The Loom of Time, page 12
Nevertheless, the elite do have a crucial point to make. For it isn’t really culture that is a problem for them. Rather, what they really mean to say is, Culture is so subjective a thing, that because you can’t measure it or even analyze it properly, it may be safer just to ignore it. Among policy and bureaucratic types, whatever cannot be objectively quantified, or categorized, or tested should be virtually ignored in one’s analysis, or treated with extreme skepticism.
Is there a way out of this dilemma?
Yes. It begins with one man.
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Clifford Geertz was arguably the greatest American anthropologist of the twentieth century. In his otherwise savage attack on Western orientalists dealing in stereotypes of the Islamic world, the late Columbia University professor Edward W. Said singles out Clifford Geertz as among the handful of exceptions. Geertz’s “interest in Islam,” Said writes, “is discrete and concrete enough to be animated by the specific societies and problems he studies and not by the rituals, preconceptions, and doctrines of Orientalism.”[*1]
Like many an anthropologist, Geertz’s worldview was built out of particulars: from the ground up. He did his pathbreaking fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco, the two ends of the Islamic world. Living for years in remote villages in these countries, he developed a theory of humanity best summarized in his essay collection The Interpretation of Cultures, published in 1973. It is the opposite of the many tracts on globalization, which explain the world from the top down. Geertz is seeing the world whole, from the vantage point of a wooden shack on a dusty road.
“Culture,” Geertz begins, is an “acted document,” a public utterance of a kind, even though it may be but a wink and a nod, or an impolite suck of the tongue when a Greek taxi driver refuses a rider. Culture is “not an occult” thing that exists only in someone’s mind. It is not a prejudice. It is real, Geertz says. Being real, “men unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist…” Men are “unfinished animals,” who only complete themselves through a specific culture. Quoting Santayana, Geertz says that no man can speak without speaking a particular language, which itself is full of cultural implications. All men, therefore, are “cultural artifacts.” The only generalization that one can make about humankind is that man is “a most various animal.” And any notion of the unity of humankind must begin with that.[2]
Culture, Geertz goes on, must be interpreted, because it cannot be added up or measured. That is the task of the anthropologist, who becomes, in effect, an ethnographer, someone who studies ethnic groups and by inference their characteristics. Quoting the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, Geertz says that such interpretation requires “thick description.” Establishing rapport, interviewing subjects, keeping a diary, and so on all add up to what thick description means.[3] This has more in common with what the great British travel writers of the Near East—Charles M. Doughty, Wilfred Thesiger, and Patrick Leigh Fermor—have done rather than what most political scientists have. This is also why the area specialists—the Cold War–era Arabists, China hands, and so on—have usually had the profoundest wisdom to offer in Washington. And what all of these travelers and experts have shown in their writings—and what Geertz, the anthropologist, makes especially clear—is that culture, above all, consists of what it takes for an individual to acceptably operate in a given society.[*2]
Culture is context. “Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity,” writes Geertz, adding that during his fieldwork in Morocco, the more he figured out what Moroccans were up to in their daily lives, “the more logical, and the more singular,” they seemed. “Culture…is the ultimate source for what we think constitutes common sense,” writes Charles King, a Georgetown University professor who has chronicled the lives of anthropologists. This is why cultural relativism—that is, making allowances for different behavior patterns—something which conservatives decry, is actually a good and true thing, since it makes us aware that all cultures, not just those in the West, are efficient and rational in their own particular way. Thus, the different cultural patterns of the earth’s peoples express an underlying unity of the human species.[4]
That is, provided we look closely at culture. For it is from concentrating on the mundane, on the minutiae of ground-level existence, that the most crucial insights about such things as violence, individual identity, political legitimacy, and revolution are revealed. “The aim,” says Geertz, “is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts.” Evidence is not theory alone, it is something built up from “directly observable” cultural modes of thought. Thus, Geertz’s pièce de résistance as an anthropologist is not a grand theory or set of perceptions; rather, it is his famous study of the traditional Balinese cockfight, which reveals “social order, abstract hatred, masculinity, demonic power,” and much more. It is all about a descent into detail, in order to get beneath the bland clichés, labels, and nostrums that define conventional thinking about places.[5]
Such a descent into detail and closely observable facts led Geertz to warn as far back as 1963 about the future of new states of Africa and elsewhere in the third world. Because their governing institutions and history of civil politics were so weak and underdeveloped, he explained, they would be prone to “primordial” sentiments, namely “tribalism” and ethnic hatreds. Self-rule would exacerbate these tendencies rather than alleviate them, since it would lead to a fight over spoils now that the “aloof and unresponsive” colonial regimes had departed. Mind you, Geertz’s argument was more complex than essentialist. “Tribalism,” for instance, can be a form of political order emerging from group solidarity, even as competing tribes that are forced to coexist within the artificial boundaries drawn by colonialists can be a force of dissolution.
Drawing on his years of living experience in third world villages, Geertz observes: “The power of the ‘givens’ of place, tongue, blood, looks, and way-of-life to shape an individual’s notion of who, at bottom, he is and with whom, indissolubly, he belongs is rooted in the nonrational foundations of personality.”[6]
And that, in turn, is a foundation stone of a place’s politics.
Geertz says that the rise of independent states in the third world “does not do away with ethnocentrism; it merely modernizes it.”[7] The late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington would come to a similar conclusion three decades later, arguing that the clash of civilizations would signal the final phase of modernism, as the weakness of states gives rise to group consciousness. Moreover, those various ethnic, sectarian, and civilizational disputes would not be alleviated by the growth and expansion of cities, since having fled the age-old ways of the village and inhabiting badly urbanized shantytowns, people’s primordial identities would merely be reinvented in more abstract and extreme forms in order to cope with impersonal urban settings.[8]
Geertz knows that “a country’s politics reflect the design of its culture.” But it does so in “obscure” ways. Moreover, awareness of this does not help much in forecasting, since, to take the example of Indonesia (where Geertz had so much experience), it has seen revolution, parliamentary democracy, autocracy, mass murder, and military rule. So, as he asks, “Where is the design in that?”[9]
Yet we must still try to grapple with political and geopolitical reality in countries. And that is more completely done by Geertz’s and Ryle’s example of thick description, however much we fail at it, and however inadequate are our efforts. For the attempt itself will improve the value of our analysis.
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Thick description goes along with a close reading of history, since a people’s experience, upon which their behavior is based, does not begin the moment a journalist lands at the airport, or the moment a political scientist begins his study of them. Human behavior, of the kind that anthropologists observe, is influenced by everything that has happened in a village, city, or country right up until the moment we begin observing it. Every moment is the culmination of ages of history before it. Therefore, the most satisfying political science is the kind with a deep historical sensibility behind it.
Of the great political scientists of the twentieth century, the one who fits hand in glove with Clifford Geertz’s anthropology is the American Barrington Moore, Jr., who received a grounding in Greek, Latin, and history at Williams College in Massachusetts. Moore’s work emphasizes the historical particularity of countries and places, and how each one is unique from the others. Perhaps his most significant book is Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, published in 1966. In it he tells how England, France, the United States, China, Japan, and India each arrived at its system of government, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, through the most original, complex, and convoluted of ways—ways that could not be replicated anywhere else. If Geertz does thick description, Moore does thick history, with a strong analytical bent.
Moore begins with England, where the growth of commerce in the towns adjacent to agricultural areas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created different economic groups, which gradually elbowed aside titled local aristocrats, leading to the destruction of the ancien régime. This was symbolized by the beheading of Charles I in 1649. Henceforth, no English king dared to take royal absolutism seriously. By the eighteenth century, following the civil war of 1642–51, Parliament had evolved into a “committee of landlords,” breaking the power of the king. Nevertheless, the aristocratic order survived: but mainly because of its money, not its birth. As Moore states, warming to his theme, “Revolutionary violence may contribute as much as peaceful reform to the establishment of a relatively free society…”
Yet the path of progress was never straight forward. The brutal enclosure laws that further strengthened the landlords eliminated the English peasantry. But it did so over time within a framework of law and order. Once the peasantry was eliminated, there was no need of deeply conservative and reactionary forces to uphold the values of such a peasantry, as would develop in Germany and Japan, and which would lead to fascist regimes there. Nor was there the possibility of large-scale peasant revolutions as would occur in Russia and China in the twentieth century. And because imperialism developed early in England, rather than late as in Germany, it was for a long time integrated into the system, and thus not an impediment to the ripening of democracy.[10]
Meanwhile, in France, as the forces of modernization cleaved ancient village society that had peacefully governed the division of labor, the rural poor became desperate and blamed the wealthier peasants or small landowners, whom Moore roughly compares with the kulaks in Russia. That’s why, he says, “At the height of the Revolution, radicalism in the cities and the countryside could join hands, a fact that helps to explain the depth and violence of the French Revolution in comparison with its English precursor.” For deep and complex reasons of culture and geography, “the underlying social structure of France was fundamentally different” from England, Moore explains, hence ruling out the more peaceful transformation that England had and would be experiencing. There was just no way for France “to enter the modern world through the democratic door” except by violent revolution, which sanctioned private property and equality before the law, and did away with seigneurial rights. Without such a decisive break with the reactionary past, France might have been carried forward “into a form of conservative modernization from above,” similar to Bismarckian Germany and Meiji Japan.[11]
America was a totally different story. It was advantaged by a late start. “The United States did not face the problem of dismounting a complex and well-established agrarian society” composed of a feudal peasantry. Yet, the southern plantation system did constitute a latifundia economy, encouraging an “antidemocratic aristocracy” and a “weak and dependent commercial and industrial class.” Thus, a civil war was required to usher America into the democratic and industrial age; the Constitution alone wasn’t enough, Moore suggests.[12]
A theme that emerges in Moore’s work is that the survival of semi-feudal peasantries deep into the modern age is very problematic, since it inhibits the development of a robust and cosmopolitan-trending middle class, and leads instead to fascism and totalitarianism in order to deal with the crisis of industrial development. Neither Japan nor Germany had successful bourgeois revolutions. In Japan, for example, the “patriotic exaltation” of peasant virtues and consequent fear of a rising commercial class paved the way for militarism and fascism. While Japan was more backward than Germany, right-wing radicalism emerged in both countries because of the plight of peasants and a new and insecure bourgeoisie under advancing capitalism. The price for avoiding an earlier civil war or revolution—as happened in England, France, and America—was for Japan and Germany a very high one. The Communist revolution in China, of course, would have been impossible without the survival of a vast peasantry into the twentieth century. As for India, it experienced neither a bourgeois revolution nor a conservative revolution from above, so rather than some appalling upheaval as in the Axis and Communist countries, it has merely wallowed in slow growth and underperformance.[13]
But all this constitutes only Moore’s broad themes, even as he constantly underlines that “human beings individually and collectively do not react to an ‘objective’ situation in the same way as one chemical reacts to another…There is always an intervening variable, a filter, one might say, between people and an ‘objective’ situation, made up,” he goes on, “from all sorts of wants, expectations, and other ideas derived from the past.” Culture, in other words, is the key. But though culture can be stated as an overriding fact, explaining its effects is problematic.[14] And because cultural influences are by their very nature obscure and ambiguous, observes the late University of Chicago sociologist Donald N. Levine, whose own work on Ethiopia was heavily influenced by Clifford Geertz, culture is easily dismissed by an elite policy class, which, itself influenced by the communications revolution, rewards only clarity and concision.
Thus, peoples and places remain more of a mystery than ever, since what is required to explain them is increasingly further out of reach. Globalization, by diluting national and ethnic cultures, makes their effects even more obscure and ambiguous. Walking the streets of countries, experiencing scenes and smells, and watching closely how people behave, will provide no definite answers. But it will help. The aim is to touch solid ground, so that real places don’t dissolve into abstraction.
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I’ll never forget my first moments in Cairo in the spring of 1976. Cratered roads, rolling layers of dust and black soot, redistributed by the occasional breeze. Monumental congestion with the constant, ear-piercing bleating of car horns. Schoolchildren riding on the backs of trams, whose wires were lit with electric sparks a few feet over their heads. Kiosks packed together with winking overhead light bulbs because of the unsteady current. Ancient rickety tables and chairs set out on the street, daring the traffic almost, where men in kaftans and cloth turbans around their heads sipped tea, inhaled tobacco with hookahs, and played shesh besh. Everywhere there was the crushing presence of what seemed to be too many males. The noise, the heat, the pollution, the glaring sunlight, the crowds were just so overwhelming. It was like returning to India, where I had been a few years earlier, except that here the colors had been drained out of the tableau, owing to the pollution and the nearby desert. It was a grainy, black-and-white cityscape, oily with human sweat. Cairo in the second half of the twentieth century registered the most densely packed large urban population in the world, in some central districts reaching 300,000 people per square mile.[15] Istanbul, 11 degrees latitude to the north, with its cooler temperatures and, by comparison, its quiet and more dynamic European-like organization, was a radically distant memory. Modern Cairo was always an environmental-demographic nightmare, rooted in both antiquity and an uncontrollable, nerve-racking present.
There were the Muqattam Hills, the same hills where the stones for the Pyramids had been quarried 4,500 years ago. In the 1970s and 1980s, they were a world of mountains and valleys of stinking refuse that went on for miles, sorted and resold by thousands of zabaleen, “people of the garbage”: a caste unto themselves, more efficient at their task than the municipal authorities. The mortality rate for zabaleen children, who died of malnutrition, disease, and pollution before adulthood, was 50 percent, I would learn on later visits with them.[16] The Muqattam Hills and the zabaleen were emblematic of Cairo’s assault on the senses.
“Today, the cry of the laborer—hoarse from drink, smoke, and hatred—is the cry of the Earth. And this heartrending cry accompanied me throughout my journey, from one end of Egypt to the other, and guided me,” writes Nikos Kazantzakis, whose 1920s travel diary on the Levant had been the first work I consulted upon arriving in Cairo.[17]
But within a few days in Cairo the abnormal became normal to me, as Geertz would have understood. The city had its own inner logic. The fact that I was shocked did not make the city shocking. And there were places of escape within the most crowded parts of the city. As I explored Cairo’s great medieval mosques and Koranic schools, built between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries by the Mamluks, a dynasty of slaves-turned-sultans, I took refuge in silent empty courtyards of pharaonic grandeur fitted to Muslim specifications, with walls rising as much as six stories and adjacent to minarets of skyscraper proportions. The architectural keys here were volume and space arrangement, amplified by stone and dust, akin to the strength of Rodin’s sculpture and without any glittering surfaces like the mosques of Iran with their blue faience. Just as there was, at least to me, seeming chaos in the streets, these medieval sanctums of purity and quietude echoed absolute authority. Cairo has always been a city of steep, vertical power.
