Combining great learning, interpretative originality, analytical
sensitivity, and a charismatic prose style, Clifford Geertz has produced
a lasting body of work with influence throughout the humanities and
social sciences, and remains the foremost anthropologist in America.
His 1980 book Negara analyzed the social organization of Bali before it
was colonized by the Dutch in 1906. Here Geertz applied his widely
influential method of cultural interpretation to the myths, ceremonies,
rituals, and symbols of a precolonial state. He found that the
nineteenth-century Balinese state defied easy conceptualization by the
familiar models of political theory and the standard Western approaches
to understanding politics.
Negara means "country" or "seat of political authority" in Indonesian.
In Bali Geertz found negara to be a "theatre state," governed by rituals
and symbols rather than by force. The Balinese state did not specialize
in tyranny, conquest, or effective administration. Instead, it
emphasized spectacle. The elaborate ceremonies and productions the state
created were "not means to political ends: they were the ends
themselves, they were what the state was for.... Power served pomp, not
pomp power." Geertz argued more forcefully in Negara than in any of his
other books for the fundamental importance of the culture of politics to
a society.
Much of Geertz's previous work--including his world-famous essay on the
Balinese cockfight--can be seen as leading up to the full portrait of
the "poetics of power" that Negara so vividly depicts.
