No words requirements

Michael Agar(I have uploaded two file names”Agar Culture’ and “Agar Culture Blends” if you have questions about this concept) introduces to us the concept of rich points (those patterned surprises and unexpected interactions that point to incidences of cross-cultural differences). Thus far in the semester, we’ve read a number of articles that present instances of rich points and the implications that misunderstandings of rich points have for interpersonal communication. Using one of the articles that we’ve read so far during the semester address the following:( I have uploaded three but not include flie named “Agar” and you can select one)

How does your selected example constitute a rich point, as defined and elaborated upon by Michael Agar?

What is/was at stake for the participants involved in this rich point? What is/was at stake for the individuals/communities in your example? In your answer to this question, please address all components of our understanding of the concept of social business – the creation and maintenance of identity/ identities, the hierarchies of value that are challenged or reinforced, and the structures of power, whether personal or institutional, that are maintained or resisted against?

– __ ., ______ r– _________ _

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Chapter I /Thick

Description: Toward an

Interpretive Theory of

Culture·

I

In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that
certain ideas burst. upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous
force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they
seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems,
clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame
of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which
a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of
such a grande idee, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is
due, she says, “to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at
once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose,
experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generaliza-
tions and derivatives.”

After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it
has become part Qf our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expec-

4 THE INTERPRETATION OF CUL TURES

tations are bro_ught more into balance with its actual uses, and its exces-
sive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-uni-
verse view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the
problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend
it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist
where it does not apply, or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in
truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part
of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-prom-
ising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had.
The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selec-
tion, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the
means of production does not explain everything, not even everything
human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolat-
ing just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of
pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also
given rise.

Whether or not this is, in fact, the way all centrally important scien-
tific concepts develop, I don’t know. But certainly this pattern fits the
concept of culture, around which the whole discipline of anthropology
arose, and whose domination that discipline has been increasingly con-
cerned to limit, specify, focus, and contain. It is to this cutting of the
culture concept down to size, therefore actually insuring its continued
importance rather than undermining it, that the essays below are all, in
their several ways and from their several directions, dedicated. They all
argue, sometimes explicitly, more often merely through the particular
analysis they develop, for a narrowed, specialized, and, so I imagine,
theoretically more powerful concept of culture to replace E. B. Tylor’s
famous “most complex whole,” which, its originative power not denied,
seems to me to have reached the point where it obscures a good deal
more than it reveals.

The conceptual morass into which the Tylorean kind of pot-au-feu
theorizing about culture can lead, is evident in what is still one of the
better general introductions to anthropology, Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror
for Man. In some twenty-seven pages of his chapter on the concept,
Kluckhohn managed to define culture in turn as: (1) “the total way of
life of a people”; (2) “the social legacy the individual acquires from his
group”; (3) “a way of thinking, feeling, and believing”; (4) “an abstrac-
tion from behavior”; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist
about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a “store-

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 5

house of pooled learning”; (7) “a set of standardized orientations to re-
current problems”; (8) “learned behavior”; (9) a mechanism for the
normative regulation of behavior; ( 10) “a set of techniques for adjusting
both to the external environment and.to other men”; (11) ‘.’a precipitate
of history”; and turning, perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, as
a sieve, and as a matrix. In the face of this sort of theoretical diffusion,
even a somewhat constricted and not entirely standard concept of cul-
ture, which is at least internally coherent and, more important, which
has a definable argument to make is (as, to be fair, Kluckhohn himself
keenly realized) an improvement. Eclecticism is self-defeating not be-
cause there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but be-
cause there are so many: it is necessary to choose.

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below
attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with ,, .
Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in_webs qfsignifi~~he ·
hJmselJhas sp1.m, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it
to be therefore nofan experimenta.Tscieiicein searcli onaw·out ·an in-
teq,retive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after,
construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pro-
nouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.

II

Operationalism as a methodological dogma never made much sense so
far as the social sciences .are concerned, and except for a few rather too
well-swept corners-Skinnerian behaviorism, intelligence testing, and
so on-it is largely dead now. But it had, for all that, an important
point to make, which, however we may feel about trying to define cha-
risma or alienation in terms of operations, retains a certain force: if you
want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first in-
stance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its
apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it
dq.

In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners
do is ethnography. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or
more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made to-

‘ ./
I

6

THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

ward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of
knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of meth-
ods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is
establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking ge-
nealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these
things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise.
What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate ven-
ture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, “thick description.”

Ryle’s discussion of “thick description” appears in two recent essays of
his (now reprinted in the second volume of his Collected Papers) ad-
dressed to the general question of what, as he puts it, “Le Penseur” is
doing: “Thinking and Reflecting” and “the Thinking of Thoughts.”
Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right
eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial
signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical;
from an I-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” obser.vation of them alone,
one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed
whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however
unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone un-
fortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The
winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise
and special way: (I) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to
impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established
code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. As Ryle
points out, the winker has not done two things, contracted his eyelids
and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracted his eye-
lids. Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public
code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking.
That’s all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and-
voila!-a gesture.

That, however, is just the beginning. Suppose, he continues, there is a
third boy, who, “to give malicious amusement to his cronies,” parodies
the first boy’s wink, as amateurish, clumsy, obvious, and so on. He, of
course, does this in the same way the second boy winked and the first
twitched: by contracting his right eyelids. Only .this boy is neither wink-
ing nor twitching, he is parodying someone else’s, as he takes it, laugh-
able, attempt at winking. Here, too, a socially established code exists (he
will “wink” laboriously, overobviously, perhaps adding a grimace-the
usual artifices of the clown); and so also does a message. Only now it is

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theoiy of Culture 7

not conspiracy but ridicule that is in the air. If the others think he is ac-
tually winking, his whole project misfires as completely, though with
somewhat different results, as if they think he is twitching. One can go
further: uncertain of his mimicking abilities, the ,would-be satirist may
practice at home before the mirror, in which case he is not twitching,
winking, or parodying, but rehearsing; though so fa[ as what a camera,
a radical behaviorist, or a believer in protocol sentences would record
he is just rapidly contracting his right eyelids like all the others. Com-
plexities are possible, if not practically without end, at least logically so.
The original winker might, for example, actually have been fake-wink-
ing, say, to mislead outsiders into imagining there was a conspiracy
afoot when there in fact was not, in which case our descriptions of what
the parodist is parodying and the rehearser rehearsing of course shift
accordingly. But the point is that between what Ryle calls the “thin de-
scription” of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher … ) is
doing (“rapidly contracting his right eyelids”) and the “thick descrip-
tion” of what he is doing (“practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a
wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion”)
lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful
structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, re-
hearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and
without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which,
as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches)
in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids.

Like so many of the little stories Oxford philosophers like to make
up for themselves, all this winking, fake-winking, burlesque-fake-wink-
ing, rehearsed-burlesque-fake-winking, may seem a bit artificial. In way
of adding a more empirical note, let me give, deliberately unpreceded
by any prior explanatory comment at all, a not untypical excerpt from
my own field journal to demonstrate that, however evened off for didac-
tic purposes, Ryle’s example presents ap image only too exact of the
sort of piled-up structures of inference and implication through which
an ethnographer is continually trying to pick his way:

The French [the informant said] had only just arrived. They set up twenty
or so small forts between here, the town, and the Marmusha area up in the
middle of the mountains, placing them on promontories so they could sur-
vey the countryside. But for all this they couldn’t guarantee safety, espe-
cially at night, so although the mezrag, trade-pact, system was supposed to
be legally abolished it in fact continued as before.

8 THE INTERPRETATION OF CUL TURES

One night, when Cohen (who speaks fluent Berber), was up there, at Mar-
musha, two other Jews who were traders to a neighboring tribe came by to
purchase some goods from him. Some Berbers, from yet another neighbor-
ing tribe, tried to break into Cohen’s place, but he fired his rifle in the air.
(Traditionally, Jews were not allowed to carry weapons; but at this period
things were so unsettled many did so anyway.) This attracted the attention
of the French and the marauders fled.

The next night, however, they came back, one of them disguised as a
woman who knocked on the door with some sort of a story. Cohen was sus-
picious and didn’t want to let “her” in, but the other Jews said, “oh, it’s all
right, it’s only a woman.” So they opened the door and the whole lot came
pouring in. They killed the two visiting Jews, but Cohen managed to barri-
cade himself in an adjoining room. He heard the robbers planning to burn
him alive in the shop after they removed his goods, and so he opened the
door and, laying about him wildly with a club, managed to escape through a
window.

He went up to the fort, then, to have his wounds dressed, and complained
to the local commandant, one Captain Ourhari, saying he wanted his ‘ar-
i.e., four or five times the value of the merchandise stolen from him. The
robbers were from a tribe which had not yet submitted to French authority
and were in open rebellion against it, and he wanted authorization to go
with his mezrag-holder, the Marmusha tribal sheikh, to collect the indemnity
that, under traditional rules, he had coming to him. Captain Dumari
couldn’t officially give him permission to do this, because of the French pro-
hibition of the mezrag relationship, but he gave him verbal authorization,
saying. “If you get killed, it’s your problem.”

So the sheikh, the Jew, and a small company of armed Marmushans went
off ten or fifteen kilometers up into the rebellious area, where there were of
course no French, and, sneaking up, captured the thief-tribe’s shepherd and
stole its herds. The other tribe soon came riding out on horses after them,
armed with rifles and ready to attack. But when they saw who the “sheep
thieves” were, they thought better of it and said, “all right, we’ll talk.” They
couldn’t really deny what had happened-that some of their men had
robbed Cohen and killed the two visitors-and they weren’t prepared to
start the serious feud with the ~armusha a scuffle with the invading party
would bring on. So the two groups talked, and talked, and talked, there on
the plain amid the thousands of sheep, and decided finally on five-hundred-
sheep damages. The two armed Berber groups then lined up on their horses
at opposite ends of the plain, with the sheep herded between them, and
Cohen, in his black gown, pillbox hat, and flapping slippers, went out alone
among the sheep, picking out, one by one and at his own good speed, the
best ones for his payment.

So Cohen got his sheep and drove them back to Marmusha. The French,
up in their fort, heard them coming from some distance (“Ba, ba, ba” said
Cohen, happily, recalling the image) and said, “What the hell is that?” And
Cohen said, “That is my ‘ar.” The French couldn’t believe he had actually

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 9

done what he said he had done, and accused him of being a spy for the re-
bellious Berbers, put him in prison, and took his sheep. In the town, his
family, not having heard from him in so long a time, thought he was dead.
But after a· while the French released him and he came back home, but
without his sheep. He then went to the Colonel in the town, the Frenchman
in charge of the whole region, to complain. But the Colonel said, “I can’t do
anything about the matter. It’s not my problem.”

Quoted raw, a note in a bottle; this passage .conveys, as any similar
one similarly presented would do, a fair sense of how much goes into
ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort-how extraor-
dinarily “thick” it is. In finished anthropological writings, including
those collected here, this fact-that what we call our data are really our
own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their
compatriots are up to-is obscured because most of what we need to
comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is in-
sinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly ex-
amined. (Even to reveal that this little drama took place in the high-
lands of central Morocco in 1912-and was recounted there in
1968-is to determine much of our understanding of it.) There is noth-
ing particularly wrong with this, and it is in any case inevitable. But it
does lead to a view of anthropological research as rather more of an ob-
sP-rvational and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is.
Right down at the factual base, the hard rock, insofar as there is any, of
the whole enterprise, we are already explicating: and worse, explicating
explications. Winks up~n winks upon winks.
–Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification-what
Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it
makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when
it is much more like that of the literary critic-and determining their
social ground and import. Here, in our text, such sorting would begin
with distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredient
in the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French, and would then inove on
to show how (and why) at that time, in that place, ,their copresence pro-
duced a situation in which systematic misunderstanding reduced tradi-
tional form to social farce. What tripped Cohen up, and with him the
whole, ancient pattern of social and economic relationships within
which he functioned, was a confusion of tongues.

I shall come back to this too-compacted aphorism later, as well as to
. .the details of the text itself. The point ~or now is only that ethnography

10 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

is thick description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced with-
except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more auto-
matized routines of data collection-is a multiplicity of complex con-
ceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into
one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and
which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And
this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his ac-
tivity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms,
tracing property lines, censusing households . . . writing his journal.
Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a
reading of’) a manuscript-foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoher-
encies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written
not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of
shaped behavior.

III

Culture, this acted document, thus is public, like a burlesqued wink or a
mock sheep raid. Though ideational, it does not exist in someone’s
head; though unphysical, it is not an occult entity. The interminable,
because unterminable, debate within anthropology as to whether culture
is “subjective” or “objective,” together with the mutual exchange of in-
tellectual insults (“idealist!” -“materialist!”; “mentalist!” -“behav-
iorist!”; “impressionist!” -“positivist!”) which accompanies it, is
wholly misconceived. Once human behavior is seen as (most of the
time; there are true twitches) symbolic action-action which, like pho-
nation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in
music, signifies-the question as to whether culture is patterned con-
duct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together,
loses sense. The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep
raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of
rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other-they are things of this
world. The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is, ridicule or
challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that, in their occurrence
and through their agency, is getting said.

This may seem like an obvious truth, but there are a number of ways

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 11

to obscure it. One is to imagine that culture is a self-contained “super-
organic” reality with forces and purposes of its own; that is, to reify it.
Another is to claim that it consists in the brute pattern of behavioral
events we observe in fact to occur in some identifiable community or
other; that is, to reduce it. But though both these confusions still exist,
and doubtless will be always with us, the main source of theoretical
muddlement in contemporary anthropology is a view which developed
in reaction to them and is right now very widely held-namely, that, to
quote Ward Goodenough, perhaps its leading proponent, “culture [is
located J in the minds and hearts of men.”

Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive
anthropology (a terminological wavering which reflects a deeper uncer-
tainty), this school of thought holds that culture is composed of psycho-
logical structures by means of which individuals or groups of individu-
als guide their behavior. “A society’s culture,” to quote Goodenough
again, this time in a passage which has become the locus classicus of the
whole movement, “consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe
in order to operafeTna manner acceptable to frs members.” Amffrom
this view of what culture is follows a view, equally assured, of what de-
scribing it is-the writing out of systematic rules, an ethnographic algo-
rithm, which, iffollowed, would make it possible so to operate, to pass
(physical appearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extreme subjec-
tivism is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an -ex-
plosion of debate as to whether particular analyses (which come in the
form of taxonomies, paradigms, tables, trees, and other ingenuities) re-
flect what the natives “really” think or are merely clever simulations, logi-
.cally equivalent but substantively different, of what they think.

As, on first glance, this approach may look close enough to the one
being developed here to be mistaken for it, it is useful to be explicit as
to what divides them. If, leaving our winks and sheep behind for the
moment, we take, say, a Beethoven quartet as an, admittedly rather spe-
cial but, for these purposes, nicely illustrative, sample of culture, no one
would, I think, identify it with its score, with the skills and knowledge
needed to play it, with the understanding of it possessed by its perform-
ers or auditors, nor, to take care, en passant, of the reductionists and
reifiers, with a particular performance of it or with some mysterious en-
tity transcending material existence. The “no one” is perhaps too strong
here, for there are always incorrigibles. But that a Beethoven quartet is
a temporally developed tonal structure, a coherent sequence of modeled

12 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

sound-in .a word, music-and not anybody’s knowledge of or belief
about anything, including how to play it, is a proposition to which most
people are, upon reflection, likely to assent.

To play the violin it is necessary to possess certain habits, skills,
knowledge, and talents, to be in the mood to play, and (as the old joke;
goes) to have a violi.n. But violin playing is neither the habits. skills,
knowledge, and so on, nor the mood, nor (the notion believers in “ma-
terial culture” apparently embrace) the violin. To make a trade pact in
Morocco, you have to do certain things in certain ways (among others,
cut, while chanting Quranic Arabic, the throat of a lamb before the as-
sembled, undeformed, adult male members of your tribe) and to be pos-
sessed of certain psychological characteristics (among others, a desire
for distant things). But a trade pact is neither the throat cutting nor the
desire, though it is real enough, as seven kinsmen of our Marmusha
sheikh discovered when, on an earlier occasion, they were executed by
him following the theft of one mangy, essentially valueless sheepskin
from Cohen.

Culture is public because meaning is. You can’t wink (or burlesque
one) without knowing what counts as winking or how, physically, to
contract your eyelids, and you can’t conduct a sheep raid (or mimic
one) without knowing what it is to steal a sheep and how practically to
go about it. But to draw from such truths the conclusion that knowing
how to wink is winking and knowing how to steal a sheep is sheep raid-
ing is to betray as deep a confusion as, taking thin descriptions for
thick, to identify winking with eyelid contractions or sheep raiding with
chasing woolly animals out of pastures. The cognitivist fallacy-that
culture consists (to quote another spokesman for the movement, Stephen
Tyler) of “mental phenomena which can [he means “should”! be ana-
lyzed by formal methods similar to those of mathematics and logic” -is
as destructive of an effective use of the concept as are the behaviorist
and idealist fallacies to which it is a misdrawn correction. Perhaps, as its
errors are more sophisticated and its distortions subtler, it is even more
so.

The generalized attack on privacy theories of meaning is, since early
Husserl and late Wittgenstein, so much a part of modern thought that it
need not be developed once more here. What is necessary is to see to it
that the news of it reaches anthropology; and in particular that it is
made clear that to say that culture: consists .of~9Jl[al!y e_sJablished struc:
tures of meaning in terms-oT;iich people do such things as signal con-

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 13

spiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them, is no more
to say that it is a psychological phenomenon, a characteristic of some-
one’s mind, personality, cognitive structure, or whatever, than to say
that Tantrism, genetics, the progressive form of the verb, the classifica-
tion of wines, the Common Law, or the notion of “a conditional curse”
(as Westermarck defined the concept of ‘ar in terms of which Cohen
pressed his claim to damages) is. What, in a place like Morocco, most
prevents those of us who grew up winking other winks or attending
other sheep from grasping what people are up to is oot ignorance as to
how cognition works (though, especially as, one assumes, it works the
same among them as it does among us, it would greatly help to have
less of that too) as a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe
within which their acts are signs. As Wittgenstein has been invoked, he
may as well be quoted:

We . . . say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however,
important as regards this observation that one human being can be a com-
plete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country
with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of
the country’s language. We do not understand the peqple. (And not because of
not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet
with them.

I

V

Finding our feet, an unnerving business which never more than distantly
succeeds, is what ethnographic research consists of as a personal experi-
ence; trying to formulate the basis on which one imagines, always ex-
cessively, one has found them is what anthropological writing consists
of as a scientific endeavor. We are not, or at least I am not, seeking ei-
ther to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic
them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are
seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very
much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more
difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. “If
speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process,” Stanley
Cavell has remarked, “that may be because speaking to someone does
not seem mysterious enough.”

THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of
the universe of human discourse. That is not, of course, its only aim-
instruction, amusement, practical counsel, moral advance, and the dis-
covery of natural order in human behavior are others; nor is anthropol-
ogy the only discipline which pursues it. But it is an aim to which a
semiotic concept of ,culture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked
systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would
call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events,
behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a
context, something within which they can be intelligibly-that is,
thickly–described.

The famous anthropological absorption with the (to us) exotic-
Berber horsemen, Jewish peddlers, French Legionnaires-is, thus, es-
sentially a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with
which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to
one another is concealed from us. Looking at the ordinary in places
where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as has so often been
claimed, the arbitrariness of human behavior (there is nothing especially
arbitrary about taking sheep theft for insolence in Morocco), but the de-
gree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by
which it is informed. Understanding a people’s culture exposes their
normalness without reducing their particularity. (The more I manage to
follow what the Moroccans are up to, the more logical, and the more
singular, they seem.) It renders them accessible: setting them in the
frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

It is this maneuver, usually too casually referred to as “seeing things
from the actor’s point of view,” too bookishly as “the verstehen ap-
proach,” or too technically as “emic analysis,” that so often leads to the
notion that anthropology is a variety of either long-distance mind read-
ing or cannibal-isle fantasizing, and which, for someone anxious to navi-
gate past the wrecks of a dozen sunken philosophies, must therefore be
executed with a great deal of care. Nothing is more necessary_ to
comprehending what anthropological interpretation is, and the degree to
which it is interpretation, than an exact understanding of what it means
-and what it does not mean-to say that our formulations of other
peoples’ symbol systems must be actor-oriented. 1

1 Not only other peoples’: anthropology can be trained ~n the culture of w~ich
it is itself a part, and it increasingly is; a fact of profound importance, but which,
as it raises a few tricky and rather special second order problems, I shall put to
the side for the moment.

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 15

What it means is that descriptions of Berber, Jewish, or French cul-
ture must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine Berbers,
Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through, the formulae
they use to define what happens to them. What it does not mean is that
such descriptions are themselves Berber, Jewish, or French-that is,
part of the reality they are ostensibly describing; they are
anthropological-that is, part of a developing system of scientific anal-
ysis. They must be cast in terms of the interpretations to which persons
of a particular denomination subject their experience, because that is
what they profess to be descriptions of; they are anthropological be-
cause it is, in fact, anthropologists who profess them. Normally, it is not
necessary to point out quite so laboriously that the object of study is
one thing and the study of it another. It is clear enough that the physi-
cal world is not physics and A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake not
Finnegan’s Wake. Buti. as, i11_th_e study of culture, analysis penetrates
into the very body ;;r the object-that is, we begin with our own inter-
pretations of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to,
and then systematize those-the line between (Moroccan) culture as a
natural fact and (Moroccan) culture as a theoretical entity tends to get
blurred. All the more so, as the latter is presented in the form of an ac-
tor’s-eye description of (Moroccan) conceptions of everything from vio-
lence, honor, divinity, and justice, to tribe, property, patronage, and
chiefship.

In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and
second and third order ones to boot. (By definition, only a “native”
makes first order ones: it’s his culture.) 2 They are, thus, fictions; fic-
tions, in the sense that they are “something made,” “something
fashioned” -the original meaning of fictio-not that they are false, un-
factual, or merely “as if” thought experiments. To construct actor-ori-
ented descriptions of the involvements of a Berber chieftain, a Jewish
merchant, and a French soldier with one another in 1912 Morocco is
clearly an imaginative act, not all that different from constructing simi-
lar descriptions of, say, the involvements with one another of a provin-
cial French doctor, his silly, adulterous wife, and her feckless lover in

2 The order problem is, again, complex. Anthropological’ works based on other
anthropological works (Levi-Strauss’, for example) may, of course, be fourth
order or higher, and informants frequently, even habitually, make second order
interpretations-what have come to be known as “native models.” In literate cul-
tures, where “native” interpretation can proceed to higher levels-in connection
with the Maghreb, one has only to think of Ibn Khaldun; with the ‘United States,
Margaret Mead-these matters become intricate indeed.

16 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

nineteenth century France. In the latter case, the actors are represented
as not having existed and the events as not having happened, while in
the former they are represented as actual, or as having been so. This is
a difference of no mean importance; indeed, precisely the one Madame
Bovary had difficulty grasping. But the importance does not lie in the
fact that her story•was created while Cohen’s was only noted. The con-
ditions of their creation, and the point of it (to say nothing of the man-
ner and the quality) differ. But the one is as much a fictio-“a mak-
ing” -as the other.

Anthropologists have not always been as aware as they might be of
this fact: that although culture exists in the trading post, the hill fort, or
the sheep run, anthropology exists in the book, the article, the lecture,
the museum display, or, sometimes nowadays, the film. To become
aware of it is to realize that the line between mode of representation
and substantive content is as undrawable in cultural analysis as it is
in painting; and that fact in turn seems to threaten the objective status
of anthropological knowledge by suggesting that its source is not social
reality but scholarly artifice.

It does threaten it, but the threat is hollow. The claim to attention of
an ethnographic account does not rest on its author’s ability to capture
primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home like a mask or a
carving, but on the degree to which he is able to clarify what goes on in
such places, to reduce the puzzlement-what manner of men are these?
-to which unfamiliar acts emerging out of unknown backgrounds natu-
rally give rise. This raises some serious problems of verification, all
right-or, if “verification” is too strong a word for so soft a science (I,
myself, would prefer “appraisal”), of how you can tell a better account
from a worse one. But that is precisely the virtue of it. If ethnography
is thick description and ethnographers those who are doing the describ-
ing, then the determining question for any given example of it, whether
a field journal squib or a Malinowski-sized monograph, is whether it
sorts winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones. It is not
against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that
we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power
of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of
strangers. It is not worth it, as Thoreau said, to go round the world to
count the cats in Zanzibar.

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 17

V

Now, this proposition, that it is not in our interest to bleach human be-
havior of the very properties that interest us before we begin to exam-
ine it, has sometimes been escalated into a larger claim: namely, that as
it is only those properties that interest us, we need not attend, save cur-
sorily, to behavior at all. Culture is most effectively treated, the argu-
ment goes, purely as a symbolic system (the catch phrase is, “in its own
terms”), by isolating its elements, specifying the internal relationships
among those elements, and then characterizing the whole system in
some general way-according to the core symbols around which it is
organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression,
or the ideological principles upon which it is based. Though a distinct
improvement over “learned behavior” and “mental phenomena” notions
of what culture is, and the source of some of the most powerful theoret-
ical ideas in contemporary anthropology, this hermetical approach to
things seems to me to run the danger (and increasingly to have been
overtaken by it) of locking cultural analysis away from its proper object,
the informal logic of actual life. There is little profit in extricating a
concept .from the defects of psychologism only to plunge it immediately
into those of schematicism.

Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is
through the flow of behavior–or, more precisely, social action-that
cultural forms find articulation. They find it as well, of coµrse, in var-
ious sorts of artifacts, and various states of consciousness; but these
draw their meaning from the role they play (Wittgenstein would say
their “use”) in an ongoing pattern of life, not from any intrinsic rela-
tionships they bear to one another. It is what Cohen, the sheikh, and
“Captain Dumari” were doing when they tripped over one another’s
purposes-pursuing trade, defending honor, establishing dominance-
that, created our pastoral drama, and that is what the drama is, there-
fore, “about.” Whatever, or wherever, symbol systems “in their own
terms” may be, we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events,
not by arranging abstracted entities into unified patterns.

A further implication of this is that coherence cannot be the major
test of validity for a cultural description. Cultural systems must 11ave a
minimal degree of coherence, else we wou.ld not call them systems; and,

18 THE INTERPRETATION OF CUL TURES

by observation, they normally have a great deal more. But there is noth-
ing so coherent as a paranoid’s delusion or a swindler’s story. The force
of our interpretations cannot rest, as they are now so often made to do,
on the tightness with which they hold together, or the assurance with
which they are argued. Nothin_g has done. more, :I think, to. discredit_ cul•
tural analysis than the constructioQ gf i111pecc=able _clepictions O.f formal
order in whose actual existence Q9.body can quite believ~ …
– If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what
happens, then to divorce it from what happens-from what, in this time
or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them,
from the whole vast business of the world-is to divorce it from its ap-
plications and render it vacant. A good interpretation of anything-a
poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society-takes us
into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When it does not
do that, but leads us instead somewhere else-into an admiration of its
own elegance, of its author’s cleverness, or of the beauties of Euclidean
order-it may have its intrinsic charms; but it is something else than
what the task at hand-figuring out what all that rigamarole with the
sheep is about–calls for.

The rigamarole with the sheep-the sham theft of them, the repara-
tive transfer of them, the political confiscation of them-is (or was) es-
sentially a social discourse, even if, as I suggested earlier, one con-
ducted in multiple tongues and as much in action as in words.

Claiming his ‘ar, Cohen invoked the trade pact; recognizing the
claim, the sheikh challenged the offenders’ tribe; accepting responsibil-
ity, the offenders’ tribe paid the indemnity; anxious to make clear to
sheikhs and peddlers alike who was now iri charge here, the French
showed the imperial hand. As in any discourse, code does not deter-
mine conduct, and what was actually said need not have been. Cohen
might not have, given its illegitimacy in Protectorate eyes, chosen to
press his claim. The sheikh might, for similar reasons, have rejected it.
The offenders’ tribe, still resisting French authority, might have decided
to regard the raid as “real” and fight rather than negotiate. The French,
were they more habile and less dur (as, under Mareschal Lyautey’s sei-
gniorial tutelage, they later in fact became), might have permitted Cohen
to keep his sheep, winking-as we say-at the continuance of the trade
pattern and its limitation to their authority. And there are other possi-
bilities: the Marmushans might have regarded the French action as too
great an insult to bear and gone into dissidence themselves; the French

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture

might have attempted not just to clamp down on Cohen but to bring th~
sheikh himself more closely to heel; and Cohen might have concluded
that between renegade Berbers and Beau Geste soldiers, driving trade in
the Atlas highlands was no longer worth the candle and retired to the
better-governed confines of the town. This, indeed, is more or less what
happened, somewhat further along, as the Protectorate moved toward
genuine sovereignty. But the point here is not to describe what did or
did not take place in Morocco. (From this simple incident one can
widen out into enormous complexities of social experience.) It is to
demonstrate what a piece of anthropological interpretation consists in:
tracing the curve of a social discourse; fixing it into an inspectable
form.

The ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse; he writes it down. In
so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own
moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions
and can be reconsulted. The sheikh is long dead, killed in the process of
being, as the French called it, “pacified”; “Captain Dumari,” his paci-
fier, lives, retired to his souvenirs, in the south of France; and Cohen
went last year, part refugee, part pilgrim, part dying patriarch, “home”
to Israel. But what they, in my extended sense, “said” to one another on
an Atlas plateau sixty years ago is-very far from perfectly-preserved
for study. “What,” Paul Ricoeur, from whom this whole idea of the in-
scription of action is borrowed and somewhat twisted, asks, “what does
writing fix?”

. Not the event bf speaking, but the “said” of speaking, where we understand
by .the “said” of speaking that intentional exteriorization constitutive of the
aim of discourse thanks to which the sagen-the saying-wants to become

. Aus-sage-the enunciation, the enunciated. In short, what we write is the
noema [”thought,” “content,” “gist”] of the speaking. It is the meaning of

. the speech event, not the event as event.

This is not itself so very “said” -if Oxford philosophers run to little
stories, phenomenological ones run to large sentences; but it brings us

,,anyway to a more precise answer to our generative question, “What
:does the ethnographer do?” -he writes. 3 This, too, may seem a less
than startling discovery, and to someone familiar with the current “liter-
r 3 Or, again, more exactly, “inscribes.” Most ethnography is in fact to be found
••. books and !!flicles, rather than in films, records, museum displays, or what-

ver; but even m them there are, of course, photographs, drawings, diagrams, ta-
cs, and so on. Self-consciousness about modes of representation (not to speak of
.per.iments with them) h!l,S been very lacking in anthropology.

‘1
.:I
;J

~
~ ..
j

I

zo THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

ature,” an implausible one. But as the standard answer to our question
has been, “He observes, he records, he analyzes”-a kind of veni, vidi,
vici conception of the matter-it may have more deep-going conse-
quences than are at first apparent, not the least of which is that distin-
guishing these three phases of knowledge-seeking may not, as a matter
of fact, normally’be possible; and, indeed, as autonomous “operations”

they may not in fact exist
The situation is even more delicate, because, as already noted, what

we inscribe (or try to) is not raw social discourse, to which, because,
save very marginally or very specially, we are not actors, we do not
have direct access, but only that small part of it which our informants
can lead us into understanding. 4 This is not as fatal as it sounds, for, in
fact, not all Cretans are liars, and it is not necessary to know everything
in order to understand something. But it does make the view of anthro-
pological analysis as the conceptual manipulation of discovered facts, a
logical reconstruction of a mere reality, seem rather lame. To set forth
symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity
in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autog-
enous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or
vast, a priori weltanschauungen, is to pretend a science that does not
exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found. Cultural analysis is (or
should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing ex-
planatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Con-
tinent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape.

VI

So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it 1s m-
terpretive; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and
the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the “said” of such
discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms. The
kula is gone or altered; but, for better or worse, The Argonauts of the

• So far as it has reinforced the anthropologist’s impulse to engage himself
with his informants as persons rather than as objects, t!:ie notion of “participant
observation” has been a valuable one. But, to the degree it has lead the anthro-
pologist to block from his view the very special. culturally bracketed na_ture of
his own role and to imagine himself someth1ng more than an interested (1_n both
senses of that word) sojourner, it has been our most powerful source of bad faith.

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture Zl

Western Pacific remains. But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic
of such description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic.

This is not to say that there are no large-sc~e anthropological inter-
pretations of whole societies, civilizations, world events, and so on. In-
deed, it is such extension of our analyses to wider contexts that, along
with their theoretical implications, recommends them to general atten-
tion and justifies our constructing them. No one really cares anymore,
not even Cohen (well . . . maybe, Cohen), about those sheep as such.
History may have its unobtrusive turning points, “great noises in a little
room”; but this little go-round was surely not one of them.

It is merely to say that the anthropologist characteristically ap-
proaches such broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from
the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely
small matters. He confronts the same grand realities that others-

. historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists-<:onfront in more fateful settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Pas- sion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige; but he confronts them in contexts obscure enough-places like Marmusha and lives like Cohen's-to take the capital letters off them. These all-too-human con- stancies, "those big words that make us all afraid," take a homely form in such homely contexts. But that is exactly the advantage. There are enough profundities in the world already.

Yet, the problem of how to get from a collection of ethnographic
miniatures on the order of our sheep story-an assortment of remarks
and anecdotes-to wall-sized culturescapes of the nation, the epoch, the
continent, or the civilization is not so easily passed over with vague al-
lusions to the virtues of concreteness and the down-to-earth mind. For a
science born in Indian tribes, Pacific islands, and African lineages and
subsequently seized with grander ambitions, this has come to be a major
methodological problem, and for the most part a badly handled one.
The models that anthropologists have themselves worked out to justify
their moving from local truths to general visions have been in fact as

‘ responsible for undermining the effort as anything thet r cnuc~-
sociologists obsessed with sample sizes, psychologists with measures, or
e<;onomists with aggregates-have been able to devise against them.

Of these, the two main ones have been: the Jonesville-is-the-USA
, •~microcosmic” model; and the Easter-Island-is-a-testing-case “natural
. experiment” model. Either heaven in a grain of sand, or the farther
$ores of possibility.

The Jonesville-is-America writ small .(or America-is-Jonesville writ

zz Tl-lE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

large) fallacy is so obviously one that the only thing that needs explana-
tion is how people have managed to believe it and expected others to
believe it. The notion that one can find the essence of national societies,
civilizations, great religions, or whatever summed up and simplified in
so-called “typicf!I” small towns and villages is palpable nonsense. What
one finds in small towns and villages is (alas) small-town or village life.
If localized, microscopic studies were really dependent for their greater
relevance upon such a premise-that they captured the great world in the
little-they wouldn’t have any relevance.

But, of course, they are not. The locus of study is not the object of
study. Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighbor-
hoods … ); they study’ in villages. You can study different things in
different places, and some things-for example, what colonial domina-
tion does to established frames of moral expectation-you can best
study in confined localities. But that doesn’t make the place what it is
you are studying. In the remoter provinces of Morocco and Indonesia I
have wrestled with the same questions other social scientists have wres-
tled with in more central locations-for example, how comes it that
men’s most importunate claims to humanity are cast in the accents of
group pride?-and with about the same conclusiveness. One can add a
dimension-one much needed in the present climate of size-up-and-
solve social science; but that is all. There is a certain value, if you are
going to run on about the exploitation of the masses in having seen a
Javanese sharecropper turning earth in a tropical downpour or a Mo-
roccan tailor embroidering kaftans by the light of a twenty-watt bulb.
But the notion that this gives you the thing entire (and elevates you to
some moral vantage ground from which you can look down upon the
ethically less privileged) is an idea which only someone too long in the
bush could possibly entertain.

The “natural laboratory” notion has been equally pernicious, not
only because the analogy is false-what kind of a laboratory is it where .
none of the parameters are manipulable?-but because it leads to a no-
tion that the data derived from ethnographic studies are purer, or more
fundamental, or more solid, or less conditioned (the most favored word
is “elementary”) than those derived from other sorts of social inquiry.
The great natural variation of cultural forms is, of course, not only an-
thropology’s great (and wasting) resource, but the ground of its deepest
theoretical dilemma: how is such variation to be squared with the bio-
logical unity of the human species? But it is not, even metaphorically,

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 23

experimental variation, because the context in which it occurs varies
along with it, and it is not possible (though there are those who try) to
isolate the y’s from x’s to write a proper function.

The famous studies purporting to show that the Oedipus complex was
backwards in the Trobriands, sex roles were upside down in Tchambuli,
and the Pueblo Indians lacked aggression (it is characteristic that they
were all negative-“but not in the South”), are, whatever their empiri-
cal validity may or m~y not be, not “scientifically tested and approved”
hypotheses. They are interpretations, or misinterpretations, like any
others. arrived at in the same way as any others, and as inherently in-
conclusive as any others, and the attempt to invest them with the au-
thority of physical experimentation is but methodological sleight of
hand. Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular: another
country heard from. To regard them as anything more (or anything less)
than that distorts both them and their implications, which are far pro-
founder than mere primitivity, for social theory.

Another country heard from: the reason that protracted descriptions
of distant sheep raids (and a really good ethnographer would have gone
into what kind of sheep they were) have general relevance is that they
present the sociological mind with bodied stuff on which to feed. The
important thing about the anthropologist’s findings is their complex spe-
cificness, their circumstantiality. It is. with the kind of material produced
by long-term, mainly (though not exclusively) qualitative, highly partici-
pative, and almost obsessively fine-comb field study in confined contexts
that the mega-concepts with which contemporary social science is
afflicted-legitimacy, modernization, integration, conflict, charisma,
structure, . . . meaning-can be given the sort of sensible actuality that
makes it possible to think not only realistically and concretely about
them, but, what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with
them.

The methodological problem which the microscopic nature of ethnog-
raphy presents is both real and critical. But it is not to be resolved by

· regarding a remote locality as the world in a teacup or as the sociologi-
cal equivalent of a clou,d chamber. It is to be resolved-or, anyway, de-
cently kept at bay-by realizing that social actions are comments on
inore than themselves; that where an interpretation comes from does not
determine where it can be impelled to go. Small facts speak to large is-
sues, winks to epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they
are made to.

24 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

VII

Which brings us, finally, to theory. The besetting sin of interpretive ap-
proaches to anything-literature, dreams, symptoms, culture-is that
they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation
and thus to escape systematic modes of assessment. You either grasp an
interpretation or you do not, see the point of it or you do not, accept it
or you do not. Imprisoned in the immediacy of its own detail, it is pre-
sented as self-validating, or, worse, as validated by the supposedly de-
veloped sensitivities of the person who presents it; any attempt to cast
what it says in terms other than its own is regarded as a travesty-as,
the anthropologist’s severest term of moral abuse, ethnocentric.

For a field of study which, however timidly (though I, myself, am not
timid about the matter at all), asserts itself to be a science, this just will
not do. There is no reason why the conceptual structure of a cultural in-
terpretation should be any less formulable, and thus less susceptible to
explicit canons of appraisal, than that of, say, a biological observation
or a physical experiment-no reason except that the terms in which
such formulations can be cast are, if not wholly nonexistent, very nearly
so. We are reduced to insinuating theories because we lack the power to

state them.
At the same time, it must be admitted that there are a number of

characteristics of cultural interpretation which make the theoretical de-
velopment of it more than usually difficult. The first is the need for
theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in
sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction.
Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology;
longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements
with formal symmetry. The whole point of a semiotic approach to cul-
ture is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual
world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense
of the term, converse with them. The tension between the pull of this
need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolic action and the re-
quirements of technical advance in the theory of culture, between the
need to grasp and the need to analyze, is, as a result, both necessarily
great and essentially irremovable. Indeed, the further theoretical devel-
opment goes, the deeper the tension gets. This is the first condition for

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture zs
. cultural theory: it is not its own master. As it is unseverable from the
immediacies thick description presents, its freedom to shape itself in
terms of its internal logic is rather limited, What generality it contrives
to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of
its abstractions.

And from this follows a peculiarity in the way, as a simple matter of
empirical fact, our knowledge of culture . . . cultures . . . a culture . . .
grows: in spurts. Rather than following a rising curve of cumulative
findings, cultural analysis breaks up into a disconnected yet coherent se-
quence of bolder and bolder sorties. Studies do build on other studies,

· not in the sense that they take up where the others leave off, but in the
sense that, better informed and better conceptualized, they plunge more
deeply into the same things. Every serious cultural analysis starts from
a sheer beginning and ends where it manages to get before exhausting
its intellectual impulse. Previously discovered facts are mobilized, pre-
viously developed concepts used, previously formulated hypotheses tried
out; but the movement is not from already proven theorems to newly
proven ones, it is from an awkward fumbling for the most elementary
understanding to a supported claim that one has achieved that and sur-
passed it. A study is an advance if it is more incisive-whatever that
may mean-than those that preceded it; but it less stands on their
shoulders than, challenged and challenging, runs by their side.

It is for this reason, among others, that the essay, whether of thirty
pages or three hundred, has seemed the natural genre in which to pre-
sent cultural interpretations and the theories sustaining them, and why,
if one looks for systematic treatises in the field, one is so soon disap-
pointed, the more so if one finds any. Even inventory articles are rare
here, and anyway of hardly more than bibliographical interest. The
major theoretical contributions not only lie in specific studies-that is
true in almost any field-but they are very difficult to abstract from
such studies and integrate into anything one might call “culture theory”
as such. Theoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations
they govern that they don’t make much sense or hold much interest
apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they
are not general, they are not theoretical), but because, stated indepen-
dently of their applications, they seem either commonplace or vacant.
One can, and this in fact is how the field progresses conceptually, take a
line of theoretical attack developed in connection with one exercise in
ethnographic interpretation and employ it in another, pushing it for-

——-:;.:-·——————
26 THE INTERPRETATION OF CUL TURES

ward to greater precision and broader relevance; but one cannot write a
“General Theory of Cultural Interpretation.” Or, rather, one can, but
there appears to be little profit in it, because the essential task of theory
building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick de-
scription possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within

them. ‘
To generalize within cases is usually called, at least in medicine and

depth psychology, clinical inference. Rather than beginning with a set
of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law,
such inference begins with a set of (presumptive) signifiers and attempts
to place them within an intelligible frame. Measures are matched to the-
oretical predictions, but symptoms (even when they are measured) are
scanned for theoretical peculiarities-that is, they are diagnosed. In the
study of culture the signifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symp-
toms, but symbolic acts or clusters of symbolic acts, and th,… aim is not
therapy but the analysis of social discourse. But the way in which
theory is used-to ferret out the unapparent import of things-is the

same.
Thus we are lead to the second condition of cultural theory: it is not,

at least in the strict meaning of the term, predictive. The diagnostician
doesn’t predict measles; he decides that someone has them, or at the
very most anticipates that someone is rather likely shortly to get them.
But this limitation, which is real enough, has commonly been both mis-
understood and exaggerated, because it has been taken to mean that cul-
tural interpretation is merely post facto: that, like the peasant in the old
story, we first shoot the holes in the fence and then paint the bull’s-eyes
around them. It is hardly to be denied that there is a good deal of that
sort of thing around, some of it in prominent places. It is to be denied,
however, that it is the inevitable outcome of a clinical approach to the

use of theory.
It is true that in the clinical style of theoretical formulation, concep-

tualization is directed toward the task of generating interpretations of
matters already in hand, not toward projecting outcomes of experimen-
tal manipulations or deducing future states of a determined system. But
that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to
generate cogent interpretations of) realities past; it has also to survive
-intellectually survive-realities to come. Although we formulate our
interpretation of an outburst of winking or an instance of sheep-raiding
after its occurrence, sometimes long after, the theoretical framework in

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 27

terms of which such an interpretation is made must be capable of con-
tinuing to yield defensible interpretations as new social phenomena
swim into view. Although one starts any effort at thick description, be-
yond the obvious and superficial, from a state of general bewilderment
as to what the devil is going on-trying to flnd one’s feet-one does
not start (or ought not) intellectually empty-handed. Theoretical ideas
are not created wholly anew in each study; as I have said, they are
adopted from other, related studies, and, refined in the process, applied
to new interpretive problems. If they cease being useful with respect to
such problems, they tend to stop being used and are more or less aba11-
doned. If they continue being useful, throwfog up new understandings,
they are further elaborated and go on being used. 5

Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretive science sug-
gests that the distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the exper-
imental or observational sciences between “description” and “explana-
tion” appears here as one, even more relative, between “inscription”
(“thick description”) and “specification” (“diagnosis”)-between setting
down the meaning particular social actions have for. the actors whose
actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the
knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is
found and, beyond that, about social life as such. Our double task is to
uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts, the
“said” of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in
whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them
because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determi-
nants of human behavior. In ethnography, the office of theory is to pro-
vide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself
-that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be expressed.

Aside from a couple of orienting pieces concerned with more foun-
dational matters, it is in such a manner that theory operates in the

& Admittedly, this is something of an idealization. Because theories are seldom
if ever decisively disproved in clinical use but mer.ely grow increasingly awkward,
unproductive, strained, or vacuous, they often persist long after all but a handful
of people (though they are often most passionate) have lost much interest in
them. Indeed, so far as anthropology is concerned, it is almost more of a problem
to get exhausted ideas out of the literature than it is to get productive ones in,
and so a great deal more of theoretical discussion than one would prefer is criti-
cal rather than constructive, and whole careers have been devoted to hastening
the demise of moribund notions. As the field advances one would hope that this
sort of intellectual weed control would become a less prominent part of our ac-
tivities. But, for the moment, it remains true that old theories tend less to die
than to go into second editions.

28 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

essays collected here. A repertoire of very general, made-in-the-acad-
emy concepts and systems of concepts-“integration,” “rationali-
zation,” “symbol,” “ideology,” “ethos,” “revolution,” “identity,” “meta-
phor,” “structure,” “ritual,” “world view,” “actor,” •’function,”
“sacred,” and, of course, “culture” itself-is woven into the body of
thick-description· ethnography in the hope of rendering mere occur-
rences scientifically eloquent. 6 The aim is to draw large conclusions
from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions
about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engag-

ing them exactly with complex specifics.
Thus it is not only interpretation that goes all the way down to the

most immediate observational level: the theory upon which such inter-
pretation conceptually depends does so also. My interest in Cohen’s
story, like Ryle’s in winks, grew out of some very general notions in-
deed. The “confusion of tongues” model-the view that social conflict
is not something that happens when, out of weakness, indefiniteness, ob-
solescence, or neglect, cultural forms cease to operate, but rather some-
thing which happens when, like burlesqued winks, such forms are
pressed by unusual situations or unusual intentions to operate in un-
usual ways-is not an idea I got from Cohen’s story. It is one, in-

structed by colleagues, students, and predecessors, I brought to it.
Our innocent-looking “note in a bottle” is more than a portrayal of

the frames of meaning of Jewish peddlers, Berber warriors, and French
proconsuls, or even of their mutual interference. It is an argument that
to rework the pattern of social relationships is to rearrange the coordi-
nates of the experienced world. Society’s forms are culture’s substance.

VIII

There is an Indian story-at least I heard it as an Indian story-about
an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a plat-
form which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on

s The overwhelming bulk of the following chapters concern Indonesia rather
than Morocco, for 1 have just begun to face up to the demands of my North Af•
rican material which, for the most part, was gathered more recently. Field work
in Indonesia was carried out in 1952-1954, 1957-1958, and 1971; in Morocco in
196~ 1965-196~ 1968-1969,and 1972.

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 29

the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the
way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that
turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.”

Such, indeed, is the condition of. things. I do not know how long it
would be profitable to meditate on the encot,mter of Cohen, the sheikh,
and “Dumari” (the period has perhaps already been exceeded); but I
do know that however long I did so I would not get anywhere near to
the bottom of it. Nor have I ever gotten anywhere near to the bottom of
anything I have ever written about, either in the essays below or else-
where. Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than
that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange sci-
ence whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in
which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the sus-
picion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting
it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse. ques-
tions, is what being an ethnographer is like.

There are a number of ways to escape this-turning culture into
folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it
into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying
with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semi-
otic concept of culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it
is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as, to borrow
W. B. Gallie’s by now famous phrase, “essentially contestable.” Anthro-
pology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose prog-
ress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement
of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each
other.

This is very difficult to see when one’s attention is being monopolized
by a single party to the argument. Monologues are of little value here,
because there are no conclusions to be reported; there is merely a dis-
cussion to be sustained. Insofar as the essays here collected have any
importance, it is less in what they say than what they are witness to: an
enormous increase in interest, not only in anthropology, but in social
studies generally, in the role of symbolic forms in human life. Meaning,
that elusive and ill-defined pseudoentity we were once more than con-
tent to leave philosophers and literary critics to fumble with, has now

• come back into the heart of our discipline. Even Marxists are quoting
Cassirer; even positivists, Kenneth Burke.

My own position in the midst of all this has been to try to resist sub-

THE I.r>;TERPRETATION OF CULTURES

jectivism on the one hand and cabbalism on the other, to try to keep the
analysis of symbolic forms as closely tied as I could to concrete social
events and occasions, the public world of common life, and to organize
it in such a way that the connections between theoretical formulations
and descriptive interpretations were unobscured by appeals to dark sci-
ences. I have never been impressed by the argument that, as complete
objectivity is impossible in these matters (as, of course, it is), one might
as well let one’s sentiments run loose. As Robert Solow has remarked,
that is like saying that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible,
one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer. Nor, on the other hand,
have I been impressed with claims that structural linguistics, computer
engineering, or some other advanced form of thought is going to enable
us to understand men without knowing them. Nothing will discredit a
semiotic approach to culture more quickly than allowing it to drift into
a combination of intuitionism and alchemy, no matter how elegantly the
intuitions are expressed or how modern the alchemy is made to look.

The danger that cultural analysis, in search of all-too-deep-lying tur-
tles, will lose touch with the hard surfaces of life-with the political,
economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere
contained-and with the biological and physical necessities on which
those surfaces rest, is an ever-present one. The only defense against it,
and against, thus, turning cultural analysis into a kind of sociological
aestheticism, is to train such analysis on such realities and such necessi-
ties in the first place. It is thus that l have written about nationalism,
about violence, about identity, about human nature, about legitimacy,
about revolution, about ethnicity, about urbanization, about status,
about death, about time, and most of all about particular attempts by
particular peoples to place these things in some sort of comprehensible,
meaningful frame.

To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action-art, religion,
ideology, science, law, morality, common sense-is not to turn away
from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of de-
emotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential
vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest ques-
tions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other
sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the con-
suitable record of what man has said.

PART II

2

Culture Blends

Michael Agar

Introductory note from the Editors

Communication is inseparable from culture. As Michael Agar shows, even the grammar of a

language makes no sense without culture. Agar experienced this firsthand when he tried to greet

someone in Austrian German: should he use an informal or formal second-person pronoun?

Have you faced a similar challenge when learning a foreign language? If choosing the proper

pronoun requires cultural knowledge, what do you need to know in order to negotiate more

complex social behaviors? For instance, how do you figure out who is expected to pay for drinks

on a date? What happened to Agar when he faced this conundrum (not in Austria, but at the

University of Maryland)? How did cultural norms and expectations, gender relations, status

hierarchies, and perhaps even regional differences come into play?

A few years ago I was talking to a Black colleague at the University of Maryland, a

faculty member from another department. I was trying to jump-start a program, but

to do so I had to tangle with the university bureaucracy; and universities are just as bad

as governments and corporations. I complained because the various offices that were

supposed to help start programs actually made it more difficult to do so.

My colleague looked at me, shook his head, and started talking: “The system is not

your friend.” He talked some more, with the “not your friend” chant repeated every so

often. The irony is that his life was the mythic American success story. He’d worked his

way up from poverty to a Ph.D., but, as far as he was concerned, he’d done it in spite of

the walls American institutions had built rather than with their help.

From Michael Agar, Language Shock, 13-30. © 1994 by Michael H. Agar. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins

Publishers.

A C11lt11ral Approach to Interpersonal Comnrnnication: Essential Readings, Second Edition.

Edited by Leila Monaghan, Jane E. Goodman, andjennifer Meta Robinson.

Editorial material and organization© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Culture Blends 13

His journey out of an Afro-American urban neighborhood had convinced him that

institutions – the “system” – took care of themselves and nobody else. My journey out

of a White small town had led me to expect institutions to do their job and help you

out; if they didn’t, you had a right to complain.

These different ways of looking at things had come to life in our common language,

and they tied in with who we were, with our different social identities. The differences

happened inside the same language, just as differences do between languages as distinct

as Japanese and English.

One Friday afternoon, not long afterward, I went to a faculty reception. I met a

colleague whom I’d corresponded and talked on the phone with but never met in

person. She’d helped me out, a lot, by sending me some bibliographies and course

outlines from her field. She’d handed me a shortcut into the way things of mutual

interest looked from a different discipline’s point of view.

When I finally met her, I thanked her and said something like “The least I can do is

buy you a drink.”

She snapped to attention and said, rather sharply, “I can pay for my own drink.”

I explained that I’d have made the same offer to any colleague who’d helped me out,

male or female or any other variation on the theme. I guess you could say that she just

didn’t understand. But, in this case, we both did. She’d read my invitation as a come­

on, converting her from colleague to pickup; I’d meant it as thanks.

Something happened, in our common language, something that had to do with

who we were. Something came up, jolted us with a difference, made us aware that the

“natural” way of doing things wasn’t “natural” at all. And, once again, it happened

inside the same language, not between two different ones.

Differences like these – the sort of misunderstandings that we usually associate with

a foreign language – happen inside a language all the time. It happens when a traveler

stops in a small southern town during his drive from New York City to Atlanta and

realizes that his impatience with slow service in a store is deeply rooted in how

New Yorkers expect a customer to be treated.

It happens when a doctor sees that what a patient is trying to tell her won’t fit the

tried and true diagnostic categories, so if she wants to figure out the patient’s illness,

she’s going to have to learn more about the patient’s world.

It happens when a graduate of a Black university lands his first job in an all-White

office, finds that some of his humor doesn’t work, and sets out to learn what it is that

people in the office think is funny.

Differences happen within languages as well as across them. The way of seeing

I’m trying to bring to life in this book works inside your own language as well as

when you learn a second language. In the course of the book, stories about American

English will come up frequently. By the end of the book, the moral of these stories

will have been brought into focus more sharply – learning a second language and

learning more about your own language are, in principle, the same thing.

Usually when the subject of language differences comes up in the United States,

images of ethnic groups come to mind. And usually the subject carries a message that

the differences are a problem.

14 MichaelAgar

A while ago The Washington Post reported a riot in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood

downtown. A police officer had shot a Hispanic man. Some said the latter had pulled

a knife. Others said he was already in handcuffs.

At several points in the story the Post mentioned that communication had been a

problem, that the officers didn’t speak Spanish and many of the neighborhood residents

didn’t speak English. Suspicions of bad intentions, with no chance of communicating

to the contrary, fueled both sides until the situation exploded like lighter fluid poured

over smoldering wood.

The Post pointed out that Spanish-speaking officers are conspicuous by their absence

on the D.C. police force. The Post mentioned the obvious solution-hire more Hispanic

officers and teach the others Spanish. Another solution, not mentioned in the paper –

provide free English instruction for all new immigrants.

The Post, and most everybody else, assumes that language instruction would solve

the problem. The Post, and most everybody else, is wrong. The majority think that

language is mostly grammar. Teach people the grammar, give them a dictionary, and

they’ll communicate. But anyone who’s studied a second language in the classroom

and then tried to use it in the real world knows better than that. A friend’s main

memory of his Spanish course was the sentence El oso ni baila ni canta – “The bear

neither dances nor sings.” The main use for this timeless passage was to show his

Hispanic colleagues how little he’d learned.

Popular ideas about “language” squeeze the concept much too tightly. The tendency

is to draw a circle around language, to herd neat sentences into the corral and wrangle

out the parts of speech. But most problems with language, the problems that come up

when you try to use it to communicate, aren’t about sentences and parts of speech. They

have to do with wild herds of sentences, out on the open range.

D on’t get me wrong. Had there been a shared grammar and dictionary in the midst

of that passionate confrontation between Hispanics and police in Mount Pleasant, it

couldn’t have hurt. But, as the meetings and arguments and newspaper articles since

the riot make clear, the confrontation in Mount Pleasant was an encounter between

different worlds of meaning, meaning that travels well beyond the dictionary, meaning

that tells you who you are, whom you’re dealing with, the kind of situation you’re in,

how life works and what’s important in it-meaning that ties language inside the circle,

grammar and the dictionary, to the world outside.

If you want to use language, if you want to communicate, language inside the circle

isn’t enough. The circle is a lie. It’s like saying that if you can put rings on a piston, you

can drive in traffic.

To understand language, you have to understand that differences in language go well

beyond what you find in the grammar and the dictionary. Otherwise, why would my Black and

female colleagues and I have had trouble, even though we all spoke the “same” language?

[ … ]

Recently an Austrian friend of mine came to Washington to teach and study at

Georgetown University. She could tack through English grammar with the best of

them and had a better vocabulary than most of the native-born undergraduates in my

lecture class.

Culture Blends 15

After a couple of months I met her for dinner and asked her how everything was

going. “Fine,” she said, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, “But what is a ‘date’?”

She knew how to use the word in a sentence – ‘Tm going on a date”; “How about a

date?” She wasn’t confused because the word also means a number on a calendar or a

sweet piece of fruit. But none of that explained what a “date” was.

I started to answer, and the more I talked the more lost I became in how Americans

see men and women, how they see relationships, intimacy – a host of connected

assumptions that I’d never put into words before. And I was only trying to handle

straight dates. It was quite different from her Austrian understanding of men and

women and what they are to each other. For a while she looked at me as if I’d just

stepped out of a flying saucer, until she finally decided I was serious.

I gave up trying to explain date. I told her I’d just try to do one. But what with

wisecracks and shifts between Austrian German and American English, the scene

turned into a Marx Brothers movie. She never did learn what a date was all about, at

least not from me. But we found out that whatever date meant, it went far beyond

what the grammar and the dictionary could handle.

It hadn’t been easy moving in the other direction, either. I’ve lived in Austria several

times, and even after all these years I’m still puzzled by Du and Sie.

Du is “you,” the informal second person singular pronoun, and Sie is “you,” only it’s

the formal version. English hasn’t made the distinction since we lost thou, but many of

the world’s languages do – tu and vous in French, tu and usted in Spanish, to mention a

couple of other European examples.

The grammar books are clear as freshly washed crystal. Du, the informal version, is

for relatives, friends, and kids. Sie is for everybody else. However, the rule doesn’t carry

you very far.

I was at a professional meeting in Vienna. A female colleague, about my age, talked

with me in the hall between sessions. We called each other Sie. At midday I was walking

down the street, alone, and she passed me, alone. As she passed, she chatted for a

second and used Du. That’s nice, I thought, she’s promoted me to a friend.

Later in the afternoon, back in the hall, she called me Sie. I turned to a male

friend, with whom I was already per Du, as they say in Austria, and asked him just

what was going on. He stared back, amazed at how stupid the human species could

be when it tried.

“She’s flirting with you. Obviously.”

More embarrassing still – at a party a few months later, an Austrian man, about my

age, one of the few other people informally dressed, walked up and started a conversa­

tion. I used Sie, and so did he. After a while, his girlfriend walked up, said hello, turned

to me, and said, “W hat do you do in Vienna?” using the Du form.

I smiled and asked her what it was that made her choose Du instead of Sie. I meant

it as a pure research question.

She stiffened, looked annoyed, and said, “Entschuldigen Sie” – “You excuse,” using the

formal pronoun. You’d have to translate that as “Excuse me” to get the right effect in English.

After some social acrobatics on the part of every body, we straightened out the mis­
understanding. Since her boyfriend and I were talking in a friendly way, she assumed

16 Michael Agar

we were already friends, and a friend of her boyfriend got an automatic Du. The rule

was hers, not a general one you could rely on.

I turned to the amused boyfriend and asked how he figured out what to call people.

He shrugged his shoulders and said the Austrian equivalent of “Hell if I know, I just

listen to the other person and fake it from there.”

I still can’t spell out the rules. And I’ve barely touched all the generational, political, and

lifestyle issues that move Du and Sie around. Pronouns, something you’d think would be

classic grammar-book material, turned out to be one of the worst problems I had.

There’s no escape, either. Every time you talk you have to use pronouns, though I

learned that some tortured German is produced just to avoid the issue. Little wonder

that people try to avoid it. Every time you use the pronouns you have to look at who

you are, whom you’re talking with, and the circumstances, and then make a choice, a

rapid choice that won’t disrupt the flow of talk. And you have to do it using rules that

not everyone will agree are correct.

A couple of years ago, my friend and colleague Ruth Wodak and I taught a seminar

in Vienna. We decided to take on Du and Sie. The first day we asked the students to tell

one or two stories that showed how the rules weren’t clear. These, remember, were

Austrian German speakers talking about their native language in their native language.

Each of the students had several stories. They told them with passion. It turned into

a linguistic therapy group. I imagined – it never happened, but it wasn’t difficult to

picture – that at any moment they were going to fall from their chairs, crying and

pounding the floor with their fists, and scream, “God, please free us from this pro­

nominal system that causes so many traumas and crises in our lives!”

On the one hand, you might be speaking the same language – like my American

colleagues and me. On the other hand, you might be learning a different language – like

Spanish or German. Grammar and the dictionary, language inside the circle, are

important, no doubt about it. But grammar isn’t enough to communicate, and com­

munication can occur without all the grammar.

Language has to include more than just language inside the circle. To use a language,

to live in it, all those meanings that go beyond grammar and the dictionary have to fit

in somewhere. The circle that people – and some linguists – draw around language has

to be erased.

Culture is the eraser.

Usually people think of “culture” as something that a particular group of people

have. Cultures roll around the planet like so many billiard balls, self-contained objects

that might collide or bounce off the cushion but still retain their perfect round shape.

People use “culture” this way all the time. I just gave an example of Austrian culture

using Du and Sie. Before that, the example had to do with American culture surround­

ing the word date. The newspaper story dealt with Hispanic culture, and the two

anecdotes the book opened with were about Black culture and women’s culture. The

labels are way too general, because a lot of variations on the theme live under those

names, but that’s a problem that will fill a later chapter.

Culture is something those people “have,” but it’s more than that. It’s also something

that happens to you when you encounter them. As long as they’re just out there, just a

Culture Blends 17

different group of folks, you won’t have to deal with them. When you deal with them,

culture turns personal. Culture is no longer just what some group has; it’s what happens

to you when you encounter differences, become aware of something in yourself, and

work to f igure out why the differences appeared. Culture is an awareness, a conscious­

ness, one that reveals the hidden self and opens paths to other ways of being.

Culture happens when you learn to use a second language. It happened to my

Austrian friend when she tried to figure out what a date was, and it happened to me

when I stumbled over Du and Sie in Austrian German. But it also happens inside your

own language, as it did with my colleagues and me.

Culture starts when you realize that you’ve got a problem with language, and the problem

has to do with who you are. Culture happens in language, but the consciousness it inspires

goes well beyond it.

Meanings usually float at the edge of awareness. Even when meanings make a selec­

tive appearance in the mind’s eye, they’re somehow “natural” or “right.” They’re not

only the water in which you swim; they’re the water in which you first learned to swim

at all.

Culture changes all that. The “natural” or “right” meanings, the ones that tell you

who you are and how the world works, turn arbitrary, one of a number of possibilities.

Your “natural” language shines under the light of a new awareness; it blossoms into a

fascinating complexity; you see possibilities you never imagined existed. Culture

changes you into a person who can navigate the modern multicultural world.

Culture is an elusive beast. Different cultures color the landscape of modern life.

But as long as they stay out there, objects of contemplation, problems won’t get solved

and minds will chug along as they did when we all lived in isolated villages.

In this book, culture is about to change from a distant object into a personal experience.

Culture may be something they have, all well and good, but personal contact makes

culture your own. Until it’s your own, culture won’t make a damn bit of difference.

Americans carry an unfortunate stereotype. They’re known world-wide for holding

culture at bay. Several years ago, I went to live on a Greek island for the summer.

A friend of mine, a Swiss architect who owned a home there, invited me up for dinner.

After dinner I chatted with him and his wife, in English. He hated to speak High

German, he explained, because of its associations with Nazi Germany. He was old

enough to remember the war.

Culture has to do with who you are.

We got around to the image of Americans as the world’s worst second-language

learners. There’s an old linguistics joke: What do you call a person who speaks three

languages? A trilingual. Two languages? A bilingual. One language? You guessed it, an

American.

My friend wasn’t an America-hater. Far from it. But he was genuinely puzzled. It’s

not, he said, that Americans aren’t capable of learning grammar as well as anyone else.

Maybe even better. The problem, he thought, is that they have trouble understanding
a different mentality.

I thought about how America had never understood Vietnam, how it was shocked

when the Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran. I thought about Mexican friends and

18 Michael Agar

acquaintances who told stories of how Americans hadn’t shown them any “respect.”

I recalled a party in Austria, where two Americans who knew German grammar much

better than I did spoke in American ways that the Austrians found abrasive.

Americans have trouble understanding another mentality, suggested my Swiss

friend. They have trouble entering into another world that goes with another language,

another point of view, another way of doing things. Americans have trouble with

culture. That’s a stereotype I’ve heard all over the world.

I don’t know how true the stereotype is, and God knows I’ve met plenty of people

from other lands who showed little awareness that anything other than their way of

seeing things ever existed, or even deserved to. But the fact remains: You can’t use a new

language unless you change the consciousness that is tied to the old one, unless you

stretch beyond the circle of grammar and dictionary, out of the old world and into a new

one. And Americans are famous for thinking they’ve got the best consciousness around.

Americans are the best, number one, free and rich and capable of doing anything.

Where did such a stereotype come from? It’s easy to think of reasons. A nation of

immigrants who broke with tradition and improved their economic situation. A melt­

ing-pot ideology that cried out, “Hurry and become one of us.” The insecurity of a

colony vis-a-vis the former masters. An exploitable frontier that called out that the sky

was the limit. The anti-immigrant mentality that grew up at the turn of the century.

A global savior role in two world wars, followed by a righteous stance against the

Stalinist state.

Do all Americans run around with the number-one mentality, looking at other

languages only through their own? No, of course not. Don’t people from other places

besides America live locked into a one-dimensional consciousness? Of course they do.

But, for a while anyway, I’m going to let the stereotype stand. Americans without

the experience of culture are number-one Americans. I’ve met plenty of them. Some

of them run the most important institutions in the country. They hold America back

from sailing in the new winds of history. The mentality that the number-one types

represent – in America or anywhere else – must change.

There are two ways of looking at differences between you and somebody else. One

way is to figure out that the differences are the tip of the iceberg, the signal that two

different systems are at work. Another way is to notice all the things that the other

person lacks when compared to you, the so-called deficit theory approach.

Number-one types – American or any other – use the deficit theory. They’re the

best, anything else is less than the best, and anyone who would call into question who

they are when they’re already the best is a fool or a masochist or even, as they used to

say in America before perestroika, a Communist. Ronald Reagan was elected, in part,

on a wave of number-one sentiment.

The deficit theory does have its advantages. But it’s a prison. It locks you into a

closed room in an old building with no windows. It inoculates you against culture. You

might tinker with the grammar and dictionary of a language, but you never commu­

nicate – except in terms of the world that shaped your attitudes, the language designed

to fit your assumptions about what the world is and how it works, the native language

you learned when you first stumbled around the house in diapers.

Culture Blends 19

The situation has to change. It’s a cliche of the nineties to observe that we live in a mul­

ticultural world, whether we want to or not. Revolutions in information and transportation

have pulled us all together. Wars and the economy move us physically all over the globe.

It’s hard to think of many jobs in which contact with “different people” isn’t normal.

Entertainment – film, food, and fiction – often involves the products of “foreigners.”

Communication in today’s world requires culture. Problems in communication are

rooted in who you are, in encounters with a different mentality, different meanings, a

different tie between language and consciousness. Solving the problems inspired by

such encounters inspires culture.

For number-one types, it means changing from “best” to “different.” If they take

culture seriously, they embark on a lifelong process of transformation that only ends

when they do. It opens up new possibilities and stokes the fires of creativity. It subverts

the amiable na”ivete that Americans are famous for the world over.

Those wedded to the number-one identity, the identity that holds them captive in

the monolingual prison, see culture as a threat. They are right. Personally, I think the

real threat is the way the number-one identity holds culture at bay. Without it, such a

person stands banished from the growing global conversation.

When people learn culture, when they burst out of their former unconscious ways

and gaze at the new landscape of possibilities, they change in positive ways. I’ve seen

it happen more times than I can remember.

Just after I’d returned from a year in Austria, I talked with a businessman in that

great purgatory that brings us together, an airport waiting lounge. He was an “America

is number one” man who complained about how “foreigners” did business.

I told him a story. I told him how Austrian businessmen I’d met who worked with

Americans knew our language, watched our TV shows and movies, read our novels,

looked at the Herald Tribune and our weekly newsmagazines. They had come up with

theories of what we were like. They knew about us, about our ties between language

and consciousness, but we knew nothing about them.

In a business negotiation where X knows a great deal about Y, and Y knows almost

nothing about X, who has the advantage? I asked. The businessman bought me a beer.

In an interview with Felipe Gonzalez, the socialist prime minister of Spain, a reporter

asked what it was like dealing with the Americans. At first, he said, he’d had the usual

stereotype – who do these world colonizers think they are, anyway? But after a few

meetings, he changed his mind. It’s kind of touching, he said. In walk the representatives

of this world power, and the main thing they care about is whether you like them or not.

In the corridor of a train, a German woman and I struck up a conversation while we

stared out the window at the passing farmland. She’d just returned from a month- long

trip around the United States. I asked her how she liked Americans. She launched into

an enthusiastic story about how she’d learned from them, how they looked at

themselves and the situations they faced as something you could change, something

you could transform in a favorable direction.

In her world, she’d learned that you are what you are, you do what you have to, and

that’s it. No more. Now her world was full of new possibilities that, she said, sometimes

shocked her family and friends.

20 Michael Agar

The stories of the businessman in the airport, the prime minister of Spain, and the

German woman on the train show what happens when you “catch” culture. They all

noticed a difference in language tied to who they were, realized other ties were

possible, set out to figure them out, and then changed themselves as a result.

Culture lights the darkened countryside into a landscape of new choices. It changes

the way you look at things.

Culture has its downside as well. It can wash you away into a sea of anomie. Some lose

the certainty of the world that tied them to their original language and never recover.

In Vienna, an older Kurdish student attending one of my classes had trouble with

the final paper. Toward the end of the semester, he came in to talk with me. His

German was confused and confusing. I’d attributed it to what was probably his recent

immigration to Austria. I was wrong.

He spoke of a childhood with one Kurdish parent and one Iraqi, of migration to

Vienna years ago when he was still a child, of his study of English, since he really

wanted to go to the United States or Canada and thought and read about little else.

He’d taken my course, he explained, because he thought I’d be teaching about

American language in English.

He didn’t know who he was anymore, he said. He couldn’t speak any of his four

languages well enough to give voice to what was inside of him, and what was inside of

him was a contradictory mess any way. He had culture, but for him it was a cancer that

consumed his coherence.

His story was a sad one, and it’s not the only time I’ve heard it. Stories like his are

sometimes used by proponents of the number-one theory to explain the dangers of

going outside the circle, of venturing into culture. From their point of view, it’s dan­

gerous, no matter what, because it always knocks you out of the “our way is the only

way” mentality, which the number-one types fight to preserve.

Cases like the Kurd’s show that culture is powerful, and power unrecognized and

uncontrolled can destroy rather than create. The answer isn’t to fight it, to banish it, to

legislate it away. The answer is to understand it, to keep an eye on it, to learn how to

use it to shift into gear for lifelong travel into the contemporary multicultural world.

Culture has come out of the American closet. America was built – so goes the old story,

which conveniently ignores Indians, slaves, and the Chinese – on waves of European

immigration, waves made up of people committed to melting into the pot. Nowadays,

the waves of immigration are neither Anglo nor European, and a lot of them don’t

want to melt. They want to be Americans, but they don’t want to be Anglo-Europeans.

“Multiculturalism” is the new cliche of our times, a call to recognize a new American

phenomenon on the part of our institutions – education, health care, the workplace,

law enforcement, and the rest. But no one quite knows what to make of it or what to

do about it. The results are tragic. Rich differences are converted into threatening

deficits. The old myth is dead, but the new reality still baffles, confuses, and sometimes

explodes into violence.

America has an opportunity, a chance to change a breaking point into a turning

point, a chance to make a global contribution, a chance to make multiculturalism work.

Culture Blends 21

One traditional strength of America is the ability to innovate, to look at a problem and
figure out a solution without holding hands with centuries of tradition. Remember
the story of the German woman on the train, the one who learned during her
American travels that she could change? Even Abbie Hoffman, former sixties radical
and cultural critic until his death, said he couldn’t imagine working anywhere else
because of America’s “can do” attitude.

Culture and language aren’t just issues here, either. Recent events in the former
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the old Soviet Union, in Iraq and Ethiopia, in
Kenya and South Africa, in Mexico and Nicaragua, in India and Indonesia, to name just
a few examples, testify to the global concern with multiculturalism, the feeling that it’s
a situation to be feared rather than a historic possibility to be celebrated.

Besides, the world economy, the speed of information and transportation,
tourism and war, the internationalization of business and politics and academics,
not to mention music, have taught growing numbers of people that multicultural­
ism isn’t just a feature of home; it’s a feature of anyone’s life, any where, when that
life expands beyond national boundaries. And the number of lives so expanded
increases each year.

There are alternatives to circling the wagons, alternatives to forebodings of fear or
aggressive threats to bring those “different” people into line. But to figure out
alternatives, we’ve got to figure out what those differences are all about and how to
handle them. Conversations and newspapers often hang the problems on “culture”
and “language,” but the concepts are more complicated, more interesting, than what
those conversations and newspapers would lead you to believe.

“Language,” goes the first mistake, lies inside the circle. People don’t speak the
same language; if they’d only learn the other one everything would be fine. But the
stories I’ve told show that grammar and the dictionary – what we usually think of as
“learning a language” – aren’t enough. People who speak the same language don’t
always communicate, and people who learn a second language and stay inside the circle
don’t either. The concept of “language” has to change.

“Culture,” goes the second mistake, is something “those people” have. Cultures,
those different-colored billiard balls, roll around, collide with each other, and wreak
havoc with what used to be a straightforward game. But the stories I’ve told show that
culture is more than just something a group has. It’s something that happens to people
when they realize that their way of doing things isn’t natural law, that other ways are
possible. Something they’ve just heard, something that jolted their sense of who they
are, invites them into a different way of seeing. The concept of “culture,” like the
concept of “language,” has to change.

The two concepts have to change together. Language, in all its varieties, in all the
ways it appears in everyday life, builds a world of meanings. When you run into
different meanings, when you become aware of your own and work to build a bridge
to the others, “culture” is what you’re up to. Language fills the spaces between us with
sound; culture forges the human connection through them. Culture is in language,
and language is loaded with culture.

If you do start to see things this way, you change. The old “self,” the one in your
heart and mind and soul, mutates as it comes into relationships with others.

22 Michael Agar

The self stretches to comprehend them all. A life of Being turns into a life of

Becoming. You turn into a sailor and an immigrant for as long as you live – a theme

I’ll return to later.

This way of seeing, a way that grew out of several fields, mostly linguistics and

anthropolog y, is one I’ve been talking about for years, to undergrads and grads, to

community groups, to organizations, and I thought the time was right to write it

down. I thought the time was right because the world in general, and America in

particular, is waking from its long, number-one slumber. It has to. The way the

world works now, the only alternative is isolation, and the way the world works now,

isolation is no longer an option.

[ … J

But lessons learned in encounters with radically different worlds apply at home as

well. At home those other kinds of people, those other ways of using the “same” lan­

guage, aren’t as distant. You and they, whoever the “they” of the moment happens to

be, already share some common grammar and some common experience. Differences

close to home are less different, more immediately accessible, but fascinating and

complex all the same.

What I want to do is show you how interesting and important language and cul­

tural differences really are, how encounters with them disrupt buried routines and

open up possibilities previously unimagined. Differences aren’t a threat; they’re an

opportunity.

When you finish the book, what you will have, if I’ve done my job, is a way of

seeing, one you’ll never lose, one that will change the way you move through daily

life. I want to tr y to reveal language and culture in a new way, because I want to

help make a multicultural world work. This book is aimed at people, not institu­

tions or countries, because the secret – the one that Tom Paine knew – is that if

enough people change the way they see things, institutions and countries have to

follow suit.

It’s a vision through rose-colored glasses, I know, to think a piece of writing could

have such an effect. With all the conflict around us based on language and cultural

differences, why even try? When an independent trucker I once interviewed talked

about his second marriage, he called it “the triumph of hope over experience.” I’d like

to twist that a little and try to show that experience, some of it anyway, might turn out

to be a source of hope.

Hope, of course, isn’t enough. While I was writing this book, I presented some of

the ideas in it to a conference on intercultural communication in Germany. Afterward,

a colleague from Bulgaria came up to talk. Interesting, he said, and optimistic, thereby

attributing to me one common stereotype of Americans. But what do you do, he

asked, with hatred of the Moslem minority in Christian Bulgaria, a hatred grounded in

the occupation of Bulgaria by the Ottomans centuries ago?

Language and culture savvy won’t wave a magic wand over deep-seated historical

hatreds and make them disappear. It won’t dissolve the gross social inequities that

often drive conflicts attributed to language and culture. What it will do is open lines of

communication based on what people are rather than on what they are not. When the

time comes for talking instead of shooting, such lines of communication can only

Culture Blends 23

help. With any luck, a little talking before the shooting might melt the bullets. That’s

where the hope part comes in.

Culture erases the circle around language that people usually draw. You can master

grammar and the dictionary, but without culture you won’t communicate. With

culture, you can communicate with rocky grammar and a limited vocabulary. This

statement seems paradoxical because of the circle around language, the circle that

exists in most people’s imagination. Without the circle, the paradox disappears.

The circle has to go.