The ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz.(book on philosophy)(Book Review)

From its origins in classical thought and Christianity, Western culture has always had a strong tendency towards universalism. This principle has long been expressed in the idea of the unity of human kind and the belief that all human beings had a common origin and were equal before God. During the European Enlightenment, these Christian concepts were secularized to produce the notions of a common human nature and universal human rights. At the same time, the West produced a scientific method that was so successful its practitioners assumed they had found the key that would open the way to knowledge of the universe. In other words, the universalizing principle has been one of the great strengths of Western culture and has been central to the self-assurance and development of Western civilization.

Nonetheless, there have periodically been major intellectual and social movements in the West that have rejected universalism in favor of relativism. These were often derived from political theories based on conflict models, such as Marxism, which saw the struggle between classes as the dynamic of history, or Nazism, which thought much the same about race. In both cases, the notion of a universal scientific method was adulterated by either class-based perspectives, such as the Russian plant geneticist Lysenko's distinction between "proletarian" and "bourgeois" science, or notions like the racial conflict between "Aryan" and "Jewish physics" under Hitler's regime.

The most recent relativist perspective to emerge in the West has been "multiculturalism," an intellectual concept and political movement that has been far more successful than any of its predecessors. It has had a major impact on the culture of most of the leading Western nations. This is especially true of the United States where, as Allan Bloom observed in the mid-1980s, multicultural relativism had captured the minds of academics and their students throughout the institutions of higher education, where not only Western values had been relativized but so had the very notion of scientific truth itself. Since then, multiculturalism has been far more than an academic theory. It has had practical outcomes such as profound changes to immigration and education policy, employer recruitment and contracting practices, attitudes to diplomacy and foreign affairs, and artistic expressions in both high and popular culture.

While there are both hard and soft variants, most versions of multiculturalism hold that all cultures are authentic in their own terms and that neither the West at large nor the United States in particular has the right to impose its beliefs and values onto others. Under these principles, the traditional universalizing project of the West cannot be sustained. Enlightenment universalism becomes an arrogant presumption and Christianity no more than one among many equally valid religious perspectives.

While there has been no shortage of debate about its influence, there has so far been little discussion about multiculturalism's origins. Externally, it was no doubt strongly influenced by the process of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s and the growth of the United Nations. Internally, it had much less to do with politics. Few of its advocates came from either of its relativist predecessors, and it has no obvious source in a clear-cut political ideology. Instead, its foundations lie more in academic theory and method. Perhaps its biggest single source and its major long-term sustenance has come from the academic discipline of anthropology, in particular the field of cultural anthropology that has been so influential in the United States. And within this field perhaps the most persuasive voice since the 1960s has been that of Clifford Geertz.

The cover notes on the latest collection of Geertz's essays say that the book "treats the reader to an analysis of the American intellectual climate by someone who did much to shape it." (1) This is all too true. During the past thirty years, Geertz and a number of like-minded colleagues and followers have been at the height of academic authority not only in anthropology but also in history, the social sciences, the study of literature, and the emergence of the field known as cultural studies.

Geertz has long been regarded as the doyen of cultural anthropology. He did his initial fieldwork in the 1950s in Indonesia and in the 1960s in Morocco. His major empirical work was Negara (1980), an analysis of the myths and ceremonies of the nineteenth-century pre-colonial Hindu and Buddhist-influenced state of Bali.