and splendid—as this that the West earns its credentials to conquer and transform the East. The English in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, and presumably the Belgians, the French, and the rest where they are, are right and justified in replacing ancient civilizations with their own, for they are on the side of mercy and emancipation, against deception and cruelty. In the space of a few paragraphs, we get some of the most thoroughly entrenched tropes of the liberal imagination (an imagination, I’d best confess, I more or less share)—the cultural integrity of “simpler” peoples, the sacredness of human life, the equality of the sexes, and the coercive character of imperial rule—struck off against one another in a way that can only leave us at least unsettled. To have moved from the magic garden of the dreaming Orient to the white man’s burden, Gauguin’s world to Kipling’s, so rapidly and with such fine logic is but the last imbalancing blow the text delivers. It is not only the Balinese and Helms who seem morally elusive when we finish this remarkable account. So, unless we are willing to settle for a few embroidery mottoes of the eating-people-is-wrong variety, do we.

      The case is general. For all the peculiarities here involved, the decentering of perception the Balinese cremation generates as it is worked through first, second, third, and nth order interpretations, coming from all sorts of directions and going all which ways, is characteristic of any imaginative construction powerful enough to interest anyone beyond its immediate audience. (And, indeed, if it is not powerful enough to do that it probably will not have an immediate audience.) Such a construction has a career, and one itself imaginative, for it consists of a set of encounters with other such constructions, or rather with consciousnesses informed by them. Whatever role it comes to play in the lives of individuals and groups removed in either space or time from the social matrix that brought it forth is an outcome of that career. The truth of the doctrine of cultural (or historical—it is the same thing) relativism is that we can never apprehend another people’s or another period’s imagination neatly, as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering glosses that connect us to it but through them. Professor Trilling’s nervousness about the epistemological complacency of traditional humanism is not misplaced. The exactest reply to it is James Merrill’s wrenching observation that life is translation, and we are all lost in it.

      II

      Whatever use the imaginative productions of other peoples—predecessors, ancestors, or distant cousins—can have for our moral lives, then, it cannot be to simplify them. The image of the past (or the primitive, or the classic, or the exotic) as a source of remedial wisdom, a prosthetic corrective for a damaged spiritual life—an image that has governed a good deal of humanist thought and education—is mischievous because it leads us to expect that our uncertainties will be reduced by access to thought-worlds constructed along lines alternative to our own, when in fact they will be multiplied. What Helms learned from Bali, and we learn from Helms, is that the growth in range a powerful sensibility gains from an encounter with another one, as powerful or more, comes only at the expense of its inward ease.

      What I have called “the social history of the moral imagination,” and announced to be the common enterprise of a critic of Trilling’s ilk and an anthropologist of mine, turns out to be rather less straightforward than some current views in either of our disciplines take it to be. Neither the recovery of literary intentions (“what Austen wished to convey”) nor the isolation of literary responses (“what Columbia students contrive to see in her”), neither the reconstruction of intra-cultural meaning (“Balinese cremation rites as caste drama”) nor the establishment of cross-cultural uniformities (“the theophanous symbolism of mortuary fire”) can by itself bring it to proper focus. Austen’s precisian view of feminine honor, or the modernist delight in her reflexive fictionality; the Balinese conception of the indestructibility of hierarchy in the face of the most powerful leveling forces the world can muster, or the primordial seriousness of the death of kings: these things are but the raw materials of such a history. Its subject is what the sort of mentalities enthralled by some of them make of the sorts enthralled by others.

      To write on it or to teach it—whether for Bali or Euro-America, and whether as a critic or an ethnographer—is to try to penetrate somewhat this tangle of hermeneutical involvements, to locate with some precision the instabilities of thought and sentiment it generates and set them in a social frame. Such an effort hardly dissolves the tangle or removes the instabilities. Indeed, as I have suggested, it rather brings them more disturbingly to notice. But it does at least (or can) place them in an intelligible context, and until some cliometrician, sociobiologist, or deep linguisticist really does contrive to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx, that will have to do.

      For a literary example to parallel and interact with my developing anthropological one of what this sort of analysis comes to in the flesh, and to drive home the similarity of intellectual movement it requires (whether you are dealing with your own culture or somebody else’s, with texts or events, poems or rituals, personal memories or collective dreams) one could do worse than to look for a moment at Paul Fussell’s recent The Great War and Modern Memory.³ There are other possibilities, equally germane—Steven Marcus’s investigations of the precarious intricacies of the Victorian sexual imagination, or Quentin Anderson’s of the development of a plenary view of the self in American writing from Emerson forward, for instance. But Fussell’s work, justly acclaimed (by Trilling among others, who must have felt a kinship between its intentions and