Preface

12
point of view’ more sensitively, profoundly and authentically than other
approaches. Immediately we encounter problems. Reviewing Geertz’s
cultural analysis, Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight (1973d),
Vincent Crapanzano noted the degree of condensation necessary to such a
cultural analysis. It requires blurring the relationship between Geertz’s and
Balinese villagers’ subjectivities (Crapanzano 1986: 70). It assumes that ‘a
whole people share a single subjectivity’ (1986: 74), irrespective of
differences of gender, class, age, experience of temperament; and, without
any evidence, attributing ‘to the Balinese all sorts of experiences,
meanings, intentions, motivations, dispositions, and understandings’ (1986:
72). Crapanzano concludes:
Despite his phenomenological-hermeneutic pretensions, there is in fact
in “Deep Play” no understanding of the native from the native’s point of
view. There is only the constructed understanding of the constructed
native’s constructed point of view… His constructions of constructions
of constructions appear to be little more than projections, or at least
blurrings, of his point of view, his subjectivity, with that of the native,
or, more accurately, of the constructed native (1986: 74).
As the rest of the present book argues, these charges against cultural
analysis, and culture itself, are well founded and may be extended further.
The criticisms are the more serious in that they are directed not at weak
points, which are inevitable in any approach, but at some of the most
celebrated, and supposedly definitive, examples of cultural analysis at its
best.
Even this short review indicates grave problems. For a start, cultural
analysis does not necessarily provide understanding of how people
themselves understand the world about them. Cultural interpretation, it
seems, runs the risk of systematically substituting the analyst’s
interpretations for the participants’, while claiming to found the analysis on
the latter’s authenticity. Further, cultural analysis may easily become not a
description or investigation of, or commentary on, other people’s thought
but, disturbingly, the projection of the scholar’s own categories, concerns
and current interests onto the subjects of study. How though, crucially, are
we to judge the degree of projection or displacement scholars engage in
when attributing culture to people? Of what kind are they? What sort of
consequences do they have for our understanding, or rather
misunderstanding? How are we to address such projections and
displacements? Can we counter them? If so, who is best able to do so, and
how?