The implications of interpretation are exemplified in Geertz’s analysis of a funeral in Java, a case of social discourse in which shifting political divisions and their symbolic expressions affected core rituals and emotions surrounding death (1973).
Geertz first outlined a critique of functionalism, focusing on its inability to deal with social change, and then sketched the distinction between culture and social system, “the former as an ordered system of meaning and of symbols, in terms of which social interaction takes place; and to see the latter as the pattern of social interaction itself” (1973:144).
Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations. Culture and social structure are then but different abstractions from the same phenomena. But these two different abstractions are integrated, Geertz argued, in very different ways. Social structure is bound together based on “causal-functional integration,” the articulation of different segments that interact and maintain the system. Culture, in contrast, is characterized by logico-meaningful integration, “a unity of style, of logical implication, of meaning and value.” It is the sort of coherent unit “one finds in a Bach fugue, in Catholic dogma, or in the general theory of relativity” (Geertz 1973:145).
Such distinctions become important in the Javanese funeral when changing associations between symbols and political parties create dissonance in the integration of culture and disrupt the organization of society.
To oversimplify, peasant religion in Java had been a syncretic mix of Islam and Hinduism overlain on an indigenous Southeast Asian animism. “The result,” Geertz wrote, “was a balanced syncretism of myth and ritual in which Hindu gods and goddesses, Moslem prophets and saints, and local spirits and demons all
found a proper place” . This balance has been upset increasingly during the twentieth century as conservative Islamic religious nationalism crystallized in opposition to a secular, Marxist nationalism that appealed to pre-Islamic, Hinduistanimist “indigenous” religions. Those positions became sufficiently distinct that the difference between the self-conscious Muslim and self-conscious “nativist” (combining Hindu and native elements with Marxism) became polarized as types of people, santri and abangnan. In postindependence Indonesia, political parties formed along these dividing lines: Masjumi became the conservative Islamic party and Permai, the anti-Islamic mix of Marxism and nativism. These differences were epitomized at a specific Javanese funeral.
“The mood of a Javanese funeral is not one of hysterical bereavement, unrestrained sobbing, or even of formalized cries of grief for the deceased’s departure,” Geertz observed. “Rather it is a calm, undemonstrative, almost languid letting go, a brief ritualized relinquishment of a relationship no longer possible” (Geertz 1973:154). This willed serenity and detachment, iklas, depends on the smooth execution of a proper ceremony that seamlessly combines Islamic, Hindu, and indigenous beliefs and rituals. Javanese believe that it is the suddenness of emotional turmoil that causes damage—“It is ‘shock’ not the suffering itself which is feared” —and that the funeral procedure should smoothly and quickly mark the end of life.
But in this particular case, the deceased was a boy was from a household loosely affiliated with the Permai party, and when the Islamic village religious leader was called to direct the ceremony, he refused, citing the presence of a Permai political poster on the door and arguing that it was inappropriate for him to perform the ceremony of “another” religion. At that moment, iklas—the self-willed and culturally defined composure surrounding the death—unraveled.
Geertz describes the emotional chaos that ensued, tracing its roots to a central ambiguity: religious symbols had become political symbols and vice versa, which combined sacred and profane and created “an incongruity between the cultural framework of meaning and the patterning of social interaction” (1973:169). Not only is this an interesting point about the dynamic uses of religious and political symbols, but it is a fine example of thick description.
Nothing about this case—its selection, its historical background, the political dimension, the cultural expectations, the motives of distraught family and neighbors—none of it can be explained except by exposing “a multiplicity of conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one
another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which [the anthropologist] must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render” (Geertz 1973:10).