Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz

its reputation against it.

      It is not so much that this reputation is a wholly false one (it has rather more truth in it than I, at least, professionally immunized against noble savageism, would have thought at all possible); it is that it is not the only one that it has. Drier looks at some of the products of all that creativity—not just cremation, but the witch and dragon dance, with its ravaging hag and tranced youths attacking their chests with daggers; sorcery, which is endemic in Bali and filled with images of perversion and wild brutality; the purified animal hatred of that popular enthusiasm, craze even, cockfighting—have conduced to a less genial view of things. So have similar looks at the social life out of which the creativity grows—pervasive factionalism, caste arrogance, collective ostracism, maternal inconstancy. And at some of the transforming events of recent history—the mass suicide with which the ruling classes greeted Dutch takeover in 1906 (they marched, blank and unseeing, dressed like cremation sacrifices, out of their palaces, directly into cannons, rifles, and swords); the mass murder, peasants killing peasants in a cry of “communism,” after Sukarno’s fall in 1965 (some estimates run to fifty thousand, which would be comparable to a half-million here; and in one of the villages I lived in a few years earlier, thirty households of a total seventy were incinerated all in a single night). Helms’s flames still exist alongside his towers, his falling wives alongside his rising doves, his barbarous spectacles alongside his gay picnics. And they seem as inseparable from one another as ever.

      Clearly, I cannot pursue this conjunction of Shangri-La and Pandaemonium any further here; what it does to conceptions, etherial or satanic, of the nature of artistic genius; what of ourselves we find in it in translation. Nor can I trace, beyond the glancing examples given, the role it has played in the history of our imagination. I merely want to insist that it has played one: minor surely in comparison to the ironies of World War I or the deliverances of such more consequential Asian cultures as China’s or India’s, but real nonetheless, not yet over, and in its own way telling. And that, therefore, the ethnographer of Bali, like the critic of Austen, is among other things absorbed in probing what Professor Trilling, in that last, winding, interrupted essay of his, called one of the significant mysteries of man’s life in culture: how it is that other people’s creations can be so utterly their own and so deeply part of us.

Chapter 3 / “From the Native’s Point of View”: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding

      I

      Several years ago a minor scandal erupted in anthropology: one of its ancestral figures told the truth in a public place. As befits an ancestor, he did it posthumously, and through his widow’s decision rather than his own, with the result that a number of the sort of right-thinking types who are with us always immediately rose to cry that she, an in-marrier anyway, had betrayed clan secrets, profaned an idol, and let down the side. What will the children think, to say nothing of the layman? But the disturbance was not much lessened by such ceremonial wringing of the hands; the damn thing was, after all, already printed. In much the same fashion as James Watson’s The Double Helix exposed the way in which biophysics in fact gets done, Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term rendered established accounts of how anthropologists work fairly well implausible. The myth of the chameleon fieldworker, perfectly self-tuned to his exotic surroundings, a walking miracle of empathy, tact, patience, and cosmopolitanism, was demolished by the man who had perhaps done most to create it.

      The squabble that arose around the publication of the Diary concentrated, naturally, on inessentials and missed, as was only to be expected, the point. Most of the shock seems to have arisen from the mere discovery that Malinowski was not, to put it delicately, an unmitigated nice guy. He had rude things to say about the natives he was living with, and rude words to say it in. He spent a great deal of his time wishing he were elsewhere. And he projected an image of a man about as little complaisant as the world has seen. (He also projected an image of a man consecrated to a strange vocation to the point of self-immolation, but that was less noted.) The discussion was made to come down to Malinowski’s moral character or lack of it, and the genuinely profound question his book raised was ignored; namely, if it is not, as we had been taught to believe, through some sort of extraordinary sensibility, an almost preternatural capacity to think, feel, and perceive like a native (a word, I should hurry to say, I use here “in the strict sense of the term”), how is anthropological knowledge of the way natives think, feel, and perceive possible? The issue the Diary presents, with a force perhaps only a working ethnographer can fully appreciate, is not moral. (The moral idealization of fieldworkers is a mere sentimentality in the first place, when it is not self-congratulation or a guild pretense.) The issue is epistemological. If we are going to cling—as, in my opinion, we must—to the injunction to see things from the native’s point of view, where are we when we can no longer claim some unique form of psychological closeness, a sort of transcultural identification, with our subjects? What happens to verstehen when einfühlen disappears?

      As a matter of fact, this general problem has been exercising methodological discussion in anthropology for the last ten or fifteen years; Malinowski’s voice from the grave merely dramatizes it as a human dilemma over and above a professional one. The formulations have been various: “inside” versus “outside,” or “first person” versus “third person” descriptions; “phenomenological” versus “objectivist,” or “cognitive” versus “behavioral” theories; or, perhaps most commonly “emic” versus “etic” analyses, this last deriving from the distinction in linguistics between phonemics and phonetics, phonemics classifying sounds according to their internal function in language, phonetics classifying them according to their acoustic properties as such. But perhaps the simplest and most directly appreciable way to put the matter is in terms of a distinction formulated, for his own purposes, by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, between what he calls “experience-near” and “experience-distant” concepts.

      An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that someone—a patient, a subject, in our case an informant—might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on, and which he would readily understand when similarly applied by others. An experience-distant concept is one that specialists of one sort or another—an analyst, an experimenter, an ethnographer, even a priest or an ideologist—employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical aims. “Love” is an experience-near concept, “object cathexis” is an experience-distant one. “Social stratification” and perhaps for most peoples in the world even “religion” (and certainly “religious system”) are experience-distant; “caste” and “nirvana” are experience-near, at least for Hindus and Buddhists.

      Clearly, the matter is one of degree, not polar opposition—“fear” is experience-nearer than “phobia,” and “phobia” experience-nearer than “ego dyssyntonic.” And the difference is not, at least so far as anthropology is concerned (the matter is otherwise in poetry and physics), a normative one, in the sense that one sort of concept is to be preferred as such over the other. Confinement to experience-near concepts leaves an ethnographer awash in immediacies, as well as entangled in vernacular. Confinement to experience-distant ones leaves him stranded in abstractions and smothered in jargon. The real question, and the one Malinowski raised by demonstrating that, in the case of “natives,” you don’t have to be one to know one, is what roles the two sorts of concepts play in anthropological analysis. Or, more exactly, how, in each case, ought one to deploy them so as to produce an interpretation of the way a people lives which is neither imprisoned within their mental horizons, an ethnography of witchcraft as written by a witch, nor systematically deaf to the distinctive tonalities of their existence, an ethnography of witchcraft as written by a geometer.

      Putting the matter this way—in terms of how anthropological analysis is to be conducted and its results framed, rather than what psychic constitution anthropologists need to have—reduces the mystery of what “seeing things from the native’s point of view” means. But it does not make it any easier, nor does it lessen the demand for perceptiveness on the part of the fieldworker. To grasp concepts that, for another people, are experience-near, and to do so well enough to place