Geertz 1973 Part 2

Geertz 1973 Part 2

1. Field Notes

   • Ethnography from beginning to end enmeshed in writing
     • Translation of experience into textual form - Clifford 1983
   • "Inscribes social discourse: writes it down... turns it from a passing event... into an account which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconstituted" Geertz 1973
   • Writing is central
     • Permanent record of experience

2. Writing culture

   • "What does an ethnographer do? He writes" Geertz 1973
   • "He observes, he records, he analyses" Geertz 1973
     • "Three phases of knowledge seeking"
   • In writing we begint to author the patterns of what we observe and experience in the field
     • Patterns = culture
   • We assume that in these patterns these rules and regulations often unwritten and unspoken lie the webs of significance which give form and meaning to experience

3. The Balinese Cockfight and becoming an insider

   • "Getting caught, or almost getting caught... led to a sudden and unusually complete acceptance into a society extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate"
   • "Immediate, insider-view grasp of an aspect of the peasant mentality"
   • Pecularily revealing Balinese mentality
   • "It put me very quickly on to a combination of emotional expression, status war and philosophical drama of central significance to a society whose inner nature I desired to understand"
   • Java - small village - almost 3 years

4. The Balinese Cockfight 1973

   • Read as a text - like a poem or painting
   • "Like any art form... the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience... [to a] more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived"
   • "Attending cockfights is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education. What he learns there is what his culture's ethos and his private sensibility"
   • "A collective text"

5. The meaning of the cockfight

   • "Every level of the Balinese experience... It brings together themes"
     • Animal savagery
     • Male narcissism
     • Opponent gambling
     • Status rivalary
       • Kin or village group
     • Mass excitement
     • Blood sacrifice
     • Excitement
   • Cocks and men are equated together
     • Cocks are representations of an animalism inherent in male ego
       • Usually suppressed in public
         • METAPHOR
     • Lavish great care on their cocks
   • "I am cock crazy" Balinese headman

6. Participant Observation

   • Participant: gives a sympathetic insight to the native POW
     • "Kind of immediate, insider-view grasp of... mentality"
   • Observer: describe patterns ans regularities of behaviour that reveal the implicit meaning of a cultural text"
     • Patterns constitute the evidence that support interpretation

7. Culture is made by a system of meaning - symbols

   • Symbols guide action