Preface

185
pay scant regard to people as subjects or, better, agents. It is not
necessary to ask about Balinese criteria of analysis, because
Balinese are preconstituted as incapable of self-reflection (except
mechanical ‘meta-social commentary’, Geertz 1973d), criticism
and self-transformation. Balinese are objectified into the raw
materials to be thought. Gerundively they are not merely
describable, but comprehensible, and so to be comprehended.
Preinterpretation is enshrined in the disciplinary practices of
university courses in anthropology: to train incredulous young
minds into the realities of society, culture, kinship, ancestors,
ritual, rationality, taboo and what they will find when they finally
get to the field. (As with all good discipline, there are lots of
exclusions. The authors you are not supposed to read are
numerous and far more interesting on the whole.) Postinterpreting
takes up almost as much time, not just in textualizing and
contextualizing the insights, but in defending the interpretations
against criticism (e.g. Geertz 1983b; Boon 1990). Purporting to
advance understanding of human action, the human condition, the
nature of textuality, by claiming to engage other hearts and minds
as no other approach, interpretive anthropology may enshrine a
hidden political agenda (Pecora 1989). It certainly offers at once a
superior form of surveillance and a reassurance that other people
out there are understandable and understood, manageable,
controllable. It has also proven eminently marketable back home.
In their actions if not their words, interpretivists stress the
relationship of anthropologist and reader at the expense of that
between anthropologist and native. They play to the sensitivity of
the reader; and in so doing displace the native yet again. The
anthropologist’s role is double: both inquirer and author. As
author, she is the conduit for the ethnographer’s experience. But
she reworks that experience in writing; and so anticipates the
experience for her successors. Volosinov forewarned of the
consequences of confusing theme and meaning: the circularities of
endless signification and representationism, which have been the
hallmarks of the Literary Critical cul-de-sac. In rejecting, rightly,
naive realism, the hermeneuts have backed into a hall of mirrors.
‘In finished anthropological writings...what we call our data are
really our own constructions of other peoples’ constructions of
what they and their compatriots are up to’ (Geertz 1973c: 9). The
problem is that in the writings in question the constructions are of
meta-level far beyond Sperber’s nth degree. Ethnographers do not
intuit other peoples’ constructions. They elicit informants’