<論文>《政治文化論》の視座 : クリフォード・ギアツを中心として

Abstract

Clifford Geertz writes at the outset of one of his essays that "culture, here, is not cults and customs, but the structures of meaning through which men give shape to their experience; and politics is not coups and constitutions, but one of the principal arenas in which such structures publicly unfold." This distinction between the two seems to be the skeleton of his theory of politics. Amplifying Geertz's argument, this article attempts to link politics and culture theoretically, in order to formulate the "politico-cultural" perspective. First of all, through giving a general survey of his interpretive anthropology and clarifying some of the key concepts, I show how consistently politics and culture are mutually related in his explanation. Suggesting that culture structures, and is structured by, politics through the medium of symbol, Geertz points out the way to synthesize the two in the realm of semiotics. Then, in the main part of this article, I analyze this dialectical relationship between politics and culture into two modes of power: "dynamics" and "symbolics " of power. The former denotes the substantial aspect of power, the control over the actions of others, which is exercised in actually existing political relations; the latter denotes the symbolic aspect of power, the production of a cultural system (i.e. ideology), which underlies actual politics and makes those politics possible. If "dynamics" and "symbolics" are thus defined, discordance between them becomes apparent. On the level of dynamics of power, there appears the centrifugal, dispersive structure of political relations; on the level of symbolics, there appears the centripetal, ordered system of meanings and symbols. That is to say, what is intensely competitive politics on the one hand, is highly unified ideology on the other. Geertz himself is aware of this discordance, which he calls the "paradox of cultural megalomania and organizational pluralism, " and sees the Balinese state as "stretched taut" between them. And moreover, through correlating these two opposing factors of politics and culture, he suggests that they complement each other. This articles therefore concludes that, in the "politico-cultural" perspective, we must trace out the link between politics and culture, rather than deduce from one to the other, in order to approach what Geertz calls "sociological realism."