Clifford Geertz: the reading on the cock fight

1
Clifford Geertz the reading on the cock fight

• Doing ethnography
• Why/how were Geertzs treated as ghosts before,
  and now as good friends?
• Cock fights open and hidden meanings
• Apply to a college class
• Features
• Some meanings

2
Geertz his two major points on culture

• What culture is not complexes of actions
  (customs, traditions, habits, usages).
• What culture is a control mechanism (plans,
  recipes, rules, instructions)
• Why a big point? Humans need culture part of
  our evolutionary nature. Weak on more-or-less
  automatic ways of fulfilling needs, but still
  filled with the needs (procreation, sustenance,
  cooperation, conflict)

3
Theres no clear human nature without culture

• Humans, same species everywhere, have such
  dramatically different ways of acting, ways of
  seeing the world, judgments, temperaments,
• And why humans from one society are raised from
  birth in another, they have the ways of acting,
  ways of seeing the world, judgments,
  temperaments, etc., of their adoptive culture.
• Is biology chopped liver? Geertzs position is
  that a person cannot develop outside of some
  culture.

4
Geertz culture, cont.

• The point? It is our evolutionary nature. Weak on
  more-or-less automatic ways of fulfilling needs,
  but still filled with the needs (procreation,
  sustenance, cooperation, conflict)
• Culture fills the void.
• Humans have such dramatically different ways of
  acting, ways of seeing the world, judgments,
  temperaments.
• People from different cultures do not understand
  each other. (e.g., savages not quite human)
• Humans from one society, raised from birth in
  another, have the ways of acting, ways of seeing
  the world, judgments, temperaments, etc., of
  their adoptive culture.
• Is biology chopped liver? Geertzs position is
  that a person cannot develop outside of some
  culture. (sounds like Mead)

5
Radical example Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf linguistic
  relativity
• Idea that the varying cultural concepts and
  categories inherent in different languages affect
  the cognitive classification of the experienced
  world in such a way that speakers of different
  languages think and behave differently because of
  it.
• Eskimo words for snow
• Hopi vs. Western language and time

6
Eviater Zerubavel lumpers and splitters and
islands of meaning

• What things go together? How?
• What things are different? How?
• There is no one way to see the world.
• Division by tens
• Two genders
• Racial classifications
• Categorization of actions
• Radical view categories are pure artifacts that
  have no basis whatsoever in reality.