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Politics and the Archeology of Meaning: A Review EssayLocal Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology by Clifford Geertz; Negara:The Theater State in 19th Century Bali ; The Interpretation of Cultures ; Hermeneuticsand the Human Sciences by Paul Ricoeur; The Conflict of Interpretations ; Freud andPhilosophyReview by: William AdamsThe Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 548-563Published by: University of Utah on behalf of the Western Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/448348 .Accessed: 10/10/2012 00:18

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POLITICS AND THE ARCHEOLOGY OF MEANING A Review Essay

WILLIAM ADAMS

San Francisco

Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 244 pp.

Negara. The Theater State in 19th Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 295 pp. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 470 pp.

Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 314 pp.

The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 512 pp. Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 573 pp.

SINCE Plato banished the poets from the city of the just, social philosophers and scientists have worried and argued over the place and force of ideas in social life. Such musings and battles have yet

to produce settled conclusions, and they probably never will. Indeed, the very word "idea" is enough to start the argument going again. Yet in spite of all the quarrels, the conviction that collective life is in some fundamen- tal way about those things its members (elites and masses, peasants and kings) collectively think, imagine, or believe is something we cannot shake. No matter how far social science has traveled in the direction of natural- ism, the notion that "man is an animal," in Clifford Geertz's elegant for- mulation, "suspended in webs of significance he has himself spun" (1973: 5) has traveled along with it. And to the despair, perhaps, of the naturalists, the complex and inexact business of unstringing such webs continues to attract its practitioners, and to produce a more-or-less steady din of dis- course and disagreement over the best way to talk about the significance of significance.

The recent and much discussed "interpretive turn" in social science is another moment in this discourse, another stab at understanding how we humans mean things, and where and how our meanings figure in the very concrete practices and necessities that also compose our social lives. The lexicon of interpretive theory is often thick and forbidding, as the mother word "hermeneutics" suggests. But like most theories that take root and become productive, it is based upon a relatively simple claim. If web spin-

NOTE: For their contribution to many of the ideas expressed in this essay, I would like to thank the students who participated in my graduate seminar at the University of North Carolina in the Spring of 1984.

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ning, to extend Geertz's metaphor, is a consequential part of our human social reality, then social scientists must attend to it, and they must do so in ways that are carefully fashioned to grasp the peculiar features of spin- ning and of webs. As the works reviewed here suggest, it is a claim that has produced an impressive body of work. "The woods are full of eager interpreters" (Geertz 1983: 21), casting their hermeneutical nets over every- thing from cockfights and baseball to the archaic symbolisms of evil and desire.

At least, this seems to be the case among sociologists and especially an- thropologists. In political science, on the other hand, the woods have been a good deal less busy, or at least less musical. Political theorists with con- tinental tastes have probably read the writers I will discuss or refer to here. But for the most part interpretive theory has stayed put on the bookcase, exotica adorning the edges of the mainstream of American political science.

This essay is an effort to make a case for interpretive theory that goes beyond mere erudition. Specifically, I want to argue that the non-scientific practitioners of interpretation have something to say to political scientists about the task of understanding the place and production of meaning in politics. I do not expect or intend this argument to lead to conversions. I make it rather in the conviction that where meaning crosses and gets tan- gled up in political practices and institutions (which is to say almost every- where), political science will always need to be something more than, or other than, a science.

I

Like myth, ideology and symbolism, culture is a term everyone uses apologetically and then proceeds to use all the same, as if nothing else quite will do. Ambiguities and corruptions aside, it is exactly the right word here as well. For it is toward a theory of culture that hermeneutics leads, and it is as a theory of culture that political science has something to gain from interpretive theory and technique.

Political theorists, as I have already suggested, have always paid atten- tion to the idea of culture, although until quite recently they called it other things; "national character," "ideas," "manners," "objective spirit," "ideology." More recently, political scientists have reformulated this in- terest in terms of the impact of "subjective" or "psychological orienta- tions" on political behavior (Pye and Verba 1965; Pye 1966, 1968). The terms used to describe exactly what the "subjective" and "psychological" are composed of have varied some, from normative ones like "values" and "fundamental beliefs" (Almond and Verba 1963) to more conceptual cat- egories like "cognitions" or affective ones like "sentiments" and "feel- ings." But the larger idea here, that all societies embody particular configurations of belief and feeling about political structures, processes and ends, and that political scientists must be capable of describing such atti- tudes and determining their impact on political behavior, has been a rela- tively fixed assumption of contemporary political analysis.

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As even the most cursory acquaintance with the literature suggests, it has been a productive assumption as well. And yet I want to argue that the uses to which contemporary analysts have put the idea of culture, as well as the ways in which they have insisted it be studied, have been some- what confining. Simply put, what has most interested political scientists are those subjective "attitudes" and "orientations" that bear upon "po- litically relevant objects" (Pye and Verba 1965: 523), usually understood as regimes, institutions, procedures, leaders, or, somewhat less often, po- litical principles. As I will try to show in context and detail, the complaint of interpretive theory here is not the such attitudes and objects do not ex- ist, and far less that they do not matter. It is rather that there is a good deal of both meaning and culture left over here, outside the conceptual net of "subjective orientations" toward "politically relevant objects." Just what this leftover amounts to is one of the central concerns of the works I will discuss in what follows.

The subjective bias (Dittmer 1977: 555) of the term political culture has led to methodological as well as thematic constraints. To conceive of culture as the "manifestation in aggregate form of the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics" (Pye 1968: 218) is to place it in people's minds, and thus to make subjective possessions of the meanings that "give order . . . to the political process" (Pye 1966: 104-5). There are a number of philosophical difficulties with this formulation, which I will return to a bit later on. But more important here are the procedural consequences, and limitations, such a notion entails. If culture is indeed composed of psy- chological and subjective orientations, if it is a matter of what people think of particular political objects, then, like public opinion, it seems clear that the best way to find out what people think is to ask them. This strategy has been further shaped by the insistence that "fundamental orientations" be "operationalized, that is, translated into concrete behaviors, feelings or opinions to study" (Rosenbaum 1975: 8). This means that asking ques- tions about subjective orientations should yield something a bit more defi- nite than curses, rhapsodies or testimonials. Political science, after all, is not oral history. The political analyst must turn the contents of subjectivity into measurable and verifiable data, and this has meant, quite simply, that "the basic tool of contemporary political culture study is the survey re- search method" (Rosenbaum 1975: 22).

There is obviously much to say for survey research studies. But again, the question here is whether or not the possibilities for the political analy- sis of political culture are exhausted by such techniques, and by the broader epistemological orientations (culture is subjective; the only good subjec- tivity is an operationalized subjectivity) such techniques assume. Already constrained in thematic terms, survey research techniques and studies also tend for methodological reasons to land the study of political culture in some rather well turned regions of the political/cultural landscape, those places, precisely, that can be gotten at with questions designed to yield measura- ble and verifiable data. This is to exclude from the outset the investigation of political meanings that cannot be turned into data, that lend themselves only to very different forms of inquiry.

Politics and the Archeology of Meaning 551

It is essential to stress that there are such meanings, and that such an exclusion therefore has ramifications for the political understanding of po- litical problems. Political scientists have never argued that there are no other aspects or visions of culture than their own, or that it is a bad thing that there are literary critics, anthropologists and philosophers around to pay attention to them. But the case to be made for interpretive theory, represented in what follows by one anthropologist and one philosopher/liter- ary critic, is a bit more substantive and, I hope, provocative than a live and let live view of the academic division of labor. For it is precisely in terms of the way in which the "subjective" gets tangled up with the "ob- jective" in politics, how meaning impinges on structures, psychology on behavior, belief on action, that the "survey research-subjective orienta- tion" view and study of political culture is limiting. The way in which po- litical culture has been scientifically pursued and studied is only a partial solution, in other words, to the very problematic that set such studies in motion. It is to the widening of the response of political science to this same problematic - "how every people gets," in Geertz's words, "the politics it imagines" (1974: 313) - that interpretive theory makes a further, and necessary, contribution.

II

Philosophical hermeneutics is an old and rich tradition, claiming names and interests as diverse as those of Aristotle, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Max Weber, Freud, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty. But among con- temporary writers, Paul Ricoeur's work may be viewed as exemplary, par- ticularly in the context of the problems just described. For as the titles under review here suggest, Ricoeur has meditated at length on the connection between hermeneutics and the social sciences.

The connection matters to Ricoeur for the same reason it mattered to Weber (Ricoeur 1981: 225). There is human society and action where there is meaning. Or in Weber's terms, all social action is meaningfully oriented and directed (Weber 1978: 7). This suggests that social science will always be in part, and necessarily, committed to understanding, in Weber's partic- ular and well known sense of that word, those meanings that social actors pursue and around which their social relationships are constructed. And since to understand another's meanings is, for Ricoeur, to construe or inter- pret them, the social sciences will always have an inescapably "hermeneu- tical" component.

Just why Ricoeur thinks that meanings must be construed, as well as what it means to construe them, will become clear in what follows. But before confronting that question, it is essential to bring into view another aspect of the interpretive stance. For in Ricoeur's view, the act of under- standing through interpretation is not, to begin with, a problem of method or social scientific procedure. More fundamentally, it is an "ontological trait" (1974: 9), a facet of our being as members of a social and political world. In other words, the act of interpretation, of understanding through interpretation, is itself a part of our constitution as social beings. The pro-

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totypical interpreters are thus not social scientists, busying themselves with the meanings others live with. Before the anthropologists, sociologists or political critics do their work, we are all interpreters, caught up in the task of making a certain kind of sense of the world that we find around us. "Un- derstanding," as Ricoeur puts it, "is [not] . . . a mode of knowledge but a mode of being, the mode of that being which exists through understand- ing" (1974: 7). Beneath the theme of formal interpretive technique (how does one know and say what X means by Y), the fundamental theme of hermeneutics is the nature and place of interpretation in the everyday so- cial world.

The extensive reflections on psychoanalysis, symbolism and the human sciences that comprise the better part of Freud and Philosophy and most of the essays gathered in The Conflict of Interpretations and Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences all hinge on this characterization of the central problem of hermeneutics. More precisely, the way in which Ricoeur encourages us to conceptualize social meaning is shaped by this preoccupation with the ontological character of understanding. Collective meanings are to be ren- dered not as isolated and detached objects for an equally detached observer, but in terms of where and how they really are, tangled up in social prac- tices and the interpretive acts of people making sense of their world. Meaning matters in social life precisely because it is by way of collective meanings that we perceive and understand one another in the thick of social practice and experience.

Yet to insist that meaning be regarded as interpretive schemata exer- cised in the most prosaic acts of understanding is not to suggest that in- terpretive theory aims at something like the inventory of the "subjective orientations" of social actors, however the content of such orientations is understood. Indeed, Ricoeur insists that such a project is fundamentally misconceived. For the fundamental assumption here - that there are self- conscious and self-possessed "subjects," and that they are the location and origin of meaning - is simply wrong. Indeed, the more or less constant claim of these works is that the traditional subject, sitting lucidly astride its own beliefs, values and thoughts, is a vast fiction, and one that must be carefully undone.

The exposure of this fiction is an essential component in all of Ricoeur's work. In the massive study of Freud, his approach is essentially psychoana- lytical. In the later collections of essays, he incorporates other sorts of prob- lems and perspectives; the challenge of semiotics and structuralism, the issue of ideology in Marx and Habermas, the peculiar structure of symbolism. But in all of this there is an essential, recurrent theme. If there are sub- jects, selves, minds, they are not island miracles of self-consciousness, but beings of "effort and desire," tethered to others and the world, and per- petually threatened by illusions of their own and society's making. Ricoeur in effect wants to reconstruct the entire idea of subjectivity and thus trans- form the way we think about the issue of where meaning resides and how it is to be understood.

Specifically, Ricoeur wants to disconnect the terms consciousness and meaning, at least as far as that connection is typically understood. "[The]

Politics and the Archeology of Meaning 553

place of meaning . . . ," he writes, "is separate from the place where con- sciousness reigns" (1974: 20). This is a difficult idea, for it is hard to im- agine meanings that are not dependent on our immediate consciousness of them. It is doubly difficult given, as I have just proposed, that Ricoeur insists on anchoring interpretive theory in the interpretive acts of common sense members of the social world. Where is meaning if not in minds, and what is the subject if not a set of self-conscious values, attitudes or beliefs?

The initial and most elemental distinction Ricoeur wants to make be- tween meaning and subject, between culture and values, is rooted in the theory of symbolism and the symbolic function essayed in The Conflict of Interpretations. Meaning is "elsewhere," first of all, in the sense that it is out in the world, in symbolic space which precedes and transcends what subjects consciously believe, think, or report at any given moment; lodged not in "minds," but in what Ricoeur calls the "documents," "external signs" or "figures" of a culture. The origin and location of meaning is in short a bounded community and tradition, the public world and its cul- tural possessions.

This amounts to a reconstruction of the social subject. If "the home of meaning is not consciousness but something other than consciousness" (1970: 55), extrinsic as opposed to internal, social and cultural as opposed to personal, then subjects can no longer be conceived as definite and fin- ished bundles of values or beliefs, closed in upon themselves and their mean- ings. The subject and consciousness Ricoeur describes is instead a "task" or "work" that proceeds by way of the steady and endless "appropria- tion" of meanings already inscribed in the social world. Self-understanding and identity take shape, in Ricoeur's view, only within a definite cultural medium, only in relation to a set of pre-established cultural forms which set the boundaries and terms for self-creation. It is toward such forms that as subjects we are constantly turned, and in terms of which we become who and what we are. In an explicit reference to the problem of identity and "socialization," Ricoeur writes: ". . . [T]he problem of conscious- ness seems to me to be related to this question: How does a man emerge from his childhood, how does he become an adult? At first sight this ap- pears to be a purely psychological question. . . . But in fact it takes on its true meaning when we begin to examine which figures, which images and symbols, guide this growth, this maturation of the individual" (1974: 324). The "subject," "self," "consciousness" thus comes to be within a given semantic field which serves as the fixed ground of all future interpretations: ". .. self-understanding passes through the detour of understanding the cultural signs in which the self documents and forms itself" (1981: 158).

In the essays on symbolism in The Conflict of Interpretations, Ricoeur traces out and describes this "long detour of signs" (1981: 193) taken by both worldly and social-scientific interpreters, and develops in the process some- thing approaching a theory of culture. In the broadest sense, social life is rooted in a strata of meaning composed of archaic and "pre-rational" (1974: 282) symbolic forms, a "substrate" (1974: 296) of symbolic discourse which undergirds rational discourse and indeed makes it possible. It is in and through the symbolic function, or what Ricoeur sometimes calls the

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"semiotic function," that we have a common life, history, society. "[T]he function of substituting signs for things and of representing things by means of signs," he writes, "appears to be more than an effect in social life. It is its very foundation. We should have to say, according to this general- ized function of the semiotic, not only that the symbolic function is social, but that social reality is fundamentally symbolic" (1981: 219).

III

It is in terms of this vision of culture as "a great matrix of signs" (1974: 474), as a matrix of irreducible symbolic "figures" and "documents," that Ricoeur has attempted to carve out a place for interpretation within the social sciences. If culture is indeed and at bottom composed of symbols, if rational discourse is preceded by and built upon symbolic discourse, then getting at meaning requires getting to interpretation, for it is only by means of interpretive technique that symbols can be understood.

This is so because symbols are not sheer facts whose meaning is ex- hausted on their surface, but "polysemic" or "plurivocal" structures of multiple and layered meanings. This means that they cannot be transformed into "brute data" (Taylor 1978). To understand symbols is rather to "con- strue" them, which means, for Ricoeur, to open them up, to "read" them for meaning which is not given immediately and unambiguously on their surface; symbols must be worked over, articulated, "restored." "The man who speaks in symbols," Ricoeur writes, "is first of all a narrator; he trans- mits an abundance of meaning over which he has little command. This abundance, this density of manifold meaning, is what gives him food for thought and solicits his understanding; interpretation consists less in sup- pressing ambiguity than in understanding it and explicating its richness" (1970: 49).

Just what is involved in the "reading" of symbolic discourse, and just where such a procedure fits within the concerns of the social sciences, is clarified in part by Ricoeur's justly celebrated theory of the "text," a the- ory spelled out in several of the key essays in Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences (1981: 131-221). "Text" and "textuality" have become fashionable and increasingly indefinite terms, and even in Ricoeur's original usage they are complex and virtually impossible to summarize quickly. But in the most cursory and schematic sense, "the model of the text" serves as a formal analogy for what "meaningfully oriented behavior" is as well as what it means to understand it. Social action is "text-like" in the sense, first of all, that its referent is not a psychological intention or orientation, but so- cially or culturally inscribed meanings. More precisely, social action exer- cises a fund of collective meanings which may themselves be understood as "texts" or "documents" within a cultural tradition. The ensemble of such texts would, in Ricoeur's words, constitute a vast "social imaginary" (1981: 39), an "anticipatory schema . .. on a social level, where individuals relate to one another and to their collective tradition through the figures" made available to them in such texts (Thompson 1981: 61). Social actors do indeed interpret their world, but through a body of "texts," by way

Politics and the Archeology of Meaning 555

of "works" that can be distinguished from the immediate context and event of the interpretations in which they are buried.

This first level of analogy is followed closely by a second. If the refer- ents of meaningful action are texts, then understanding the meaning of ac- tion is analogous in several ways to the problems and procedures involved in understanding texts. Most significantly, construing the meaning of so- cial actions is like construing the meaning of a text in the sense that in both instances, interpretation is never unequivocally finished or exact. There is no point, in other words, where one can definitively say; it is this mean- ing and no other. This is in part because both action and text are symbolic and metaphorical, thus "polysemic" or "plurivocal," thus open to several or multiple readings. But it is also because both text and action are more than sum of their parts. To know what a text means is not merely, as Ricoeur understands it, to ask about the sum of a sequence of sentences: what, in Oedipus the King, Oedipus says, then Jocasta says, then the shepherd says. It is also and inevitably to ask what the whole play means, and answering such a question requires a kind of "guessing" at the sense of the whole which is then confirmed, or undermined, by further reading and the weight of each element. But the meaning of the whole cannot be derived from the understanding of each part, for the whole is what organizes the parts; it is the context, the frame, of their significance. So too with action. Asking what an action means, that is, what meanings it embodies and displays, is a dialectical process, as Geertz will say, for it involves a "tacking" back and forth between an anticipation of what the whole is about, or what the total motive for the action is (Ricoeur 1981: 214), and the elements of the action that would validate (or invalidate) such an anticipation.

The fact that interpretation involves anticipating (and thus construing or guessing at) the meaning of social actions means, as suggested above, that interpretations can always be contested, can always be opposed by other readings. But that is not, obviously enough, because the meaning of ac- tion is subjective and therefore inaccessible. It is on account of the very structure of understanding and of that which is being understood, itself an embodied act of understanding. Even more important, it is not to say that there is no way to validate or invalidate guesses (1981: 211). The fact that texts, and social actions treated as texts, can be separated from the circumstances of their production - the author's intention, the actors mind, and the immediate contexts of intention and psyche - means that interpre- tations can be challenged and argued over in a coherent way. Because the text is fixed in the public world, in other words, we can bring to the con- flict of interpretations a process of validation rooted, like legal argumenta- tion, in a logic of probability and falsifiability (1981: 215). Interpretation can never be a truly rigorous science. But neither is it an intuitive art, a riot of the reader's imagination. "The hermeneutical arc," as Ricoeur likes to call it, is one that rests on both the exigencies and procedures of under- standing and explanation (1981: 220).

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IV

The vision of cultural hermeneutics that begins to emerge from Ricoeur's essays provides plenty of suggestions as to how one might begin to recon- struct the notion of political culture. But as Ricoeur's study of Freud (1970; 1974: 99-208) and the later essays on ideology (1981: 63-101, 222-46) make clear, the problem of culture is not exhausted within the framework of "sym- bolic function" and "text." The deeper possibility and problem implicit in the symbolic constitution of the social bond is the illusory potential of symbols, their role as sources of distortion and mystification as well as mean- ing and identity. Somewhere along the "hermeneutical arc," Ricoeur in- sists, interpretive theory must confront the issue of ideology.

This is the precise source of Ricoeur's enduring fascination with psy- choanalysis. For the central assumption of Freudian thought is that the production of illusion is integral to the dynamic and structure of psychic life. But Ricoeur's interest in illusion is not limited to its psychoanalytical variation. Nietzsche and Marx outline strikingly similar criticisms of the traditional subject and its grasp of those meanings around which its life is constructed. For all three writers, conscious life is deeply and fundamen- tally illusory, a series of complex masks for the will to power, social in- terests, and the dynamics of desire. It is the existence of hidden meaning, in these senses, that the close connection between culture and conscious life obscures. "[What] we have learned from all the exegetic dis- ciplines . . . ," Ricoeur writes, "[is] that so-called immediate conscious- ness is false consciousness. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have taught us to unmask its tricks. Henceforth it becomes necessary to join a critique of false consciousness to any rediscovery of the subject of the cogito in the docu- ments of its life; a philosophy of reflection must be just the opposite of a philosophy of consciousness" (1974: 18).

Symbols thus have not only a latency of density and richness; they may also have a latency of concealment, a core of hidden meaning. In still broader terms, culture as a whole is a far more complex structure than the "her- meneutics of restoration" or articulation would alone suggest. "The great matrix of signs" is not only the location and source of social meaning; it also supplies the material for the production of illusions. Ricoeur does not insist dogmatically on a formula for mystification. What is essential is that the problem of illusion be integrated with the view of culture as a collec- tion of texts by way of which we interpret and understand ourselves, a her- meneutics of "suspicion" or "destruction" must thus be set alongside a hermeneutics of "restoration" (1974: 148).

It is indeed appropriate, then, that Ricoeur at points refers to cultural hermeneutics as an "archeology of meaning" (1970: 459). For interpreta- tion is ultimately concerned with the"archaic" not only in the sense that it seeks to uncover and open up those primary symbols which constitute the meaning of social and political action. Cultural texts themselves may be "enciphered" and distorted expressions of archaic desires, interests and conflicts. Interpreters must not only be good diggers, perceptive practi- tioners of what Ricoeur calls "deep semantics" (1981: 219). They must

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also know how to see the face behind the mask, how "to make their 'con- scious' methods of deciphering coincide with the 'unconscious' work of ciphering. . .. " As Freud insisted of psychoanalysis, so too with social sym- bolics; "Guile [must] be met by double guile" (1970: 34).

V

One can do no better than to look to Clifford Geertz's recent work to find out just what this hermeneutic view of culture, or at least its symbolic portion, looks like in action. For Geertz is an ethnographer as well as a theorist, and one, moreover, who claims to practice interpretations. "This enterprise . . . ," he writes in the preface to Local Knowledge, "is nowa- days usually referred to as hermeneutics, and in that sense what I am do- ing fits well enough under such a rubric, particularly if the word 'cultural' is affixed" (1983: 5). Yet Geertz denies that he is principally a theorist of interpretive methods. "What one will find," he continues, "is a number of actual interpretations of something, [and] anthropologizing formulations of what I take to be some of the broader implications of those interpreta- tions . . . designed to suggest there is system in persistence, that all these variously aimed inquires are driven by a settled view of how one should go about constructing an account of the imaginative makeup of a society" (1983: 5).

To begin, in reverse, with several "anthropologizing formulations," this "persistence" and "settled view" are organized for Geertz, as they are for Ricoeur, entirely around symbols, around the view that culture must be conceived, and consequently interpreted, as "an organized system of significant symbols" (1973: 46), as a "pattern of meaning embodied in symbols" (1973: 89). And again like Ricoeur, Geertz stresses the practi- cal and practiced nature of the symbolic. The "imaginative makeup of so- ciety" is not composed of static, abstract forms which, like templates, cast a mechanical grid of meaning over experience. Meaning is rather buried in "discourse," in a constant stream of interpretive action. Culture is thus an "imaginative, constructive, interpretive" practice (1983: 215), symbols in action and situation, the world imagined, imaged, interpreted by par- ticular actors. What cultural interpretation eventually comes down to is the question of how these particular Balinese, Moroccans, orJavanese (the cultures with which Geertz is most familiar) enact their collective mean- ings in a whole variety of interpretive performances.

Such a vision of a symbolism and culture is significant both for what it says and does not say about the tasks of an interpretive anthropology. What Geertz quite clearly says is that ethnography is an acutely "local" sort of knowledge (1983: 167), formed of "exceedingly extended acquain- tances with extremely small matters" (1983: 22). But at the same time he insists that this concreteness not be confused with the ambition of coincid- ing with other subjects or psyches, with the business of getting into other people's minds. "The ethnographer," he writes, "does not, and in my opinion, largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive. What he perceives - and that uncertainly enough - is what they perceive 'with'

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or 'by means of,' or 'through' or whatever word one may choose" (1983: 58). It is within a sort of middle ground, then - meaningful yet public, conceptual yet "extrinsic" - that ethnography is properly located. The sort of "ideas" or "concepts" or "thoughts" the ethnographer is concerned with are not "unobservable mental stuff. They are," he writes, "envehi- cled meanings, the vehicles being symbols . . . , a symbol being anything that denotes, describes, represents, exemplifies, labels, indicates, evokes, depicts or expresses - anything that somehow or other signifies. And any- thing that somehow or other signifies is intersubjective, thus public, thus open to corrigible and plein air explication" (1980: 135).

What people in fact perceive "with" or "by means of," those sym- bolic formations that are the elemental stuff of cultural practice, are "texts," and it is toward the interpretation of such texts that Geertz bends interpre- tive theory and practice. The Interpretation of Cultures and Local Knowledge ably demonstrate what sorts of symbol systems, at least in Geertz's under- standing, should be construed as texts: structures as vast as religion, art, ideology and common sense; practices as particular as the way the Balinese go about cremating their kings, the Javanese burying their children, or the Moroccans defining what a "self" is. They demonstrate, too, how such texts may be read. The method (if that is indeed what it is) at work in these essays is a meticulous and exhaustive "tracing out" of "the curve" of par- ticular forms of "social discourse" (1973: 18), the "systematic unpacking" (1983: 22), in slightly less elliptical terms, of the dense layers of meaning that are wound up in, and in fact created by, socially significant and sig- nifying acts.

VI

What matters here, of course, is that Geertz extends these general for- mulations to political life, and proffers interpretations aimed at showing "how a country's politics reflect the design of its culture" (1973: 311). Ob- viously, in his view, the political is built around, invested in, meaning. How to extract it, how to subject it to "thematic analysis" (1973: 326), and how all of that clarifies what happens in politics is a matter to which Geertz returns again and again in these essays.

To see just what is involved here requires, first of all, that one take the matter of meaning seriously, that we try to see political practices as bundles of "texts" which construe the world, make sense of it, "say some- thing of something," as all texts do. This is not so easy to do, as Geertz points out, in part because we have become so accustomed to understand- ing the political in terms of the essentially pragmatic business of determin- ing "who gets what, where, when and how." We are also heir, in Geertz's view, to a decidedly materialistic conception of power. The irreducible ele- ment of political pragmatics is "the ability to make decisions by which others are bound, with coercion its expression, violence its foundation, and domi- nation its aim. . . . This cycle of terms, and related ones like control, com- mand, strength and subjection, defines the political as a domain of social action. Politics is finally about mastery: 'Women and Horses and Power and War'" (1980: 134).

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Of course politics is always and in part about such things, "even in places where the horses are docile" (1980: 134). But the rather exclusive focus on domination and material interests has skewed our vision of the symbolic and imaginary. The symbolic dimension is not "an indefinite world of excrescences, mysteries, fictions and decorations" (1980: 122) that sim- ply streamlines domination, or distracts the audience while the real busi- ness goes on somewhere else. Geertz wants to argue that there is a "political imaginary" at the very center of political life, that besides being about the very real matters of dividing economic pies, keeping order and waging war, political institutions and practices also configure and articulate meaning, and must therefore be approached as "structure[s] of thought, as enshrined ideas" (1980: 135). "The [political] real," as he puts it, "is as imagined as the imaginary" (1980: 136): ". .. it is through the construction . . . of schematic images of social order that man makes himself for better or worse a political animal" (1973: 218).

Geertz has explored this "political imaginary" most consistently and provocatively in terms of the problem of political or civic identity, primar- ily in the context of developing nations, most often in the context of In- donesia and especially Bali (1973: 193-341; 1983: 121-46). Indeed, Geertz's explicitly political essays suggest, by implication at any rate, that the ques- tion of collective identity is the most important and continuous problem of meaning in any political system. For whatever the structure - hierar- chical or egalitarian, liberal or communitarian, rational or traditional all political societies assume, and must more or less continuously construct and reconstruct, a sense of who "we" are, of what the collectivity and, as elemental pieces of it, its members are all about. Meaning in this partic- ular sense, what it is to be Balinese in Balinese politics, is clearly not an ornament of political community and practice, but one of its essential conditions.

It is also one of the things political practices in Bali should say as well as produce, and thinking about practices in that way, as expressions and definitions of collective identity, is one way to find out what it means to be a political person in Bali. Thus, one level, one axis, of the strategy Geertz proposes is that of interpretively casting about in ordinary political con- texts, practices and institutions in search of their constitutive meanings, in this case how a member is conceived. In practice, this turns out to be a good deal less impressionistic and haphazard than it sounds. It involves, among other very down to earth things, the thematic analysis ("images, metaphors and rhetorical turns") of highly self-conscious political doctrine (1973: 252, 225), language use in specific political contexts and practices (1973: 241), and careful investigation of the patterns of personal identifi- cation in particular political institutions (1973: 259). On the somewhat less likely and familiar side, it may also require the symbolic analysis of palace floor plans, village street design, irrigation systems, and the "lexicon of carvings, flowers, dances, melodies, gestures, chants, ornaments, temples, postures and masks . . ."(1980: 103) which compose various forms of po- litical ritual.

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But as the word identity implies, political meanings cannot be narrowly contained within a set of carefully defined and specifically political parameters. Political interpretation thus pushes out into the cultural con- text of political action, horizontally into the widening identities of social groups (the self in family, village, region and nation), and vertically to- ward the higher and, at least in Bali, more enduring and "real" levels of meaning inscribed in religious practices and vision. This is not to suggest that culture is a seamless web, one thing meaning every other thing, but that, in the matter of being Balinese (or American, or Chinese, and the special meanings, thus motives, thus behavior such identities imply), the civic, the personal and the religious facets of identity are clearly intercon- nected. Who the Balinese think they are in terms of politics has to do with who they think they are in funeral rites, the marketplace, and cockfights as well as the village meeting. To render civic identity is in part to identify and describe a range of social identities, the person as he or she appears in different arrangements of cultural contexts and symbol systems.

VII

Nowhere does Geertz display this "dialectical tacking" (1983: 70), as he likes to call it, between broadly and tightly focused views of political culture more ingeniously than in Negara, his remarkable study of the state in 19th century Bali. The notion that the state can be approached from the perspective of the symbolism it employs is not exactly news, as Geertz is well aware. But in the case of the Balinese state, the symbolic takes on an entirely different sort of significance. For if Geertz is right, the "Negara" was almost exclusively about symbolism, ceremony and ritual; it was a state devoted to theater. In a near reversal of our traditional views of what counts in politics, the closer one approached the apex of state power in pre-colonial Bali, the further one departed from the usual instrumentalities and ends of power, usually conceived. What really mattered to the Balinese royalty, a ragged group of noble claimants rather than a neat and tidy line, was not "governance" in the practical sense but display, and it was to display and, to paraphrase Weber, control over the means of display that the mechanisms and life of the state were obsessively directed. The stuff of that display, Geertz writes, "the stupendous cremations, tooth filings, temple dedications, pilgrimages, and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds and even thousands of people, were not the means to political ends; they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for" (1980: 13).

For the ethnographer interested in politics, the obvious question here is what the point of all this theater is: what is being displayed? The answer comes by way of two sorts of "exegetical tasks" (1980: 103). Initially and obviously, what there is to be interpreted are the "concrete symbols" of power, the rituals, temples and figures which compose, in literal and figura- tive ways, the theater of state power. This takes Geertz into the "thick description" (1973: 3) of everything from temple floor plans to the ritual of cremation and the shape of the royal throne, an interpretive process which tries to shake loose or "unpack" from their physical embodiment the "ideas"

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or "meanings" such objects and performances enshrine and indeed are designed to articulate. This is a tricky business, for to lift meaning from symbol is to translate it, and thus to risk "reducing a richness of particular meaning to a drab parade of generalities" (1980: 103). It is also an un- avoidable risk. ". .. [I]f one wants to be left with more than mere fasci- nated wonderment - like a cow looking at a gamelan orchestra -" (1980: 103), "digging out" the sense of symbolic utterances for "presentation in explicit form" is the very heart of the interpretive enterprise.

But in the case of the Balinese state it does not exhaust it. For what, as Geertz concludes, was being communicated in and through the theater of the state in Bali was nothing less than a cosmology. The entire structure of the state, and especially its ritual and expressive apparatus, was a com- plex, particularly extravagant way of signifiying in political form a wider and more inclusive vision of the world, rooted ultimately in Balinese reli- gious practices and understandings. The ceremonial "Negara" reenacted cosmic order, restated it at the level of, and in terms of, the problem of authority and status. "The state ceremonials of classical Bali," he writes, "were metaphysical theater: theater designed to express a view of the ulti- mate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the conditions of life to be consonant with that reality; that is, to present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it actual - to make it happen" (1980: 104).

This means, of course, that the unwinding or unpacking of the politi- cal imagery and ideas enshrined in political symbols inevitably requires a wider, more inclusive interpretive focus, one which embraces the reli- gious symbolism and vision which the state obsessively and incessantly reenacts. The ethnographer thus "tacks" from a closer to a wider view of what constitutes political culture: from 'what do the political symbols say,' to 'what is the more general system of culture, of collective mean- ings, which this form of symbolic action casts in political form' (1980: 103)? State ritual in Bali becomes clear only so far as the "faith" it was meant to mirror becomes apparent. Conversely, that faith becomes clear only so far as it is seen within its cultural documents, in its texts. That means, of course, its political texts. But it also requires the comparison of different forms of cultural texts. The central message Geertz finds inscribed in the ritual practices of the state - "the center is exemplary, status is the ground of power" (1980: 120) or, "that worldly status has a cosmic base, that hi- erarchy is the governing principle of the universe" (1980: 102) - is not given all at once in a single rush of political symbolism. It becomes clear as the problem and fascination with status reveals itself in diverse cultural forms and practices, in a cultural system. "A royal cremation," he writes, "was not an echo of a politics taking place somewhere else. It was the in- tensification of a politics taking place everywhere else" (1980: 120).

Negara is thus in its concrete approach to the Balinese state a model for the analysis of political culture; the "unpacking" of political symbols, and the location of particular strata of political symbolism in a broader system of culture. But it is also, as Geertz's final chapter explicitly proposes, a discourse on the nature of political culture in general. The traditional Balinese state is important to understand because in its very extravagance

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and excess it throws into bold relief the symbolic nature of all political power. All political order rests on "culture," that is, embodies in symbol systems and reproduces in symbolic action a complex conception of the world. This is not to say, Geertz notes, that Balinese politics (or ours) "was all in the mind, or consisted of dances and incense" (1980: 136). It is to draw atten- tion to the meaning context (what is real, what matters) within which po- litical action of the most concrete and pragmatic sort always and necessarily takes place. "The dramas of the theater state," he concludes, "were, in the end, neither illusions nor lies, neither sleight of hand nor make-believe. They were what there was" (1980: 136).

Is this to strip the problem of illusion or distortion, in Ricoeur's sense of the word, from the design of political culture and political interpreta- tion? Geertz has not pursued the issue of illusion in anything like the detail that Ricoeur has, and in this sense his own vision of interpretation remains much closer to a hermeneutics of restoration than to one of "suspicion" and "destruction." But this preoccupation with "what there is" is not so much a denial of the possibility of distortion as it is a way of carefully fix- ing its location. The root of illusion, distortion, mystification - in short, of "ideology" in the Marxist sense - does indeed rest in the symbolic func- tion, but it is not equivalent to it. The symbolic constructions, in other words, of which political practices are in part composed may indeed be- come illusory and distorted; but they are not illusory or distorted because they are symbolic. The fact that all political systems are, among other things, "imaginative works" that generate complex and deep "images of the so- cial order" (1973: 218) suggests instead that we envision illusion and dis- tortion as the disfigurement of an existing symbolic base, as errant meaning, symbol and text. "Ideology" is a "cultural system" before it is mystifica- ton (1973: 193), and thus for Geertz, at least, the interpretive enterprise is restoration before suspicion, ethnography before archeology, "thick description" before "deep semantics."

CONCLUSION

The vision of cultural criticism that emerges from the works of Ricoeur and Geertz discussed here is not a replacement for the sorts of studies that political scientists have thus far conducted under the heading of political culture. It is instead an alternate route to conceptualizing the way in which meaning is bound to practice, and how that relationship should be reported on and clarified.

The key to this alternative is the symbolic function. Political meaning is born not just in what individual subjects consciously think and value po- litically, but in cultural and intersubjective symbols, in collective mean- ings inscribed in the symbolic texts of political practices themselves. Culture in this sense is no more subjective than language is. It is out in the world, a collective possession and work, the "political imaginary" in the twin and interdependent senses that Ricoeur and Geertz explore; that which politi- cal subjects and actors think "with" and "according to," and that which is said in their political practices.

Politics and the Archeology of Meaning 563

If the political is indeed symbolically constituted, if it rests on and reproduces a system of meaning inscribed in symbols, then the study of the cultural substance and context of politics will have to do its own sort of "trafficking in symbols"; "ethnography," in Geertz's sense, "archeol- ogy" in Ricoeur's, "thick description" and "deep semantics." This will require, as I have suggested, a reformulation of what political symbolism amounts to, and interpretive theory will be enormously helpful here. But it will also require learning how to think "according to symbols," in Ricoeur's phrase, how to "read," "construe," "unpack" the meaning of particular symbols in particular political contexts. It is in this rather prac- tical business of symbolic analysis and understanding that the works un- der review here will be of use to political theorists and scientists alike.

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