Geertz's whole point is that, and I think the point for all folks with materialist conceptions of history, is that the categories "kinship", "marriage", "incest","shelter", "food", "clothing" or "morals" are metacategories which are in point of historical and anthropological fact so widely variable on the ground as to have no substantive meaning as empirically substantial, grounded and defendable cultural universals.
>
> ............
>
> "My point, which should be clear and I hope will become even clearer
> in a moment, is not that there are no generalizations that can be made
> about man as man, save that he is a most various animal, or that the
> study of culture has nothing to contribute toward the uncovering of
> such generalizations.... What, after all,
> does it avail us to say, with Herskovits, that “morality is a
> universal, and so is enjoyment of beauty, and some standard for
> truth,” if we are forced in the very next sentence, as he is, to add
> that “the many forms these concepts take are but products of the
> particular historical experience of the societies that manifest
> them”?7 "
>
> ^^^^^^^^
> CB: All humans have language. That's a universal. I think Geertz
> seems to be playing the "interesting" universal game. The thing sought
> has to not only be universal, but interesting to the professor. He
> seems to admit that morality is a human universal, or enjoyment of
> beauty or some standard of truth, but these facts don't "avail" us
> (smile).
> Well, they avail us in the discussion on this thread, because all
> three examples are the application of abstract principles, including
> abstract moral principles to behavior. In fact, come to think of it,
> here Geertz mildly , impliedly contradicts Miles claim that
> "morality" or application of abstract moral principles to behavior is
> not universal in human society. Geertz doesn't say that Herskowitz is
> wrong. Geertz just says that Herskowitz doesn't avail us.
What Geertz is, and I am, saying is that claiming that "language" or "morals" are universals when the particulars of the diversity of languages and moralities over time and across space make them wildly divergent, staggeringly malleable and always culturally specific means that assertion is useless as a substantive claim of universality. In short, and this is what the whole exchange around Chomsky was about, I think, claims about the universality of language or abstract/guiding moral principals indicate the pursuit of a fools errand if the form, content and meaning of languages, morals, incest, etc. across space and time are more qualitatively different than quantitatively similar. I think the earlier conversation on this topic included some reference to love... and if feminists have taught us anything it is that appeals to the universality of love - claims that love is a substantive human metacategory - implode VERY quickly once comparative historical research begins.
>
> The point is not that there are no specific moral principles that are
> universal, sort of, but that there are always some form of moral
> principles, i.e. abstract ideas guiding conduct in every human society
> that Geertz and the rest of us know about. Other species can't
> organize themselves based on abstract ideas. Humans can and do
> universally.
You see, Geertz' point (and Marx's about class relations and feminists' about love, family, etc.) is that it is contradictory to say that a universal category like "abstract moral principals" has any material, social or political utility when - in order to generate the category - the content placed within it always ends up being qualitatively dissimilar. Geertz' point, and that of Marx - per Bertell Ollman, Derek Sayer, Neil Smith and many others - is that abstract moral principals are always grounded in spatio-temporally specific material circumstances and that this central historically material diversity is decentered, at best, and rejected (in some kind of "we're all the same under the skin, and therefore, we ought always to be able to rationally come to agreement across our differences) at worst.
Something close to this last issue that Geertz doesn't raise is the question of where universals end and particulars begin. If all human (and alarm bells go off every time I see this last word for these very reasons - since it almost always indicates an implicit appeal to some kind of transhistorical human nature) societies operate based on "abstract moral principals" laid out in "language" - perhaps tied in some way to "kinship" and "social reproduction", and all human societies have men and women, does this mean that all men and all women are more the same, across societies (or should that be cultures, or civilizations, or tribes, or class structures.... what IS the right metacategory here) than they are different?
Upon what basis ought we to decide that morals and languages are substantive universals meaningfully similar across space and time but that men/manhood/masculinity and women/womanhood/feminity (or any other classical "universal") are different. I know most there are not anthropologists, but this is the core question. What Marx found was that the material investigation of history exploded the Western philosopy's reified claims of universality... and this is what, just about 100 years later, finally became the mainstream norm in anthropology, though not yet in sociology (outside of some who are more feminist, queer or cultural studies-ish than sociological) or, often, on the laborist or environmentalist left (where Maslow and Malthus continue to have way to much sway [as I see it].)
-A