Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”
The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.
Culture is made up of a bunch of texts. And that doesn’t just mean books or written works. Rituals and social routines are also texts. The Super Bowl is a “text” that we can “read” to understand American culture—what better anthropological study than joining half the country screaming as a bunch of padded men knock each other over to grab a leather ball one Sunday a year?
And that’s not all. We can analyze weddings, Fourth of July barbecues, that big shopping day after Thanksgiving, and presidential inaugurations all as “texts” that make up American culture.
Our job as anthropologists (or New Historicists) is to decode these cultural and social texts in order to understand a culture or a society better.
Geertz’s notion of culture-as-text became super important to the New Historicists because it allowed them to go way beyond analyzing traditional literary “texts,” but instead to look at things like Elizabethan theatrical conventions, historical documents, and anecdotes, and to analyze those along with literary texts.
Geertz’s ideas, in other words, challenge the distinction between “literary” and “non-literary” texts. The New Historicists followed in Geertz’s footsteps by also challenging that distinction.