The Interpretation of Cultures

Anthropological consideration of religion offers insight to sociological and psychological analyses. According to Geertz, religion fuses a people’s ethos, their “underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects” (127), and that people’s world view, the “picture of the way things in sheer actuality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society” (127). Religious ritual relates and reinforces the relationship between the moral, evaluative aspect of culture and the cognitive, existential aspect, revealing the social and psychological implications of religion. Sacred symbols synthesize this mutually-reinforcing, circular relationship between normative and existential realities. 

A religious system consists of “a cluster of sacred symbols woven into some sort of ordered whole” (129); the ordering of the whole gives symbols their power to connect different elements within one’s experience. Thus, religion allows morality to become the common sense by which a person conducts themselves because the “approved style of life and the assumed structured of reality [congruently] complete one another and lend one another meaning” (129). Once again, Geertz points to the nonlinear nature of anthropological study, of culture itself, and therefore also religion, through which ethos and world view form a fundamental whole, feeding into the other. 

The cultural underpinnings of religion demonstrate the widespread notion that the meaning of human action takes shape in its attunement to a cosmic order. For example, sacred symbols dramatize both positive and negative values to deal with the problem of evil. By grounding values in a metaphysical reality, religion allows its devotees to come to terms with the existence of evil by taking a proper disposition to it, so symbols formulate a world in which both good and evil exist and are necessary, directing a reasonable attitude towards each. This rationalization is possible because the fusion of ethos and world view gives social values the appearance of objectivity. 

In the next section, Geertz provides an extended discussion of the Javanese tradition of wajang, a shadow-puppet play that illustrates the fusion of ethos and worldview in religious ritual. After describing the elements of wajang, such as performers, characters, and action, he explains that “what the wajang dramatizes is not a philosophical politics but a metaphysical psychology” (134). That metaphysical psychology is encapsulated in the concept of rasa, which means simultaneously “feeling” and “meaning.” Rasa ties everything to subjective experience, so the immediate aim of devotees is to maintain psychological equilibrium, while their long-term aim is “direct comprehension of ultimate rasa” (136—to move “beyond the emotions of everyday life to the genuine feeling-meaning which lies within us all” (136). 

These aims are reflected in the worldview and the ethos of the Javanese people. Their worldview includes practicing mystical techniques for achieving tranquil detachment and formulating speculative theories about how emotions relate to everything; while their ethos includes subdued, predictable behavior to avoid disturbing others’ psychological equilibrium, as well as a “refined sensitivity to small changes in the emotional state both of oneself and of others” (136). Geertz explains how sacred symbols express this worldview and ethos in wajang using iconography, parable, and moral analogies. 

Furthermore, a person need not be able to explain sacred symbols for the sacred symbols to have meaning that orient that person within value-laden and existential realities. The average Javanese person who enjoys wajang without interpreting its meaning still uses its sacred symbols to give form to everyday experience by fusing the moral and the factual. Wajang stories clarify how ethos and world view are fused in wajang. For example, the Pandewas are characters in the play that represent Javanese virtues of compassion, will, and justice:

The resolution of these three dilemmas of virtue is the same: mystical insight. With a genuine comprehension of the realities of the human situation, a true perception of the ultimate rasa, comes the ability to combine Yudistira's compassion, Bima's will to action, and Arjuna's sense of justice into a truly moral outlook, an outlook which brings an emotional detachment and an inner peace in the midst of the world of flux, yet permits and demands a struggle for order and justice within such a world (139).

Geertz closes his analysis by pointing out that the increasingly popular conception of humans as “symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals” (140) raises the question of how they define and come to terms with situations. The implications of studying values through “ethos” and “worldview” as mutually reinforcing cultural phenomena are clear for sociology and psychology. However, Geertz also want to address another field of study, philosophy. He claims that anthropological understanding of values can contribute to philosophy by making philosophical investigation of values relevant: The close-to-the-ground character of anthropology can ground the abstractions and generalities of philosophy.

Functionalist theories, which emphasize understanding the psychological and social functions of religion, have dominated anthropology. However, the two functionalist approaches, sociological and socio-psychological, inadequately handle social change because they remain static and ahistorical, fail to consider the dysfunctional aspects of social usage and custom, and treat social systems and culture systems as if they are mirrors of one another. 

Geertz’s reformulation of functionalism begins by distinguishing between social systems and culture systems:

Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their actions; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations. Culture and social structure are then but different abstractions from the same phenomena (145).

A culture system creates a single body through logico-meaningful integration, which is “a unity of style, of logical implication, of meaning and value” (145), whereas a social system creates a single body through causal-functional integration, “where all the parts are united in a single causal web; each part is an element in a reverberating causal ring which ‘keeps the system going’” (145). Geertz argues that since these are not identical ways to organize a body, they are incongruent and create tension. It is therefore better to consider culture and social structures as independent, mutually interdependent entities. This allows for a more complex understanding of social and cultural dysfunction, as well as the relation between social secular life and religious belief and practice. 

To demonstrate the validity of his dynamic functionalist approach, Geertz applies it to a conflict that erupted during funeral rites in the town of Modjokuto in eastern Central Java, a conflict that “was in fact but a microscopic example of the broader conflicts, structural dissolutions, and attempted reintegrations” (146-47). Religious tradition in Java consists of “Indian, Islamic, and indigenous Southeast Asian elements” (147), and its main ritual is slametan, or a communal feast. The slametan ritual is intended to make offerings to Javanese spirits while simultaneously strengthening neighborhood solidarity.

Numerous factors, such as “[p]opulation growth, urbanization, monetization, occupational differentiation” (148), as well as certain political ideologies, have bifurcated Javanese social structure into santri, those who identify primarily as Muslim, and abangan, those who identify primarily as Javanese. This social distinction has become political: Santri identify with the Masjumi party, while abangan identify with the Permai party. Whereas the Masjumi party somewhat tolerates Javanese religious tradition, the Permai party is unequivocally anti-Muslim. The implications of this socio-political bifurcation become clear during the funeral rite Geertz describes. Javanese funerals typically feature a calm and undemonstrative mood, with a series of slametans before, during, and after. Geertz’s thick description of events reveals the incongruity between causal-functional integration and logico-meaningful integration. While there is not much social interaction between santris and abangans in everyday life, this funeral rite brings them into a common space:

the demonstration of territorial unity at a funeral was still felt by both groups to be an unavoidable duty; of all the Javanese rituals, the funeral probably carries the greatest obligation on attendance. Everyone who lives within a certain roughly defined radius of the survivors' home is expected to come to the ceremony; and on this occasion everyone did. (156)

As Geertz describes the events leading up to, during, and after the funeral, he notes the disorientation and uncharacteristic behavior of the Javanese people, suggesting tension between integration types. This tension challenges functionalist social disintegration and cultural demoralization theories. The identification of social or cultural conflict with social or cultural disintegration “denies independent roles to both culture and social structure, regarding one of the two as a mere epiphenomenon of the other” (163). In his analysis of what he perceived to have happened at the funeral, Geertz points out that religion is at the center of the conflict—it is not merely a reflection of stress in society:

The conflict around Paidjan's death took place simply because all the kampong residents did share a common, highly integrated, cultural tradition concerning funerals. There was no argument over whether the slametan pattern was the correct ritual, whether the neighbors were obligated to attend, or whether the supernatural concepts upon which the ritual is based were valid ones. For both santris and abangans in the kampongs, the slametan maintains its force as a genuine sacred symbol; it still provides a meaningful framework for facing death—for most people the only meaningful framework (164).

In other words, conflict arose because the kampong residents’ pattern of belief was in conflict with the pattern of social organization. The slametan is organized along neighborhood solidarity, but the split between abangans and santris in every day society does not translate to solidarity based on physical proximity. All of the kampong residents showed up to the funeral proceedings out of a belief that they must, but even in a space meant to generate solidarity, they still split themselves according to the everyday pattern of social interaction. The funeral conflict, therefore, reveals “an incongruity between the cultural framework of meaning and the patterning of social interaction, an incongruity due to the persistence in an urban environment of a religious symbol system adjusted to peasant social structure” (169).

Geertz closes by reiterating that static functionalism cannot account for the incongruity. His more dynamic framework demonstrates “the fact that man's need to live in a world to which he can attribute some significance […] often diverges from his concurrent need to maintain a functioning social organism” (169). In other words, regarding culture system and social system as independent and mutually interdependent matrices by which people orient themselves to the world reveals how different ways of organizing a body of people can produce conflict when brought face to face with one another. The conflict is revealed most acutely through religious belief and practice because sacred symbols take on different meanings, or rather become more difficult to respond to, when fused with political ideologies and social identities.