Non-classical aesthetics in the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz

Deikun Il'ya Dmitrievich ORCID: 0009-0002-9809-1010 Lecturer; Department of Humanities and Natural Sciences; Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis Postgraduate student; Department of Theoretical and Historical Poetics; Russian State University for the Humanities Office 405, Miusskaya pl., 6, Moscow, 125047, Russia iliariy@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The interpretive approach in anthropology, developed by Clifford Geertz in the 1970s and 1980s, has been well received by Russian science. It wasn't just "recognition" or identification that took place. For example, A. Zorin recognizes in Geertz's approach proximity to the structural semiotics of Yu.M. Lotman ^{[1, p. 15]}, and V. Kostyrko argues that some definitions of the symbol in the "Interpretation of Culture" "coincide with Losev almost verbatim" ^{[2, p. 42]}. Comprehension, understanding, interpretation and, we think, conceptualization were also carried out as "highlighting certain structures and concepts", "assigning personal meaning to them" ^{[3, p. 27]}. For example, the application of the Girtsev approach to the study of Islam in Russia ^[4], the creation of a kind of "anthropology of theater" in the Girtsev manner within the framework of the St. Petersburg school of theater studies ^{[5, p. 175]}.

In 2025, the "Anthropological Forum", published at the European University, legitimizes the fundamental position of the collections "Writing Culture" and "Anthropology as Cultural Critique" devoted to the analysis of Geertz's interpretative campaign in a discussion about the current and possible future states of anthropology: "in many ways they have determined (both positively and negatively) the current state of anthropological knowledge" ^{[6, p.128]}.

It is by returning to these collections that we can fix the gaps and failed ways of reception of the Hirz method. So, if we open the collection "Writing Culture", we will see that James Clifford's introductory article unexpectedly devotes a lot of space to the "poetics" of the anthropological text, and much is said about the mixing of scientific and literary genres. Of course, there is talk about "literary anthropology" or even "anthropoetry" in the aforementioned discussion "Anthropological theories for the 21st century: a roadmap". And back in the early 2000s, S. V. Sokolovsky suggested turning to "autoethnography" ^[7], just as now, in 2025, in foreign cultural anthropology, it is quite legitimate to turn to the research potential of fiction, to perceive Ursula Le Guin's fiction as a text on the anthropology of the future ^{[8, p. 16]}. That is, the idea of anthropological writing as a "fiction" (artistic and scientific fiction) has become a commonplace in Russian and world anthropology. But despite this, the problem of aesthetics, aesthetic analysis itself, or rather, the verification by aesthetic analysis of the artistic reality postulated by anthropologists, as shown by a computer search through the corpus of scientific texts on this subject, does not occur at all. The same cannot be said about the conservative, traditional directions of studying "rituals and holidays" ^{[9, p. 140]}, "culture of the peoples of Russia": songs, epics, dances, traditional crafts. It is in these texts that the words "poetics" and "aesthetics" have the same frequency as in literary studies. There is a problematic asymmetry when conservative ethnography relies on conservative poetics, which, in turn, relies on the provisions of classical aesthetics, and cultural anthropology in all its diversity of directions, adopting the image of art practices, does not thematize the aesthetic status of the knowledge produced and the object constructed in the analysis. Of course, the reason is that for frontier practice-oriented research, aesthetic theory as a kind of always systematizing activity is less relevant than criticism as an interpretive activity close to practice and often "transformative" ^{[10, p. 97]}. But if you can't turn off the interest in poetics, tropology, phenomenological aesthetics, and the ontology of the aesthetic from the genealogy of anthropology, why not turn to nonclassical aesthetics, which has been developed by a whole group of major philosophers since the 90s (V.V. Bychkov, N.B. Mankovskaya, L.V. Karasev, O.A. Krivtsun). In this we see a failed identification of Geertz's aesthetics, which cannot provide for its richer conceptualization.

Our article aims to fill in this receptive gap, but not from the point of view of anthropological practice and not from within it, but from the outside, from the side of philosophical aesthetics. We will try to actualize this path of reception of interpretive anthropology and try to read the controversy of Geertz and Krapanzano through the prism of non-classics. We will take as our subject the Girtsean definition of "Cockfighting" as a work of art. Let us single out the formula of art proposed by him, try to determine what rhetorical function his aesthetic analysis performs, what epistemological optics he implies, and what ontology of the aesthetic he postulates.

The main part

Clifford Geertz's "Deep Game", published in Russian in 2017, can be considered as a reference "rich description". Of course, there may be complaints about this "reference" provision. Indeed, as Roseberry shows, aspects such as the "sexual" (the question of the status of women in the "status massacre" of cockfighting), the aspect of the colonial past (the games were banned by the Dutch authorities), were overlooked by Geertz. Also, when describing cockfighting as a "status massacre", paradoxically, nothing is said at all about the most meaningful content of the status, about Balinese castes, about power and subordination ^{[11, p. 1020-1022]}. It should be added here that Geertz is talking about some "cockfights" that were common in a specific period of the 1950s, when anthropologist Clifford Geertz and his wife lived on the island, and when they were banned not by the Dutch, but by the Indonesian authorities. Now, in 2025, as far as we know, cockfighting is allowed and has become one of the tourist attractions, which, of course, should have changed their cultural and anthropological meaning. However, it is obvious that the "rich" description is the defining principle in the "Deep Game".

Aesthetic analysis of cockfighting

However, we are not interested in cockfighting itself, but in the final moment of their analysis, when Geertz characterizes them as an "art form" ^{[12, p. 55]}. His characterization, which is very multi-layered and somewhat disordered, will be divided into three main levels.

Firstly, Geertz argues that cockfighting as a form of art is created by certain "means of expression", that is, what constitutes the expression of cockfighting can be considered, using the terminology of classical aesthetics, as artistic means of expression. But these means of expression are formed as such in a functional relationship with each other and with other non-artistic moments of Balinese life, because only their "feathers, blood, crowd and money" become aesthetically expressive ^{[12, pp. 54-56]}.

Such anti-essentialism is connected in Geertz's thought with the philosophical foundation on which he relies in his view of culture in general. This foundation is the philosophy of symbolic forms by E. Cassirer and S. Langer. The first declares that the problem of being must be solved by referring to the consciousness of this being by the subject: "every quality of consciousness has content only insofar as it is taken simultaneously in complete unity and in complete isolation from other contents" ^{[13, p. 33]}. Hence, symbolization as being consciousness manifests itself as a symbolic text, where individual symbols are functions in relation to each other, defined in relation to each other, and not in relation to some pre-existing substance. S. Langer develops Cassirer's philosophy to a scheme of the social genesis of the symbolic. For her, a symbol is an indirect sign that is interdependent with greater abilities for cooperation between individuals in human communities compared to animals: "the transition from the symbolic function of a word to its symbolic function takes place gradually, as a result of social organization" ^{[14, p. 33]}. Thus, Geertz's functionalist ontology of the artistic is grounded in the American reception of neo-Kantianism. But it is also important that socially contextualized symbolic practices in the Cassirerian tradition are "not reducible to each other", they are "different ways of creating meanings" ^{[15, p. 38]}.

Secondly, Geertz notes that fighting as a work of art causes a feeling of "anxiety." The word "anxiety" contains a substantive adjective that traditionally captures the content of aesthetic categories. In the original, "violence" is completely expressed by the adjective "disquietful" – restless. That is, the fights are not "charming", not "beautiful", not "cute", not "harmonious", not "elegant", but "restless". "Anxiety is approaching the 'sublime.' N. Hartmann's analysis of the sublime may be useful here: "The sublime opposes the whole range of aesthetic values within the beautiful," and further: "Everyday, ordinary, neutral" as special, "Light, small, insignificant, graceful" as great and significant ^{[16, p. 523]}. Hirtsevo's "restless" has an aspect that brings it closer to Unheimlich. In the analysis of the category of the grotesque, conducted by N.V. Prascheruk, it is particularly evident that the interest in "das Unheimliche" can be felt in some types of the grotesque, which "are not associated with the carnival-laughter principle", but "grow on the basis of a tragic worldview" ^{[17, p. 56]}. If you re-read the "Deep Game", you can see that it is, in fact, not about fun, not about a national holiday: "in the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, Me and It, the creative force of emerging masculinity and the destructive force of weakened animality are mixed in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty violence and death" ^{[12, p. 20]}.

Thirdly, Geertz focuses on what we would call "condensation": fighting is "simultaneously a convulsive impulse, a grotesque war, and a simulation of status tension" ^{[12, p. 57]}. But from this layering, neither metaphor nor classical synthesis as a combination of aspects of an object into a single whole (system) ^{[18, p. 546]} occurs, although Geertz equates cockfighting through an analogy with Hamlet with the classical integrity of a European work of art, implying its self-reference. But this is nothing more than just an analogy. In combat, there is a simultaneous confrontation between people betting on their status and fighting cocks, and this, says Geertz, "shifts perception from the former to the latter" ^{[12, p. 62]}. But since the metaphor breaks down into components, the figures do not come out, and instead a "metasocial comment" ^{[12, p. 62]} and "the use of emotions for cognitive purposes" ^{[12, p. 64]} are obvious to Geertz. It is on the basis of commentary and cognitive grounds that cockfighting is synthesized into a whole as a representation, not of the Balinese society itself, but of its collective experience, and not in the form of a picture, but in the dramatic form of the event being played. This dramatic form, like the whole everyday life of Balinese, is divided into a "series of flashes" ^{[12, p. 59]}, but in it, along with the "flashy" dynamics of the present, lies a "universal", "paradigmatic human event" ^{[12, p. 67]}. Geertz here refers to the Aristotelian doctrine of mimesis, but not from the point of view of imitation of the "formative principle of nature" ^{[19, p. 16]}, but through the interpretation of N. Fry, who speaks of the "typical" and "universal". The Aristotelian "universal" in Fry's interpretation acquires the character of his other concept, "myth" as a fundamental structure of social imagination ^{[20, p. 19]}, poetic unriversality, poetry as a combination of unlimited social action as a "total ritual" and unlimited individual thought as a "total dream" ^{[20, p. 74]}. That is, here, unexpectedly for Geertz, we come to the establishment of universality with a methodological prohibition on marginal categorization (that is why he confronts, but does not rely on the aesthetic systems of Goodman, Woolheim, Langer and Merleau-Ponty).

As a result, there is no coherent picture. Firstly, the functional criterion of art is hanging in the air, although here it was necessary to analyze Balinese society as a system of institutionalized activities and show that "cockfighting" performs the same function in it as theater in Euro-American culture. In the point of "concern", Geertz switches to the position of phenomenological aesthetics, or some kind of phenomenological reflection, which not only does not serve to strengthen the functional argument, but also completely changes the subject of consideration: in this case, the subject of consideration is perception, not perceived, and not by Balinese, but by some subject of experience, an anthropologist. Finally, when talking about the representation of collective experience or some kind of "universal" in the specific collective experience of Balinese, he goes beyond primordialism to universal universals from the very center of Balinese authenticity. All this does not add up to the overall picture and does not make it clear what Geertz considers art, what aesthetics he relies on. Vincent Crapanzano also notices the confusion here. He gives a fair rebuke to the functional aspect that cockfighting and Shakespeare's "King Lear" are not equivalent, since the latter contains cultural and linguistic markers of fiction ^{[21, p. 73]}, while the Balinese criteria of fictionality are not given. Krapanzano draws Geertz's phenomenological grasp of the anxiety effect to the anthropologist himself, diagnosing it as his own insecurity. He resorts to psychoanalysis of the "Deep Game" style, saying that "by piling image on image – "image", "fiction" and "metaphor" – Geertz gives out his own theoretical anxiety" ^{[21, p. 73]}. Finally, Krapanzano's definition of cockfighting as representation, a move that we have defined as a transition to the level of universality, strikes at the very center of the Girts method. He asks, "for whom cockfighting articulates daily experience", makes "visible, tangible, graspable "real" experience in an ideational sense?" ^{[21, p. 73]}. Indeed, isn't the universality imputed to fights a deliberate reading? Krapanzano notes that it is at this point that Geertz seems to forget "the difference between texts, commentaries, meta-commentaries, drama, sports, string quartets and still lifes." And further: "in the "Deep Game" there is no understanding of the Balinese, their point of view is not given" ^{[21, p. 75]}.

Geertz's Epistemology of Interpretive Anthropology

Nevertheless, despite the persuasiveness of the criticism, we believe that these arguments are only partially valid, since it is necessary to consider Geertz's aesthetic concept based on the epistemological principles guiding his method. We are ready to propose the following epistemological scheme of interpretive anthropology.

Firstly, any anthropological text, according to Geertz, is a fiction ^{[22, p. 23]}, that is, a game of theoretical imagination. But such a game, embodied in the process of writing, has not a logical, but a rhetorical nature. The anthropologist's letter aims to create an "explanatory effect" that should "dispel the perplexity" of the reader who is asking about the life of a distant people ^{[22, p. 24]}. But the "explanation effect" does not create itself. It is subject to a number of determinants, which are denoted by James Clifford. He finds contextual determinants (the anthropologist works with a significant social environment), rhetorical, institutional (the ethnographer is involved in specific traditions, disciplinary paradigms, addresses a letter to a specific audience), genre (ethnographic writing differs from the novel), political (the question of the credibility of the representation of cultural realities is important), historical (dependence on conventions and restrictions on all of the above) ^{[23, p. 6]}.

In the case of a "Deep Game", institutional determinants at the level of quasi-theoretical argumentation are the ideal of a rich description achieved through the techniques of phenomenological hermeneutics. At the level of "conceptual schemes" as an axiom about objects, their properties and relationships (24, p. 21), or, in terms of writing, "prefigurations" as a "poetic", "pre-cognitive" act of imagination, which is a constitutive element of the structure of", in this case, an anthropological narrative

^{[25, p. 227- we see two competing "explanatory analogies" of theater and text, which also play an essential role in the rhetoric of the "Deep Game". These are the determinants of anthropological writing in this text. But the Geertz method also presupposes the active reflection of the anthropologist, and this is the second, most essential part of the method. K. Geertz himself is aware of the dominance of one or another metaphor, and constantly refers to the premises and theoretical consequences of the choice of optics. As a result, we have a number of feedback loops: at the axiomatic level, the reflection of prefigurations and conceptual schemes allows us to switch the languages of description, at the level of utterance – the theorized articulation of reflection enhances the effect of explanation, at the empirical level it defines the "scientific" model of the construction of the subject. Since there is a game of constant switching, "sketching out" interpretations, no system is formed: the open structure of the description is simply open to endless absorption of "empirical" details. This is what Geertz says: "you can start from any place in the repertoire of cultural forms and stop at any place" [12, p. 70]}.

The Non-classical Aesthetics of Clifford Geertz

Based on this understanding of Girts epistemology, the unsystematic nature of aesthetic analysis in the "Deep Game" is explained. Three discursive switches were carried out in it, which are based on constant reflection. But two important questions remain: why was an aesthetic description necessary at all? Why is it using the above-mentioned discourses?

V. Krapadzano has already indicated that Geertz's aesthetics is simultaneously guided by very classical guidelines (drama, novel) and chooses a radically non-classical subject. Here it is necessary to separate these two aesthetics. We propose to focus on the chronotypology of aesthetic consciousness developed by V.V. Bychkov. It is important in his concept that he captures non-classical thinking not only in terms of content, but also as a paradigm of configurations. If classical aesthetics operates in the categories of work, sensory experience, impression, distance, perfection, integrity, harmony, etc., then non-classical aesthetics rejects universals and turns to the experience of specific humanities, thought practices, self-reflection ^{[26, p. 32]}. She addresses everyday life as a potential source of art practices and immanence, not theory, but experience. Nonclassics is a "paratheory", "semantic education that has developed in the sphere of aesthetic consciousness" ^{[26, p. 27]}, that is, a set of discursive techniques designed to capture what plays the role of aesthetic. It provokes thought, but is not prone to systematization.

In principle, this is what Geertz is doing: Bychkov's discourse simply, in our opinion, conceptually captures what he is doing. According to Geertz, cockfighting is an aesthetic phenomenon, and therefore, as a researcher, he creates a tense semantic field that produces the effect of interpretation. The nonclassicality of the "outline" method follows directly from its epistemology. But why or why is this object identified as aesthetic? It seems to us that Geertz uses aesthetics pragmatically to capture cockfighting as a whole in three ways, in a multi-aspect way, without reducing it to the political, social, sexual, etc. That is, aesthetics is needed as a form of cognition in which the sensory phenomenon of diversity as unity is possible.

To enlarge this phenomenon, he deliberately uses the schematisms of classical aesthetics, capable of constructing targeted heterogeneities. The phenomenological categories of the individual as "restless" mimic this wholeness in the perception of the subject. And the social universal, learned from Aristotle, interpreted through N. Fry, is necessary to suspend reflection as regression into infinity and fix this aesthetic object as "given forever." Finally, nonclassical functional analysis becomes a framework for fixing different coexisting cultural symbolic worlds as combined means of expression. In this sense, it does not matter whether there is, or was, before writing the Girts text, some kind of disciplinary or aboriginal ontology behind this aesthetic object, it is created rhetorically, this is, in B. Kassen's terms, a "logical" operation concerning the "performative autonomy of language", the operation of creating the effect of existence ^{[27, p. 10]}.

Conclusion

Aesthetic analysis occupies a central place in the interpretation of cockfighting. This is due to the epistemology of interpretive anthropology, which Geertz develops: an anthropological text is the result of a theoretical imagination determined by the context of research, intellectual tradition, and rhetorical strategy. Such a text is written in order to produce an explanatory effect on a specific reader. An explanation is considered impossible, as is a definitive systematization and categorization. For the same reason, all levels of theoretical writing should be subject to reflection. Any aesthetic analysis with such an attitude is methodologically non-classical, representing a tense field of meanings around a certain object, proclaimed artistic. But the language of analysis, aesthetic discourse, can be anything. Geertz, for whom it is important to produce the most saturated description (that is, to highlight the maximum number of aspects of the phenomenon, but not to reduce them to one or a number of categories), pragmatically chooses three aesthetic discourses. Using neo-Kantian relational ontology, he postulates that the symbolic worlds that make up the paradigmatic dimension of unsaturated analysis (they can be chosen) are actually all present simultaneously and are means of artistic expression. He uses a phenomenological aesthetic to combine this multitude with a sense of "anxiety," putting fights in the category of "sublime." Finally, he resorts to the Aristotelian principle of mimesis, which produces a universal universal myth, a paradigmatic event, in order to suspend the process of his own reflection, creating the effect that the Balinese cockfighting is the same creation of the human spirit as "Macbeth" or "Crime and Punishment." Thus, Geertz's aesthetics, which is not classical in method and subject matter, uses classical languages of aesthetic analysis pragmatically to preserve the results of a rich description.

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