Preface

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shall examine how the New Order régime in Indonesia has appealed to
culture as an articulating idea.
Instead of accepting their idealizations of cultural methods of research,
how do anthropologists actually go about studying culture? What do they
take as the object of study? How do they relate to it? And how do they
infer culture from the object? Once again, I shall draw upon
anthropological work on Indonesia. It so happens that one of the most
celebrated anthropological exponents of culture, Clifford Geertz, has done
most of his analyses on Indonesian materials. So just how do you do a
cultural analysis?
Third, what is not culture? What is it that is opposed, or antagonistic, to
culture? On all but a lunatically encompassing account of culture, there
must be something else in the world, to which culture relates either as a
competing or antagonistic set of processes or as an alternative explanatory
frame of reference. Put another way, what is it that culture keeps at bay?
What threatens the world if culture falters? What is displaced, silenced,
denied in an appeal to culture?
Introducing culture
First, though, how have anthropologists imagined culture? What sort of
object of study is it? I shall address this question by reviewing the work of
the leading advocate of an interpretive theory of culture, Clifford Geertz – a
theory coincidentally developed largely on Indonesian materials. As
Geertz has famously remarked
what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s
constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to (1973c: 9)
Cultural analysis is then heterogeneous and hierarchical. Before we
have even begun the analysis and interpretation, our raw materials involve
scholars’ interpretations of the interpretations of their lives by the subjects
of study.
What exactly then is the relationship between the anthropologist’s and
the participants’ interpretations on this account? 10 The question is
important because cultural analysis claims to be able to access the ‘native’s
10
The study of culture in some form concerns language and literature specialists and
cultural studies’ scholars, for instance, as much as it does anthropologists. The theoretical
problems of culture are similar however.