The relationship between history and culture is complex and
often debated. The central point of
contention is whether culture is a subsidiary outgrowth of social structure, or
whether culture is a primary agent that creates society. Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu argue for
the primacy of culture as an agent in history and social development by showing
its transmission between generations through non-verbal means outside a system
of rules or laws. Despite this common
thrust, significant differences exist between the methods and arguments Geertz
and Bourdieu advance. Geertz utilizes
the example of Balinese cockfighting to show how anthropologists must read
cultural events like a literary text in order to derive meaning from their
symbolic structures. Bourdieu, on the
other hand, focuses on the daily habits Kabyle people of Algeria to demonstrate
that the unconscious transmission of culture maintains existing power and class
relationships. In effect, Geertz and
Bourdieu assert the primacy of culture in history and sociology in the pursuit
of different goals and through the examination of different aspects of culture
– Geertz the large event, Bourdieu daily interactions.
Writing in the early 1970s, Geertz believed that culture was
the primary force in creating “feelings and identity” for individuals. While Geertz does not describe the manner in
which individuals in a society transmit culture, he implies that it occurs
non-verbally through shared cultural events such as the Balinese
cockfight. This occurs through a “sentimental
education” in which the member of a society learns “his culture’s ethos and his
private sensibility…look like when spelled out externally in a collective text.”
Events like the Balinese cockfight provide anthropologists
with an emotional vocabulary through which they can attempt to understand how
groups build their societies.
Deciphering this emotional vocabulary requires that anthropologists
extend the concept of “text” beyond the literary mode to include examine mass
cultural events. In this way,
anthropologists should examine these events not as pastimes or religious rites,
but as a text describing both culture and society. Geertz further contends that each cultural
event teaches the individual a different aspect of his society’s core values,
as well as reinforcing his own. Each
culture is ultimately an “ensemble of texts” which the “anthropologist strains
to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.” The cultural
text embedded in no single event provides a comprehensive understanding of all
aspects of a given culture, rather it is the anthropologist’s task to create a
mosaic of understanding by examining a myriad of cultural events.
In the case of the Balinese cockfight, Geertz uses this
method of treating events as texts to argue that the ritual behavior
surrounding cockfights illustrates and reinforces the structure of Balinese
society. To do this he not only observed
the behavior of Balinese interacting with their roosters, but also fifty-seven
actual cockfights. The bloody fights
between the animals are actually secondary in importance to the reinforcement
of social ties and structures expressed through the acts of betting on the
outcomes. Appropriating Bentham’s
concept of “deep play” for the purpose, Geertz argues that Balinese express
loyalty to family, clan, and village structures by betting on the cocks owned
by members of the social networks to which they belong.
Deep play refers to games in which the stakes or so high
that utilitarian motives are insufficient to explain the individuals
participation. Geertz rejects Bentham’s
assertion that such play is immoral due to the potential negative impact to
argue that monetary value in Balinese betting on cockfights is a signifier for
the moral import of a given match, as determined by the quality of the animals
involved and the amount bet by the two owners and their backers. In matches in which large amounts are bet,
the money risked is secondary to the “esteem, honor, dignity, and respect” at
stake to the participants and their associates.
In order to show their support for the members of their family and clan
networks, Balinese watching the cockfight will clamorously bet for the animal
presented by their relation. In this
way, they show familial, clan, or village affiliation, but reiterate their
social place in Balinese culture. Geertz
believes that the issue of status in matches involving large bets is so
important that a Balinese man will almost never bet against a rooster owned by
a member of his family hierarchy. The
social importance of supporting kith and kin in this way is such that even in
cases where the bird are poorly matched, the relationship distant, or the
central bet small, that betting on the “wrong” cock too often will lead to
either social disruption or formal hostilities between individuals.
Despite the seeming social importance of cockfighting to
Balinese life, as indicated by the need to place oneself into social context
through betting behavior, Geertz argues that its importance is not due to the
functionalist social impact inherent in the event. Instead, Geertz argues that it represents the
Balinese’s efforts to describe themselves to themselves in an interpretive
“metasocial commentary on hierarchical ranks.”
This is a major difference between Geertz, structuralist historians and
anthropologists, and the efforts of Pierre Bourdieu to describe the relationship
between culture and society.
While maintaining the central importance of culture to our
understanding of humanity, Bourdieu proposes a different relationship between
culture, society, and history exists than the Geertz. Where Geertz appears to argue that culture
defines human actions, Bourdieu argues that human action stems from a
combination of culture, structure, and power that act on individual
calculations to determine the best course for an individual to follow. This requires that analysis and explanation
of human action needs some source of “mediation of the relationship between
actor perceptions and formally constructed structures.’ Bourdieu calls this mediating factor habitus.
Bourdieu defines habitus
as “an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the
particular conditions in which it is constituted; the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all
the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others.” In Bourdieu’s
interpretation, habitus is a “law”
that individuals unconsciously learn, but which governs their actions and
thoughts as they move through daily life.
This allows individuals with the same habitus to react to each other in easily understandable and
predictable ways, facilitating life by reducing uncertainty and potential
conflict.
The operation of Bourdieu’s conception of habitus is illustrated in Geertz’s
portrayal of the betting habits of Balinese participating in side bets at
cockfights. The expectation that bettors
will support their kinsman’s cock in the fight demonstrates an expected social
behavior, of which there are consequences for contravention. In Bourdieu’s analysis, however, habitus consists of all actions
including base level customs and reactions that do not require a wholly
conscious decision or calculation.
Rather habitus provides the
semi-conscious structure by which individuals create strategies to cope with
new situations or occurrences – in this way, it defines the possible actions
that an individual can consider when encountering a given situation.
One of the many examples Bourdieu provides of the use of habitus in determining individual
actions in the life of the Kabyle in Algeria is women’s methods of maintaining
gender separation during the wet season when men eat indoors, driving them from
their accustomed space for daily activities.
During this time, Kabyle women retreat from house common areas to the
“wall of darkness”, associated in Kabyle society as a women’s or private area,
so they will not attract male attention.
At this time, women also leave their looms standing to provide a
protected space and task so that they can appear separate and busy throughout
the season.
It would be overly simplistic though, to define habitus as providing only a set of
cultural cues or dictates for members of a social system, as Geertz’s analysis
of culture’s role with the Balinese cockfights does. Instead, Bourdieu seeks to connect culture to
the power relationships enshrined in society and systems of law. In purely social terms, Bourdieu argues that
habitus, particularly as involved in strict adherence to the rhythm of life as
shown in the example of women’s adaptation to men’s presence in homes during
the wet season directly enhances the “hierarchization of the male and female
worlds.” The transmission of the group’s habitus
by non-verbal or non-legalistic means reinforces these social hierarchies by
rendering them naturalistic. Bourdieu
believes that the most important effects of this is that habitus provides individuals with a seemingly built-in sense of
reality, which limits the possibilities open to the individual in society
without requiring an awareness that this limitation is imposed from the
outside. The internationalization of habitus makes this possible.
Bourdieu contends that the internalization of the externally
imposed cultural standards embodied in habitus
makes it become and objective reality that places limits on the options the
individual can even conceive of having.
In this way the individual adopts practices without having, or needing,
“either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less ‘sensible’
and ‘reasonable’.” In this way, a habitus that includes systematic
divisions in society among subgroups by age, gender, or ethnicity reproduces
the power relationships of the society.
Individuals embedded in the system by their habitus are unable to see the arbitrary nature of the structure
because the habitus makes it appear
self-evident or natural.
Culture communicates these power structures in subtle ways
that include observation of adult relationships by children, through proverbs
or sayings, and through ritual activities such as Balinese cockfights or
sacrifice of sheep at Eid. In this way
all of a culture’s discourse support what Bourdieu considers it mythology of
natural basis to support the power relationships in a given society. The appropriation of discourse allows the
propagation of habitus through
successive generations inhabiting the same cultural and material environment. This transmission assumes a static nature of
existence, both social and material among the inheritors of the habitus.
Because Bourdieu contends that habitus lies at the core of a society’s power structure, it
necessarily focuses on the issue of class membership as part of its analytic
structure. This requires that the
concept of habitus also incorporate a
subjective component that is not inherent in the individual, but among a whole
class of individuals. On one level, this
could include the designation of style of clothing, cosmetics, or behavior that
set a socio-economic class apart from others in the power structure. While Bourdieu does not provide a clear
concrete example of this, Geertz’s depiction of the Balinese cockfight
does. Although cockfighting is a
significant Balinese cultural ritual used to solidify Balinese understanding of
their social structure, it was condemned first by Dutch colonial authorities,
and later by the Javanese national government.
The Dutch habitus defined
cockfighting as a reprehensible indicator of Balinese inferiority, while the
Balinese habitus defined cockfighting
as a measure of responsible adult male behavior. The Balinese habitus further defined
appropriate betting surrounding cockfighting to show that men who gambled due
to addiction to gambling were lesser men due to their irresponsible behavior.
The illegality of most cockfighting in Bali demonstrates
another important truth about habitus. Bourdieu argues that formal law is of only
secondary consideration to the dictates of the inner law created by the habitus, particularly in maintaining the
legitimacy of power structures. Law
merely consecrates the existing power structures by recording them, and the
symbols attached to them. In this way,
the Javanese authorities utilize the law banning Balinese cockfighting to
enshrine their position of power and authority over the Balinese. If left to their own devices, Balinese would
continue their centuries old practice of regular cockfights in a communal
village ring designated for the event.
The fact that this does not occur is a constant reminder to Balinese
that despite their cultural dictates, the dictates of their habitus, the Javanese have power to
dominate them.
A significant challenge to the primacy of culture in
determining individual action as proposed by both Geertz and Bourdieu, is the
problem of individual agency. In both
models, the individual agent is stripped of the ability to choose activities,
actions, or associations by the influence of culture. Since culture is learned in non-verbal ways
during childhood in their conceptions, the individual never has the opportunity
not to follow the dictates of habitus. This particularly prevents Bourdieu’s model
from truly accounting for the influence of culture, as some individuals do
demonstrably throw off the shackles of culture or class to pursue different
behaviors, careers, or associations. The
question remains how to deal with these outlying members of a culture that
apparently discard or somehow adopt a new habitus
is an important one to account for due to the significant impact these rebels
or pioneers might have on their, or other, societies. Their existence casts doubt on Bourdieu’s
conception of habitus leading to
understanding of cultural traits as natural or self-evident by individuals
possessing a given habitus.
Bibliography
Pierre
Bourdieu, “Outlines of the Theory of Practice: Structures and Habitus,” in Gabrielle
Spiegel, ed., Practicing History: New
Directions in Historical Writing (2005)
Pierre
Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power,”
in Nicholas B Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in
Contemporary Social Theory (1994)
Clifford
Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” from The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
William Reddy,
“Anthropology and the History of Culture,” Blackwell
David Schwarz. Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1997).
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