2016 Volume 81 Issue 2 Pages 302-311
In this article, I compare Clifford Geertz’s discussions concerning religious rationalization, which appear in his essay “ʻInternal Conversion’ in Contemporary Bali,” to those of Max Weber. My aim is to investigate possibilities and enhancements of the concept of “rationalization” for the social analysis of modernity.
Geertz’s essay consists of three parts: (a)epitomizing Weber’s discussions on rationalization or rationality, (b) describing ethnographic data concerning traditional Balinese religion, and(c)sketching the changes of Balinese Hindu religion in the postwar age, which he grasped as the flourishing of a new “Bali-ism,” or the emergence of a particular type of religious rationalization.
Focusing upon the third part, I have pointed out in my previous research that his slightly rough sketches of the religious changes in Bali were insufficient to appropriately ascertain the contents and contexts of the constructive processes of Balinese Hindu religion. Furthermore, his essay had a logical split, as the ethnographic descriptions in the second part, described in the present tense, were inconsistent with the arguments of ongoing social changes in the third part. In this article, I focus upon the first part of his essay to examine how Geertz absorbed Weber’s ideas regarding rationalization. Although it is well known that Geertz was a Weberian anthropologist, there are no precise debates about the two men’s congruences and di erences, as far as I know. I hope this article might contribute to filling in that theoretical lacuna in order to provide a deeper understanding of modern Balinese religion and society.
In conclusion, there is a considerable gap between Geertz’s and Weber’s frameworks of discussions on religious rationalization. For example, Geertz’s concept of the “problem of meanings” is quite different from Weber’s concept of “Sinnproblem,” despite its having been derived from it. The most important thing is that Geertz failed to discuss the connotations of ambiguities and complexities of rationalization at all, while Weber placed great weight on them. For Weber, rationalization was so complex that various different streams of rationalization had to be grasped. Moreover, rational things from one point of view might be irrational from another. He argued that the concept of rationalization had to be defined and grasped on the basis of “value freedom” (Wertfreiheit)or cultural relativism.
Clearly, Weber’s concept or theory model of rationalization has more potential than Geertz’s. And yet it seems e ective to rearrange Weber’s model slightly in order to comprehend Balinese Hindu religion nowadays; i.e., not only can complex streams of rationalization be found on the level of total social systems, but also on the level of the religious system itself. I will examine the validity of a model developed from introspections and retrospections on both Geertz’s and Weber’s discussions to comprehend the complicated mechanisms of modern societies, including that of Bali, according to ethnographic data.
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