The Crowd Parts

Clifford Geertz told me a story once, many years ago, that has stayed with me. He was doing fieldwork in Bali, in the least accessible part of the island, where he had learned there would be a large and elaborate cremation ceremony for an important personage from the royal lineage. Even the modest cremations of commoners in Bali, as I can personally attest, are staggering and almost phantasmagorical events: massive numbers of sarong-clad mourners in procession, crowds of excited spectators, the obsessive rhythmical clanging of the gamelan, crescendos of chanting, the heavy, spice-laden smell of burning incense, fanciful floats, festooned with tinsel and mirrors, in the shape of animals and gods, cunningly plaited offerings of grass, leaves, and gorgeous flowers, magnificent platters heaped high with fruits arranged in elaborate patterns, and at the center of it all, the enormous tower containing the corpse arrayed for the pyre. There is, at least for the uninitiated, the sense, overwhelming and unnerving, of an aesthetic mania, an intense, seemingly compulsive commitment to the overwrought display of extravagant beauty.

Geertz, of course, was hardly one of the uninitiated. Some of his most brilliant work was on Bali, work in which he was exceptionally attentive precisely to the social functions of display. He had brooded about the significance of aesthetic performance and carefully analyzed its relation to kinship structures, the class system, the village polity, the politics of irrigation in a society based on wet rice agriculture. There was nothing dreamlike or mystical in Geertz's apprehension of Balinese ritual: his work shows every sign of priding itself on its tough, detailed apprehension of the real-world costs, down to the last penny, the smallest household task, and the pettiest claim to status, entailed in the seductive, compelling project of performing culture.

This attentiveness is why I remember the story, out of all the ones we exchanged over the years. Balinese cremations, as Geertz repeatedly noted in his writings, are polysemic events. They are not simply about the disposing of a corpse: they are not simply about anything, including the moment in which the whole elaborate structure, including the structure of the human body, goes up in flames. Planned oftentimes for years—the corpse embalmed or buried and held, as it were, on account until the necessary money is raised and the arrangements settled—the ritual unfolds over days and in a dizzying blend of strict order and apparent chaos.

Geertz wanted, he told me, to take it all in: a royal cremation is a relatively rare event, and he knew that he was being blessed with an almost unique access to an extraordinary, multifaceted spectacle. This was the experience anthropologists used to dream of and still long for, even when they are too sophisticated to admit it. He was exactly at the right place at the right time, not forced to look through the eyes or stumble over the feet of others but poised for the touch of the real. And Geertz did not need to say what we both understood: that among contemporary anthropologists he was, with his aesthetic sensitivity and descriptive powers, almost uniquely suited to receive this touch.

It was a hot day, he recalled, and he began to race back and forth through the half-crazed throng—from the gamelan orchestras and the dancers, to the sandalwood carriers, to the carriers of heirloom weapons, to the priests in trance states chanting mantras, to the excited mob of gawkers, to the bearers of animal coffins and trays of offerings, to the street venders and giggling urchins, to the pyre about to be lit. Geertz was not a small man, and, running in a sweat from one part of the procession to another, he must have made a strange, comical showing of himself among the diminutive, graceful Balinese.

The hypnotic sound of the gamelan—a rhythmic clanging that seems to penetrate one's very marrow—intensified, he said, the disorientation to which he felt he had begun to succumb. He needed at once to be ubiquitous and perfectly still, to keep his wits about him in the midst of almost frenzied...