With the death of Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), both anthropology and Asian studies lost one of their most prominent, influential, and wide-ranging figures, as many obituaries and retrospective assessments of his life and work have noted (see, e.g., the unusually thoughtful and balanced one by Sherry Ortner, Reference Ortner2007). For more than forty years, Geertz's books and articles had a profound impact on his own discipline and on many neighboring ones, and though he dealt at length with other parts of the world, from Morocco (the subject of some of his fieldwork) to the United States (he sometimes turned his gaze to the rituals of his own culture), he often wrote about Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular. In terms of topics, he made major contributions to general debates on how to study history and culture, and to more specific discussions of issues such as the path that Islam took into and through individual nation-states.

Given the wide range of subjects about which Geertz wrote, both within and beyond the context of Southeast Asia (the main region that will concern me here), it would be impossible to try, in a short essay, to give an overview of his work. Instead, the aim of this essay is simply to offer a set of short “soundings” (examinations of specific themes), in which I draw attention to particular concerns that informed his work over the years. My hope is that by proceeding in this fragmentary way, I will be able to give some sense of the depth and breadth of Geertz's intellectual curiosity and how it related to a highly variable set of theoretical subjects—a set that changed over time. I do, though, want to stress three broad trends relating to his career as a whole. First, over the course of his decades of scholarly writing, Geertz became more relativistic and particularistic in his approach. Second, he became increasingly convinced over time that it was critical to approach the study of cultures in semiotic terms—that is, as semiotic systems—and that unraveling these systems (what he sometimes referred to as the webs of significance that collectivities together wove) required close attention to symbols in general and language in particular. Third, his method is perhaps best understood as one rooted in the desire to create multifaceted “cultural portraits,” evocations of how communities operated and how individuals within those groups made sense of their world—an approach that shared certain affinities with the work of Franz Boas and even more so with Ruth Benedict, whose books Patterns of Culture (Reference Benedict1934) and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Reference Benedict1946) influenced him, but made more room for change over time within cultures and stressed the need to think more in terms of “cultures” (lowercase and multiple) than “Culture” (capitalized and singular).

Sounding I: Ideology and Culture

In Geertz's work, the distinction between ideology and culture comes in many forms. What I think is critical is that Geertz perceived Bali as more culturally homogeneous in comparison to Java, which he portrayed as more diverse and heterogeneous. This difference is what I would call “ballast.” In the Balinese context, the symbolic structures and ethos are viewed as ballast in that they seldom are utilized as a sense of power and control over various segments of society. On the other side, the cultural systems in Java are always expressions of the political and social dynamics and the kinds of stratifications that exist. One may suspect that Geertz might have seen himself as making extensive use of the concept of ethos, but he differentiated it by abangan, santri, and priyayi. Thus, rather than culture versus ideology, what we have is a portrait of Java that is far more “post-traditional,” emphasizing the contestation among and between rival varieties of Javanese culture and religion. His model of Bali was, relatively speaking, far more conventional and unitary. Issues such as these have shed light not only on Indonesia, but also on the relationship of religion, politics, and society throughout Asia. In this sense, the scholarship of both Clifford and Hildred Geertz and of others has resulted in a critical understanding of the cultural and political profiles in which the nation-state is expressed. Along these lines, Southeast Asia is the most difficult to generalize because it does not possess that sense of perceived historical, cultural, or geographic continuity and unity that one finds in Japan, Korea, and China, and to a lesser degree in South Asia.

As one would expect, the critiques of Geertz's work have come from different disciplines, and often without reference to Southeast Asia. One might look at Talal Asad's (Reference Asad1983) critique of Geertz's understanding of religion, or Dale F. Eickelman's (Reference Eickelman, Shweder and Good2005) review of Geertz's interpretation of Moroccan Islam. The culture and ideology issue is dealt with theoretically by Dominick LaCapra (Reference LaCapra1988), and Richard A. Shweder (Reference Shweder2007) offers a nuanced perspective on Geertz's thoughts on culture, relativism, and the social sciences. Within the context of Southeast Asia, in an essay that both deals with and goes much beyond Geertz, John R. Bowen (Reference Bowen1995) provides an excellent summary of anthropological approaches and writings as they interconnect with the other social sciences. Of interest and importance to the matter of Islam, it may be noted that Bowen also edited a symposium titled “Scripture and Society in Modern Muslim Asia” (Reference Bowen1993) that compares textual traditions and analysis from South Asia to Southeast Asia.

Sounding II: Culture and Explanation

With this as a general introduction to Geertz's work and writings on Southeast Asia and beyond, let me explore a few issues in some depth. I should be careful to point out that Geertz's ideas did change over time, and initially they might be viewed as a partial reflection of the period in which he was working. Clearly, though, the German Romantic influence was always critical to his understanding of cultures, religions, and meanings, just as it was the basis for his sense of relativism and historicism, essential to showing how change occurs and why. In his rejection of universalist theories such as Marxism, Freudianism, and structuralism, and of social anthropological versions of society, Geertz treated the idea of culture in terms of its particularisms and the ways in which humans differ in so many directions from one another. In many of his early general essays, Geertz asks a critical question, namely, why and how humans have invested so much in the particular. As one might suspect of all species, this is a very basic feature of Homo sapiens, and it is evident in the existence of cultures in the plural, but more so in the marked differences of the vast linguistic diversity that characterizes our species. Overall, Geertz's approach is not a denial of the real existence of the world, but a means of getting at what is “in” the world. Within that approach, culture, the self, and reflexive consciousness are crucial to the reconstitution of the world. The anthropologist's task, then, is to explore cultural being. For a Balinese, being is religious; thus the anthropologist's aim is the discovery and understanding of the features or principles that order and define the world for Balinese.

At various times, Geertz's work has been critiqued for its explanatory reach. Explanation as a mode of scholarship is best found in his Agricultural Involution (Reference Geertz1963a), but beginning in the 1960s, his writings moved in essentially humanistic directions—thus, the interest in explanation became almost mute. This, of course, should not be surprising, as Geertz's anthropology was highly influenced by the German tradition through Boas and Benedict. Within this tradition, description and explanation are essentially compounded. Thus, explanation was based solely on the depth and detail of the description. Description that was detailed, heavily documented, and ethnographically rigorous stood as the explanation. In short, culture is there, and it describes and explains itself.

Some writers have argued that Geertz gave up on social science explanations in favor of what might be called a cultural explanation. In many ways, Geertz seemed to believe that his analyses were as explanatory and scientific as what is normally found throughout the social sciences. But for Geertz, the real difference is that he recognized the cultural contingency of his own position, whereas in the social sciences, one might not. Overall, I think it is fair to suggest that Geertz might not have quite resolved the relationship between explanation and interpretation. When pushed—which he was—he tended to see them not as opposed, but as premised on different criteria of critical self-awareness.

Next, I wish to develop some of the general features of Geertz's writings on Indonesia and ask to what extent they have had a bearing on similar historical and anthropological developments in South and East Asia. My concern is a more detailed discussion and analysis of Geertz's writings on Islam and religion in Indonesia, his understanding of Bali, Dutch structural anthropology and its implications, how comparison(s) entered his work in Southeast Asia, and the mutual convergence of culture and history both within the nation-state and within academic exchange. In passing, we may note Geertz's early but everlasting work on agriculture, regional economies, and market economics.

Sounding III: Islam, Java, and Indonesia

In work reaching from West Africa, East Africa, and Morocco to Iran, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, Islam has been portrayed in many forms and in many variants. Characterizations include Islam as an anticolonial religion, Islam as a traveler's religion, and Islam as a trader's religion. Such vignettes are a kind of Western Orientalistic writing, here meaning a quick and handy way of covering the internal characteristics and variants in dogma and practice that are critical to and within Islam. Such accounts have had a persistent influence on Western writings on Islam. Marshall G. S. Hodgson deals with many of these portraits in his three volumes on The Venture of Islam (Reference Hodgson1974). One must place Hodgson squarely outside the Orientalist camp, and, notwithstanding his critique of Geertz, he is much closer to Geertz in spirit. In particular, his concern is not to boil down Islam to certain essences, as do some variants of Orientalism, but, like Geertz, to demonstrate its intrinsic richness and internal variation.

In Southeast Asian studies as well as other areas in the 1950s and early 1960s, much of the writing on Islam by social scientists was cast in the mode of development and modernity, especially in dealing with new nations in what was labeled the “third world.” Islam in many book titles was cast as a dependent variable, such that one finds titles such as “Education and Islam,” “Economic Development or Political Development and Islam,” and so on. In this sense, Islam never enjoyed primary consideration or treatment; it was seen as an ancillary social force or phenomenon. Of course, the parallel upshot in a period of heavy Orientalism was that Islam in India and China came in for comparative neglect in light of the emphases in those regions on Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the like.

To a much lesser degree, one also finds some of this kind of thinking in Geertz's very early work, but he never treats Islam as a minor or secondary force. His initial work on Islam—a major work that even many of his critics have applauded, its flaws notwithstanding, as one of the best ethnographies of Islam in Asia ever written—is The Religion of Java, published in Reference Geertz1960, which was primarily neo-Weberian (with the influence of Talcott Parson on him as strong as that of Emile Durkheim, notably in the way in which Geertz emphasized the need to “integrate” society and culture). The basic focus is not on religion per se but on the social structure and social organization of Islam—namely, the kinds of social groupings and classes and how they interpret Islam. The religious variations are cast as subtraditions—abangan, santri, and priyayi variants—and the focus is on how Islamic strictures are reworked in terms of dogma and the ensuing system of belief. The Religion of Java appeared at a critical juncture. Critiques of the volume basically came from a number of directions. Initially it was Hodgson's (1974, 2:551) critique, which notes that Geertz's version of the religion is based on Shari'a-minded Muslims who are basically modernists, thus relegating the other groups to a vague combination of Hindu-Buddhism or folkish traditionalism. For Hodgson, Sufism is critical to understanding why Islam was adopted in Java and to appreciating the richness of Javanese culture. Unlike Geertz, Hodgson is clear that the Hindu-Buddhist remnants did not last long in Java, and he insists that Islam spread throughout all layers of Javanese society. This is a critical point about Islam in Java, which I find convincing.

Geertz's work points to the critical interplay between knowledge and power in Islam, and in all world religions for that matter, and it has been inspirational for a younger cohort of scholars in debating such issues. In a few cases, such as the writings of Mark R. Woodward (Reference Woodward1989), the critique has gone even further by developing the critical role of hadith in Javanese Islam. Another point that is emphasized by Woodward is that the court rituals so central to the priyayi life were not Hindu-Buddhist, but primarily derived from Persianate models of kingship that had made their way to Southeast Asia from India. Anthony Milner (Reference Milner1995) also echoes the importance of this point in the Malay context. Hodgson and these younger critics claim that Geertz applied an overly modernist and reformist vision in interpreting Javanese Islam. In this sense, Geertz's early shortcomings reflect the modernization framework that dominated the social sciences of the 1950s and early 1960s. By the late 1960s, Geertz, in his Islam Observed (1968), was moving toward a more cultural/Benedictian position as well as a narrativized approach to both the study of Islam and culture more broadly. Ultimately, Geertz realized the limits of The Religion of Java, and in 2005, he noted that his work on Islam needed to be coupled with textually oriented studies of Qur'anic, hadith, and Shari'a traditions, especially if we wish to grasp the role of “scripturalism” in nationalist politics (Shweder and Good Reference Shweder and Good2005, 71, 117).

The anthropological work on Islam in Indonesia has now created a generation of scholars who are able to textually work the issues from Shari'a to the abangan tradition, covering what Geertz envisioned in the 1960s. We are all in debt to Geertz's pioneering work. It should be emphasized that in the Reference Geertz1980s and Reference Geertz1990s, the efflorescence of anthropological and historical literature on Islam in diverse settings led to a far more refined sense of the commonalities and differences across different subtraditions of Islam. Anthropologists have now provided a more deeper and clearer sense of Islam in local contexts than what Geertz achieved, in part because the comparative materials were not yet available to him. They have also linked variations in Islam to the study of textual and legal traditions found across vast expanses of the Muslim world.

Sounding IV: Bali

Whereas the work in Java directed Geertz toward a number of global and broad concerns, his work with Hildred Geertz on Bali moved in other directions and spurred other types of intellectual discourse, some of which will never have any closure. Bali, like a few other places that anthropologists have worked in, has long fascinated not only social scientists but also students of religion and the humanities in general. At one time, a common joke among anthropologists was that every Navajo household was composed of a husband, wife, children, and one anthropologist. Surely if the Navajo are the most overstudied society on record, the Balinese might be a close second.

The anthropological infatuation with Balinese aesthetics, social structures, and philosophical developments has vacillated between interpreting Balinese life within itself and with respect to philosophy and caste-like social structures as they existed in India. James A. Boon (Reference Boon1977, Reference Boon1982, Reference Boon1999) has brilliantly caught and conveyed the nuanced and overt types of internal and external interests through which Bali has been envisioned back to the 1800s. The fascination and strangeness of Bali appear in traveler's accounts and Indic scholarship, which saw Bali primarily as an aesthetic outpost within the dominance of Islam throughout the archipelago. Dutch scholarship on Bali had its roots in the nineteenth century and a richly overarching philosophical tradition. Not only did this scholarship stress the Indic ties, it also saw Bali as the opposition to the hegemony of Java as the only “inner island” that was not Islamic. Again in this context, Java and Islam are equated, but Bali is linked to ancient India and the Hindic traditions that dominated the phenomena of rank, hierarchy, and complexity.

Clifford and Hildred Geertz started their fieldwork in Bali in the 1960s against this backdrop. They continued publishing their research for four more decades. Many of the works are coauthored, and at the same time, each of them worked on different topics. Hildred Geertz wrote a superb volume on the Javanese family, and most of her efforts on Bali extended to art and the philosophical tradition (H. Geertz, Reference Geertz and Geertz1991, Reference Geertz1994, Reference Geertz2004; Geertz and Geertz Reference Geertz and Geertz1964, Reference Geertz and Geertz1975; Geertz and Togog Reference Geertz and Togog2005). In many ways, the inspiration for their work stemmed from the fieldwork and writings in the 1930s of Miguel Covarrubias, Jane Belo, Colin McPhee, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead, all of whom were and still are foundational to Bali fieldworkers in their own way.

By the time the Balinese work started, the Weberian influence that was so pronounced in Geertz's The Religion of Java was no longer that critical, and what developed was the full flowering of what has been referred to as cultural portraits à la Ruth Benedict. Throughout the years and decades of writing on Bali, Geertz was fully aware of the Dutch scholarship from both the early and the contemporary periods. The reason I mention this is that many writers on Bali and Indonesia have felt that Geertz did not cite all of the relevant work. This attitude simply is not warranted. Geertz seldom peppered his writings with endless references that would have had little or no bearing on the subject matter at hand, however much they might interest or fulfill the expectations of another writer. It is clear that Geertz was heavily influenced by the Dutch writings on Bali. He read them thoroughly, as he did the French and German sources, and he cited them in an exacting manner.

The differences that some Dutch scholars have had with Geertz, and vice versa, turn on issues that I will explore later in this essay. In many ways, their findings, developments, and interpretations run in parallel paths that might have implications for one side or another. The Dutch saw the problem of interpreting Bali as one form of structuralism, whereas for Geertz, the issues were primarily cultural. One of the critical cultural expressions in the Balinese writings, both in the Geertzes' work and in the Dutch scholarship, is an understanding of the forms of internal complexity that run throughout Balinese social structure as well as traditions in dance, drama, theater, oral traditions, and other aesthetic expressions. Much of Geertz's discussion focuses on these themes, and the weight of his ethnographic findings support it just as the Dutch sources do from the 1940s onward and prior to that era.

Sounding V: Complexity and Involution

Geertz's thinking on complexity and involution, which would become very influential over time, was shaped profoundly by earlier work on these subjects by Alexander A. Goldenweiser, especially a Reference Goldenweiser and Lowie1936 essay that Geertz cites with approval in Agricultural Involution. The connections between Goldenweiser's theory and Agricultural Involution are clear. As far as it can be determined, none of the works that Geertz published on Bali ever mention Goldenweiser, whose work might have made the best case for how complexity developed in Bali. In brief, the question that Goldenweiser pursues is how complexity takes form, and how increasing complexity may not result in qualitative transformations or innovations. Goldenweiser notes and stresses that the dominance of a particular pattern takes hold, and any further changes work inward to draw forth greater and greater internal complexity without transformations that are qualitatively different and might have no bearing on their origins. In his analysis, Goldenweiser draws examples from the ornateness in late Gothic art by noting that the basic form of art has reached a finality and that its structural features are established only as variations. Originality as invention is exhausted. Elaboration continues without inventive transformations. Another apt example in Goldenweiser is his discussion of how fugues are ornately and particularly developed in Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions. There is in Bach a deliberate limitation on invention, and thus the melodic elements are repeated, combined, and recombined, and “the result is a highly complex musical texture; so complex, in fact, as frequently to confuse the ear, unless unusually musical or experienced. This feature stands out in bald relief especially when compared, say, with Beethoven, where elaboration or combination of basic melodic elements is not abandoned but supplemented by continued melodic invention. The resulting effect is relative simplicity and freshness” (1936, 104).

The internal complexity of Bali was pivotal for both the Dutch scholarship and the writings of the Geertzes. The theme of stasis and its paramount quality appear in virtually all of their descriptions. Stasis is not stationary—it works back on itself. Stasis in Bali is there and pervades most of the social and aesthetic life, and it simply cannot be reduced to any single factor. A fine example of involution in Balinese society is teknonymy, and the Geertzes (Reference Geertz1964, 1975) show how it works throughout the fabric of Balinese society. Teknonymy, which is a system of naming children either by birth order or by reference to kin in the generation before or after, is not found in many societies, and when it is, it is usually in small-scale societies, though it has been documented in different areas of Chinese kinship and social organization. In these cases, teknonymy appears confined to a narrow domain of kinship. In contrast, Balinese teknonymy runs throughout the entire society, both in terms of horizontal connections and vertical hierarchical ties that embed status, rank, and property arrangements, not only between individuals but also from village to village and from region to region. It pervades lineages and other kin groups (with their religious, economic, and political dimensions), and also creates new ones. It is no wonder that the Geertzes understand teknonymy as a cultural paradigm that not only creates ongoing complexities but also establishes new cultural connections bearing its stamp. Yet it is puzzling that the Geertzes make no reference to Goldenweiser, whose piece on involution would have been especially helpful. Teknonymy in all of its various permutations in Bali creates a late Gothic art style, but one in which ethnographers—whether be they Dutch, the Geertzes, or others—can describe as occurring as part of the present. It should be noted that involution is hardly a common matter. But perhaps one might find parallels between Bali and Indic aesthetics and philosophy, both of which promote and endure ongoing processes of internal complexity without qualitative transformations.

In Negara (1980) and the whole conception of the state and what Geertz calls the “theater state” in nineteenth-century Bali, he is basically arguing against Western concepts of power and how power is deployed throughout the state. In this sense, he draws parallels to accounts of early state formation in medieval Europe by utilizing the works of Ernst H. Kantorowicz (Reference Kantorowicz1957) and Ralph E. Giesey (Reference Giesey1960). In passing, both Kantorowicz and Giesey are relegated to the section on notes, but if one knows these two works, it is evident that the idea of the “king's two bodies” and its development in medieval ideas of power and funerary ceremonies serves as the basic inspiration for Geertz's notion of the development of the Balinese theater state. In other words, Geertz took his center–periphery model from medieval European patterns of theological power and interpreted it within the context of the Balinese symbolism. Yet one can read Negara as a form of critique, not only in terms of Bali but also in terms of how anthropologists have used and misused the idea of power as a political process. My only qualification to the foregoing would be to hedge on my use of the term “Western concepts of power.” Geertz in the late 1970s was part of a broader shift in Western scholarship, particularly in history and anthropology, whereby our very concept of power was incorporating a far more nuanced and “cultural-constructionist” model of politics. In this, one might say, Geertz was both responding to new currents in political theory and trying to point out that he and at least some other anthropologists and even sociologists (such as Edward Shils) in the 1950s and 1960s had anticipated the turn to a concept of power/politics interpenetrated by its cultural constructions.

Sounding VI: Geertz and Dutch Structuralism

Dutch structuralism and its anthropological interpretation of Indonesia were always a problem for Geertz. He was never theoretically inclined toward Dutch structuralism. In part, this was because of his move away from generalized or nomothetic theory in the late 1960s. His feelings were most negative on theories that were globally based, evidenced by his dismissal of French structuralism, and especially Lévi-Strauss. To a great extent, his negative Reference Geertz and Geertz1967 piece on Lévi-Strauss is the basis of what he thought about the whole enterprise. Within this context, he had little interest in what he felt was a rewriting of Lévi-Strauss as the intellectual foundation for and within the anthropology of Indonesia. The writings by P. E. de Josselin de Jong on Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss, and his Reference Josselin de Jong1951 volume titled Minangkabau and Negri Sembilan: Socio-Political Structure in Indonesia, with its focus on symmetrical and asymmetrical connubia as a general overarching framework, would have been anathema to Geertz. For the Dutch scholars, structuralism began with the investigation of dualistic principles, especially in the islands of outer Indonesia, and that was of little interest to Geertz. Further still, many Dutch writers viewed these islands and societies as primarily Austronesian societies, and not Indonesian societies. Within this framework, each study of each society is a study of dualism, and thus there is hardly any mention of Indonesia as a nation. Geertz was well aware of the Dutch scholarship, but was he disinterested by the emphasis that both the ethnographic and the historical material placed on verifying a theory of dualistic structures.

The issue of how the Dutch scholarship related to Islam is a tough one to unravel. Under Dutch rule, the research areas (which might have covaried with administrative regions) were identified as a set number of areas based on adat law. Eventually, adat law became critical for the concern regarding the kind of fieldwork and other research that was to be done. Surely the Dutch scholarship on Islam has a long and creative path, but one still hears that under Dutch rule, the denial of “Indonesia” by adat law areas was a way to keep Islam out of the total cultural scene. This simply was not the case, but from to time to time it is still expressed, and as far as I know, Geertz never made such a claim or statement. Overall, the scholarship on Islam is very textual in terms of the various aspects of Islamic law. The Dutch scholarship on Islam within Indonesia and adjacent Muslim areas is best exemplified by the papers in a volume edited by M. B. Hooker (Reference Hooker1983). Hooker's volume on Islam must be read alongside what Geertz and other scholars have published within the Indonesian context. I should like to point out that the piece by Roy F. Ellen (Reference Ellen and Hooker1983) in the Hooker volume is a superb analysis of another side of Islam, what Ellen calls “practical Islam.” This work should be read in conjunction with Geertz's writings on both Indonesian and Moroccan Islam.

Sounding VII: History and Anthropology

Geertz's writings on history and anthropology and their relationship to one another addressed critical debates in the humanities and social sciences. By the 1970s, many fields in the humanities had turned to anthropology and the idea of culture as it related to language, comparative literature, philosophy, and eventually fields such as cultural studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. Philosophy and linguistics as part of the humanities also brought forth some interest in the culture concept and how systems of meaning were a part of various discourses. At the same time, some of the social sciences found intellectual and theoretical connections with what was happening in the biological sciences, in models of rational choice theories and of personal and group maximization. It was a time of what Geertz called “blurred genres.” The interest in anthropology among scholars in the humanities was primarily directed toward understanding how anthropological theories and frames of analysis could provide new interpretations and insights into older issues in the humanities, especially in the fields of literature, comparative literature, and languages. Thus, Lévi-Straussian structuralism, Marxism, cultural Marxism, cultural analysis through Geertz or David Schneider, symbolic approaches, theories of interpretation, ethnography and thick description, and componential analysis all became a part of the anthropological export trafficked to the humanities.

Geertz's (1990) own interest is clearly set forth in how he relates various forms of the historical endeavor to cultural anthropology. As he notes, anthropology and history dwell and vacillate on the issue of time and space, on the big and the little. He points out that, historically, anthropology has had an obsession with the little and with perspectives from the bottom upward, and thus the size of our efforts might appear small. This, of course, is evident when one compares Bali with certain historical works on medieval and Renaissance Europe, works that deal with royalty, royal cremations and funerary practices, and the creative aspects of kingship. But in terms of borrowing, some historians have moved from the big to the little and back again, as exemplified by Robert Darnton's (Reference Darnton1984) writing on the “Great Cat Massacre” in France. In that work, we see echoes of what Geertz did with the cockfight and how he read Balinese culture from particular events. Darnton and Geertz occasionally taught an undergraduate seminar at Princeton University.

The connection and devotion to history on the part of Geertzian anthropology is that history is essentially relativistic, or at least the most relativistic of the humanities, and possibly more so than most aspects of social anthropology. Furthermore, history, as he saw it in its various forms of significance and interpretation, is based on empiricism, and not embedded or based on abstractions or on theories that Geertz (Reference Geertz1990) labels “bootless.” He goes a little further: “Anthropology gets the tableau, History gets the drama; Anthropology the forms, History the causes.”

However, the issue of interpreting Geertz in a straightforward manner as a relativist is not that simple; it is neither valid nor correct. It could be argued that he is better described as a particularist than a relativist; these are different positions, and he “labeled” himself not as a relativist but as an anti-anti-relativist, which is not the same thing.

Textual tactics allow anthropologists and historians to move from the local and the marginal to broad issues, such as how the power of meaning is created through the panorama of medieval political theology. Within this operation, the role of symbolic forms and forces is critical to understanding Bali as a cultural portrait, and the parallel with medieval European divine kingship and funerary cremation is but one of tacking back and forth. Anthropologists seek to find out how things fit together, historians venture into how things are brought forth.

Geertz's reading of and adherence to history had much to do with history's relativistic foundations, but it also gave him a means of not having to address global theories or virtually any theory in social anthropology. It must be kept in mind that the Weberian influence and a Parsonian view of culture were hardly global and were never meant to be universal. The only larger “ism” in anthropology that Geertz would accept was that of relativism, but even relativism in the 1990s in anthropology was in trouble because it was compounded into various versions of postmodernism. Interestingly, historians generally have read Geertz as a highly theoretical thinker, despite his rejection of global theories such as structuralism, Marxism, and cultural Marxism. Again, one must ponder the ifs and whys regarding his move to history. In part, it starts early in his writings, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s, theory hardly comes into his work. And surely thick description and webs of meaning are hardly theory. As I already have noted, Geertz also wrote with a stronger conviction that explanation and interpretation are one and the same. On the other side, the move to history, as in the Balinese writings, was a further departure from his work of the 1960s and early 1970s. But it was a safe departure.

Sounding VIII: Economy and Society

In later years, as he refined his own intellectual position, Geertz reserved special scorn for what he called “economistic” explanations of social action; but the fact is that during the years he spent at Berkeley, his writing and teaching largely focused on economic issues. Although no one would confuse his views even at that time with those of such fundamentalist materialists as, say, Marvin Harris, Geertz was working during the late 1950s and early 1960s well within a Weberian framework, examining in particular the culture–economy nexus and how ideas and social organizations related to economic growth. These were the years in which he published The Religion of Java (1960), “Social Change and Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns” (Reference Geertz and Hagen1962), and Peddlers and Princes (Reference Geertz1963b), and sent off the Agricultural Involution (Reference Geertz1963a) manuscript, among other works. At that time, he was concerned with such specific issues as the interaction between occupation and religious affiliation, the organization of petty markets, cultural barriers and incentives that he believed influenced the development of capitalism, the varied social implications of shifting field and irrigation agriculture, the economic effects of colonialism, and the promise that such everyday institutions as rotating credit organizations might have for the accumulation of funds that enabled investments in larger-scale enterprise. The advanced undergraduate course in economic anthropology that he offered in 1960 embodied a thorough review of, and critique of, anthropological contributions to “development studies”; notes for that course were passed on and highly cherished among interested Berkeley students long after Geertz had departed Berkeley for the University of Chicago.

With that background, it is not surprising that the students whom Geertz influenced went on to pursue research in Southeast Asia that raised similar kinds of issues. Much of that influence was effected through a superb seminar on social stratification in peasant societies that was held in 1960; it was led by Geertz and Lloyd A. Fallers and attended occasionally by such on-campus luminaries as Irving Goffman, Paul Wheatley, and Reinhard Bendix. Three student members of that seminar were motivated to devote their careers primarily to research in Southeast Asia: James Siegel, Henry T. Lewis, and W. G. Davis. Siegel's fieldwork was on Acehnese Islam, while Lewis and Davis both worked on markets in the Philippines. All three have produced students of their own who also have conducted Southeast Asian research.

Concluding Thoughts

Geertz's initial writings reflected the social science of his time, even or maybe especially in his criticisms and in his effort to escape from it. This is evident in the tendency to treat religion as a kind of background, something like the climate that is there—something important but without agency or dynamism. So it is addressed, when it is, in relationship to more vital elements of society—hierarchy, wealth, power, social structure, and so forth. This position might characterize Geertz in his Balinese studies and in Islam Observed. As captured in The Religion of Java, religion is deployed in aliran and its conflicts, but it must be stressed that this is not background, but rather the primary generative force in explaining the internal variations of Javanese Islam. Indeed, it is partly because of the force of aliran/religiously based sociopolitical organizations that Geertz felt that he could confidently dismiss class as a structuring variable in Java.

But for historians of Europe since the Reformation, religion is just a vessel that may express something arising elsewhere but causing very little in its own right. Historians looked at religion and political alignments or social class, with religion in effect the passive partner, as a way of congealing social interests and differences that originated elsewhere. And that is why Weber's Protestant ethic stood out so distinctively and received such attention.

In the final analysis, it is clear that Geertz would never have accepted a position that religion is only a mere background. The Weberian influence was always central to his thinking. Of course, a reader might claim that Geertz was theoretical and sought vague causal explanations. This is a tough issue. What I think most appealed to Geertz within the Weberian framework were not causal explanations, either strong or weak, but how Weber developed the Germanic idea of elective affinity from Kant and Goethe and applied this to the realm of social and historical analysis. A rereading of Geertz within an elective affinity understanding would probably clarify many of the problems encountered in analyzing his works. From this viewpoint, what the Geertzian position brought forth is almost a perverse argument that religious belief might even effect something important. The charge that Geertz's work was and is eclecticism is still made even to this day, a position that I find absurd.

Historically, within the scholarship on certain regions of Asia, but not Southeast Asia, there was a very strong temptation to look for some Ur-source of cultural attitudes and behavior. The search for the Ursprung comes from German intellectual culture history and philosophy of the 1800s onward, with the belief that the Ursprung would unlock the secrets of whole cultures and civilizations. Here, the major initial emphasis was on the ancient language texts, as they could unravel what the essence of a way of life was. Ancient India and what it meant is a case in point. This kind of search appeals to experts and area specialists because it validates the importance of their expertise and immersion. By emphasizing the ineffable quality of culture, it forefends against shallow commentators (as well as economists and political scientists) unless they, too, bow to the power of the past, something they were usually all too glad to do in a paragraph before turning to the present that they cared about). At the same time, this emphasis—which was also appealing to native scholars—created and played to a stereotype of the changeless, timeless East. In an odd way, Geertz toyed with and yet skillfully handled these prejudices and approaches, avoiding the traps they lay while seeking (and laying claims to) cultural depth.