Iqra’i

I’m not sure I have anything interesting to add on pedagogy per se, but Helen (perhaps predictably) piqued my interest in this exchange by linkdropping my favorite half-guilty-pleasure anthropological article ever, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

When Roland Barthes unpacks the symbolic meaning of everyday things, or Clifford Geertz talks about what’s really going on in a Balinese cockfight, or feminist film critics say that screwball comedy is inherently sexist, they’re not pointing out possible interpretations; they’re calling attention to messages we’ve already received without necessarily realizing it.

First of all, of course, it’s sort of important to point out that we can’t know for sure if Geertz’s interpretation of the Balinese cockfight is definitely “what’s really going on,” because we only have Geertz’s account to work with. I’m sure there are other, contradictory accounts, but I haven’t read them and I’d be surprised if Helen has. (There is at least one line of enduring criticism of the piece that I’ve encountered, however, which is that Geertz somehow neglected to mention that Indonesia was in the midst of civil war and unrest while he was doing his fieldwork. It’s certainly possible that this had little or no impact on the cockfight, but is it really the job of the hermeneutist to bet against hidden connections between social systems?)

The broader issue here is that the sphere of things that are true about a particular text/film/phenomenon — messages that one can accurately say are embedded — is, if not infinite, incredibly vast. But it’s obviously true that not every message embedded in a piece is received, as any failed artist will attest; my favorite example of this, of course, is Brecht, who in attempting to make a theatre beyond the personal and the sentimental ended up inventing characters with whom his audiences sympathized madly. Sure, there’s an obligation to point out the influential messages, but doesn’t falsely assuming that a message has been influential distort the text rather than revealing it?

It’s also often true that messages are reflected rather than created by the text — while screwball comedy may have, in its way, reinforced gender inequalities (something to which those of us who consider ourselves genre conversationalists remain susceptible). Recognizing the difference between conduit and origin is important, sure, but a reflected message is only half the battle – it’s somewhat irresponsible not to try to go back and search for the origin itself, especially if you’re attempting to point out to your students/readers/audience messages that they’ve already received.

The enduring popularity of the essay, and Geertz’s work in general, isn’t because of its theoretical insights but because of its literary ones — hermeneutics requires a faithful representation of the text being considered, and “thick description” makes ethnography much more fun to read. Geertz does a brilliant job with narrative in the piece, but narrative really does require deliberate choices, and those depend more on the hermeneutist’s own perspective than we scholars, critics and pundits usually care to admit.