RITUAL RATHER THAN MYTH

Earlier as well as later Geertz’s concern with making sense of life might suggest that he is concerned with belief more than with practice and there- fore with myth more than with ritual. But actually Geertz is interested less in the fact of making sense than in the expression of it. Once again, then, he is interested less in belief itself than in practice, less in world view than in ethos, and less in myth than in ritual. Where myth articulates the world view, ritual puts that world view into practice to constitute an ethos:

For it is in ritual . . . that this conviction that religious conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated. It is in some sort of cer- emonial form—even if that form be hardly more than the recitation of a myth, the consultation of an oracle, or the decoration of a grave—that the moods and moti- vations [i.e., ethos] which sacred symbols induce in men and the general of the order of existence [i.e., world view] which they formulate for men meet and rein- force one another. In a ritual, the world as lived [i.e., ethos] and the world as imag- ined [i.e., world view], fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world. (Geertz 1973:112)25

Even though Geertz praises ritual for bringing together world view with ethos, he deems ritual ethos: it is the concrete manifestation of the world view. Even though Geertz deems the ideal the fusion of world view with ethos, he values ethos more: the “world as imagined” may shape the “world as lived,” but the world as lived is, as the term implies, the real world. As Geertz puts it, “religiousness is not merely knowing the truth, or what is taken to be the truth, but embodying it, living it” (Geertz 1968:16–17). To be Balinese is not just to espouse a certain view of person, time, and social behavior but to live it out. Thus Geertz barely considers myths and instead concentrates on rituals—funerals, cockfights, and sheep raids among them.26

NOTES

1. On the varying ways in which meaning is distinguished from cause, see Segal 1992.

2. See also Geertz 1973:100–108; 1968:101.

3. On the discontinuity between a traditional ethos and a new world view as well as the reverse, see Geertz 1968.

4. See Geertz 1968:97, where he states that the world view renders the ethos “justifiable.”

6. For other contrasts between religion and other cultural systems, see Geertz 1973:111–12; 1968:91–95, 101, 111.

7. See also Geertz 1973:127. On the functionalism implicit in Geertz’s concept of religion as the fulfillment of a need for meaning, see Frankenberry and Penner 1999:626–29.

8. On the difference between Geertz’s use of the textual analogy and Ricoeur’s, see Segal 1992:129. On Geertz’s different uses of the analogy, see Bakker 1989:42 n. 5. Geertz analyzes anthropological writings themselves as literary texts in Geertz 1988.

9. See Ryle 1971:II:chs. 36–37.

10. On Geertz’s intellectual development, see Geertz 1991, 1995, 2000; Inglis 2000.

11. On Weber’s influence on Geertz, see Peacock 1981. For a contrast between Geertz and Weber as interpreters, see Segal 1999.

12. For criticism of Geertz’s downplaying of the mind as the key source of cul- ture, see Goodenough 1974. See also Renner 1984:539.

13. On the similarity between Geertz and Winch, see, briefly, Austin 1979:58 n. 5.

14. See also Geertz 1968:18–19, 95; 1973:45, 213, 360, 362. 15. See Ortner 1984:129; Munson 1986.

16. For criticism of Geertz as a sheer interpreter, see Shankman 1984a; 1984b; 1985; Gellner 1988:25–30; 1992:43–45, 68–69. In partial defense of Geertz, see Scholte 1984:540–42.

17. Yet elsewhere, Geertz (1995) seems to equate categorization as generaliza- tion with explanation.

18. On Geertz’s efforts to avoid idealism, see Alexander 1987:lecture 17. 19. See Geertz 1973:ch. 13. On the differences between Geertz and Lévi-Strauss on analyzing culture, see Keesing 1974:78–80, 83–85.

20. For criticism of Geertz for ignoring material causes, see Shankman 1985:244–46; Roseberry 1982; Franke 1984; Gellner 1988:25. In response to Rose- berry, see William H. Sewell Jr., “Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Syn- chrony to Transformation,” in Ortner 1999:36–37, 42–45. For criticism of Geertz for ignoring power, see Asad 1983; Gellner 1992:69.

21. See also Geertz 1995:22–23, 39–41; 2000:133–40. 22. See also Geertz 1973:21–26, ch. 2.

23. For criticism of Geertz as a sheer particularist, see Shankman 1984a:263–64, 265–67; 1985; Spiro 1986:261–63, 276.

24. See also Geertz 1973:26–30, 40, 44, 51–54, 363, 408; 1983:ch. 3. For criticism of Geertz as a relativist nevertheless, see Gellner 1992:43–45, 49–55, 68–69. On Gell- ner’s criticism, see Segal 1997:144–46.

25. See also Geertz 1968:100; 1973:131.

26. For criticism of Geertz for ignoring myth, see Munson 1986:20–21.

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