I am trying to get a little more educated on the "theories" (is it proper to call them that?) that inform methodologies, methods and the views of people and researchers. And I am hoping someone can explain to me what is meant by this short excerpt from Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, Middletown: Wesleyan University press (2005), p. 125 about Geertz.
In Geertz's essay "The Balinese Cockfight": "The reactions of the audience [...] reflect a culture, seen as a semiotic system, that is both integrated and stable, forming a whole. Gerrtz [sic] does not see the culture within the framework of social processes taking place in Balinese society; nor does he consider social divisions and social conflicts. Thus despite his avowed purpose of avoiding systematization and concentrating instead on the unique manifestation of behaviour, he resorts to the very macro conception of society that he rejects. And this results in methodological irrationalism."
In what way is this a macro conception of society? Why is Geertz's essay an example of systematization? And how could a consideration of social divisions and conflict circumvent those "issues"? Apologies if I misunderstand, but please bear with me as I am just trying to get a better understanding of Igger's view of Geertz.
Any recommended readings are also welcome. Thank you for your time and understanding!a
The quote is from a part of Iggers' work where he criticises Geertz and his followers in the field of cultural history for recreating the holistic problems of earlier approaches such as Marxist-inspired social history. These older approaches tended to focus on classes and social groups understood as largely determined by economics. With a touch of determinism that one tends to find in such works accompanied with what Iggers calls "often dogmatic answers" of the Marxists to historical questions, the result is a "systematised" science of history that leaves little ground to free will. Add the economic and social input and basically, whomever the actors are, the result will be the same. Iggers is unhappy with such a straightforwardly determinist account of history, though he finds many merits in them in general. Geertz and others are very much critical of these approaches to society and history as well, hence their avowed decision to focus on "the unique" and their shift away from "systematisation" understood as understanding the determinants and coming up with "if X then Y" sort of explanations.
Crucially, Iggers is not against an analysis of society along socioeconomic lines per se. He is rather opposed to doing this with deterministic tendencies. In Geertz, however, the rebellion is to the whole business of understanding society as divided into different socioeconomic classes, as Iggers sees his work at least. Geertz's unit of analysis is symbols. He takes symbols looks at how they endow mere physical action with meaning through his "thick description". Yet, he does not go into much detail about how individuals' ways of creating and interpreting symbols might change at a given time. More disturbingly, not being a historian (Iggers explicitly emphasises this to claim his work is ahistorical, see page 125), Geertz completely ignores the historical dimension of these symbols. It is as though they are and have always been stable entities, resistant to social, economic, and political change. In his reaction to old social history and related movements in anthropology and sociology, Geertz and his followers went too far according to Geertz. While social historians reified social classes too much, Geertz ignores their existence altogether and portrays his societies as unnecessarily united and stable over time.
In short, it is a macro conception according to Geertz because the culture and the symbols seem to encompass each and every member of the society despite their differences, socioeconomic or otherwise. If Geertz paid more attention to social struggles and classes, he could have found that symbols were not perceived the same way by, say, a rich man from a privileged background and a poor woman in a male-centred society.
I hope this helps!