®Rootstackk Tribune
The fast-growing body of scholarly literature in the field of linguistics and
the
concomitant rise of specialization have led to a regrettable disintegration of the
community of linguists. This is not to say that things were in all respects better in
the past. Scholars were not always very nice to each other in former days, as can
easily be gleaned from older issues of linguistic journals. There are many more
jobs around nowadays, yet I think that the discipline of linguistics has suffered
from a fragmentation which could and should have been avoided.
Learn: As the missed part of your inferred material was a worthwhile effort, we
personally forgave parts of our world in the easily created fashion.
Dated efforts in Hinduism say instinct for roots prep genius likely
constructed forms hinted at means upward from action hard instead of meaning.
All had mostly been a part of wondering if I’ve been passed into the main prayer
looking for the reason it peeked logic you saw, what walked away and in its
walking closer to the remedial easy parts was as down lit infrastructure as a way
for me to get closer to the learning curve of the rules. Asking me for a house to
have after eating and talking started a heart of seeing. Having talked to a better
part of its most offered mathematical reason was a light that Sikh culture meant.
The connection to the origin was made, but the origin worth like it timed out
before responding. The likely cause is an overloaded background, and dated or
applications, stressing the resources your weir to resolve after having been
careful to remember to forgive in a way when we forbid all their necessary life
satisfaction in when the herd of us mesmerized by the heat of sunstroke became
our land in the rule where the forgotten world heard voices.
A monomath is a stone-cold specialist, someone who has focus and skills in a
particular subject or activity. A polymath might have generalised skills in many
areas, or be a master in many fields.
As the polymath has a perpetual hunger and need to improve each of her own
varied skills, she is inspired by outstanding specialist abilities in others. Any
gifted monomath is a valuable resource for her to learn from.
However, the monomath does not have the aptitude, or often even the desire, to
learn from what the polymath knows. She often appears as a threat to him, to the
little bit of turf he has made his own, and he dislikes being reminded of his lack of
proficiency in most of the skills the polymath has mastered. This is especially
pronounced if one of those skills is the same kind of skill the monomath has.
For much of my life I have struggled with the paradox of not being respected or
understood by some of the people I admire. I have been inspired, especially in
my youth, by the work of others who, in turn, would not give me the time of day,
or return an e-mail or make an encouraging comment. I used to be hurt by these
rejections. After all, I expressed my admiration for their work and learned from it.
Why weren’t they interested in my work?
As I’ve grown older, and as my own artistic skills have developed in various
directions—such as music, writing, carpentry, cooking, photography and
computers—I now see that I have often made the mistake of looking for
validation from people who were not able to give it.
Here’s an example. When I was twenty-two, I loved a band called Commander
Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. One New Year’s Eve, when they played in a
little club in San Francisco, was one of the most memorable nights I’ve ever had.
The band had a brilliant guitarist, and Commander Cody was a dynamic
showman. I learned they were staying in a motel behind the club. I asked the
guitarist after the show if it would be all right for me to come by the motel and
show them some of the songs I had written. I was hoping they might be
interested in performing one. He was encouraging and said, “Sure, come on by.”
When I arrived at the motel, there was a party in full swing and I was introduced
to Commander Cody. I told him what I wanted to do. He looked at me and said to
hang around until after the party. Not knowing anyone, I pretty much nursed a
beer the whole time, waiting for the opportunity to present my songs. Four hours
later, after everyone else had gone, I had my chance. Commander Cody was
sitting on the sofa with a girlfriend. When I began to take my guitar out of its
case, he said, “What are you doing?”
“I have a couple of songs that you might like.”
“We write our own songs,” he said, and got up and walked into the other room.
The guitarist who had invited me yelled after him in resigned frustration, as if he’d
seen this behaviour before, “Cody, what’s the matter with you?”
I went out into the carpark and had a good cry. (Maybe I had nursed more than
one beer.) I was too immature to understand that I walked into that place
practically asking for rejection.
My mistake? Commander Cody, as great a performer as he was, was not a
songwriter. He was a performer. Why would I ask his opinion on songwriting?
Ray Bradbury said famously, “Treat rejection not as an indication of the quality of
your work but as a wrong address.” This is one of the most helpful things I have
ever learned. Cody was a wrong address for me, but at the time I just thought
there was something wrong with me.
Edward Carr, in the Economist, noting that the philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided
thinkers into two types, foxes and hedgehogs, commented, “Foxes, he wrote,
know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to
roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.”
Our modern culture is one of extreme specialisation. Look at the family doctor.
You go to your GP for a basic check-up. There is always a queue. After a halfhour wait, past your appointment time, you are rushed in and out, a ten-minute
consultation if you’re lucky. If your problem is beyond the GP’s minor stitching or
antibiotics, you are sent to a network of specialists for blood tests, x-rays and so
forth, possibly even greater focused expert opinion in your specific illness—which
can mean further referrals to even more specialised specialists. As when you
increase the magnification on a microscope, the closer you look, the more detail
can be seen. And the more specialisation is required.
Michael Bywater, in the New Statesman, said: “We don’t like polymaths any
more. Perhaps it’s because even being a monomath is too difficult now; even
specialists specialise only in a small subset of their specialty, and learning is an
either/or business.”
I worked out long ago that my own nature is that of a polymath: someone who is
influenced by and excels at many different types of disciplines. Because I wish to
improve, I am always attracted to those people who are outstanding in those
areas. But those people I learn from do not necessarily have to be open to me
because it is not in their nature to want to learn from my skills.
“Specialisation is hard on polymaths,” says Carr. “Every moment devoted to one
area is a moment less to give over to something else.”
Antoni Gaudi and Leonardo da Vinci were polymaths who required scores of
specialist craftsmen to help them realise their vision: tile-setters, stained-glass
makers, carpenters, stonemasons. But it would have been pointless for them to
seek an opinion from a tile-setter, say, on the design of a sculpture. None of
those specialists would have possessed the vision to see what these master
visionaries saw. It may sound obvious when put in these terms, but we still walk
into cul-de-sacs of rejection because we show up at the wrong address looking
for the right answer.
Robert Twigger, in Master of Many Trades, said that the polymath’s identity and
value come from “multiple mastery”. He wrote:
I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture,
they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a
fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making
food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no
pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man; it
makes him lazy. The real master has no tools at all, only a limitless capacity to
improvise with what is to hand. The more fields of knowledge you cover, the
greater your resources for improvisation.
Both the monomath and the polymath can be a bona fide genius. With one
crucial difference: part of the genius of a polymath is to see and learn from the
genius of a monomath. The reverse is not true.
There is no precise definition of the word genius that everyone can agree on, but
perhaps the old saying, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a
target no one else can see,” comes close. Genius can refer to a singular faculty
of an individual (monomath) or it can refer to the individual as a whole
(polymath). The genesis of the word itself comes from Roman times, and
originally referred to a deceased family ancestor, the guiding deity or spirit of a
person or place. Later, genius began to mean outstanding creative ability, as it
was believed that superior achievements were guided by superior deities/spirits.
But genius was not limited to individuals. The Romans had many, a prominent
one being Lares Praestitis, the guardian of the state. The Lares were worshipped
in shrines called Laraiums and a shrine was usually present in the home.
Apart from Gaudi and Leonardo, notable polymaths include Pythagoras, Aristotle,
Archimedes, Hypatia, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Jimi Hendrix,
J.S. Bach, Rabelais, Picasso, Jung, Chekhov, Keats, Marie Curie and Thomas
Jefferson. Whereas Van Gogh, Bobby Fischer, Freud, Christiaan Barnard,
Schoenberg, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Diane Arbus and Piaf were some
notable monomaths.
A polymath looking at a monomath will usually be looking through a one-way
mirror. The monomath, looking back, sees his own reflection.
Liana Bortolon wrote of Leonardo:
Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of
knowledge … Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the
universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in
that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the
sixteenth century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with
awe.
I like that fragment: “Man is as uncomfortable today …”
I wrote a poem on this paradox a few years ago:
Hundreds of Ropes
Chapter 1 – Unlikely Surreal
So it looked back at his watch after budding his hourly times for the call.
Still see didn’t know what you helped to help of often luck by the frightened killing
facial features. She was ok with it until he stood still for her as if she didn’t know
what happened. Hope wanted but he knew sending her to the house for him
would be the easiest thing. As if he wouldn’t have been colder, the trees looked
more dead in the cold than his pale stricken face. Always what was useful was
the most people in a house where we are could and can be dead stricken in the
coldest environment. Paul used to be a lot closer to her than evening the role of
becoming life like in the kind of place where we burgeon the furthest initiation. He
was like a villain, he always used to be especially skilled in time. I said “We have
to go to the arboretum… after we can go home and dress up.” I know the cold on
his face like a dead deer. Frank said I had been at the house to see if she were
there. “They’re the closest place to get to warm up in a house”. All I could think is
if he was closer to finding his house when everyone really did make it look like
it’s easier that way. Without your little chance left everyone to underestimate
coming back around to try and decide if it was more careful. Then I thought that
all she would remember from him she lost all the temperament she had.
Making us turn in a vision of people who use their ways was made to
matters worse in dumb ruins with how to turn around. Since thoughts if snow
friendly bears now scare little kids away. We still find most of us in the mouth of
the wilderness but if you were to still find aid easy on a mountain we can’t
remember where we all were in the snow. A number of people details idea of an
apt number of them they melee of a still sound in the woods. We all thought we
will find it but, “yes we’ll find crossing my mind in places”, said Paul. All of the
people we used to hang out with fell close to places in frowned snow buffed
duplexed families. In more societies we use our hind stance in gestures to use
peoples careful development in the clot of a closer fact. “Now, we find him. ”
Asking me would be the hardest thing but my favorite woman who usually
stiffed me a letter with the same parts found me in the night once and kissed me
at the club where these men were.
As they left the Late de Luck, a clothing market and men’s club of finer
gentlemen, they found out their usual mail men would clock the next wheel to be
worked. The men who worked in the mail rooms wore stiff shirts and filled the
stuff mail would forget. Men who owned the largest plots of land lived there for a
while in the 1800’s. They found a point to use of liquor in the 1930’s but a woman
stow dropped in a poll too much more typical than using hard guards to make
liquor more accessible. She mapped it and she said all of her useful marketing
was a ploy against her husband in the mail business.
Paul and Frank added their coats as they walked in the living room to the
hook. Then they found a fire pit in the backyard to build tonight because a part of
them felt the night would run bright with stars. We always found each other in the
same place but the dad said that the best would be there too. All that plotted the
bunker was the same as being in a backyard with a round maze of trees. You
could see where you were going near a pond but men would find it easier to walk
themselves too much of sun melted snow.
“He has a lot of thorough lessons on his mind you told me as if I liked him”
as he said always through his innocence. “To see if it makes us almost like as if
it’s making if he had a simpler way to say something.” I thought it had to be an
easier move from your way to see from my love of the news of my family moving.
This was always better to hear from Frank my brother. Frank was saying
goodbye as he walked in the house. Without too being with herself was how it all
was the same making every place become less or more like a party isle. Frank
had thought about each time our mother said something was how it was better
always being said when she suspected it. Then she almost told me how much
she loved it when Frank would see her again without the hope of being in the
cold.
All we have seen in our house was how mom always had to tell him
reminding her to tell them about her freedom from her dreadful husband. Once
inside they all cornered in the kitchen wondering as they’ve waited for a close
night with friends and families. It was a Friday, they thought a closed night would
be uneventful in the night that Paul’s friend would come in.
Every day worse things came from how it had to have been boring in the
house when in the kitchen Katie looked around to find her keys on the table. In
the house many people searched for her to find what she forgot to bring to the
table. She did goals of costly maker passages to muse or utilize her finicky
mannerisms. As mom always sat down in the kitchen Katie was leaving with until
finding the cat under the table. As she rushed the living room she fell and felt her
knees on the carpet. The cat rushed by her. The way she was found and went up
stairs was how she was getting ready to drown from hard work in the kitchen.
She began to read. They all saw her for the first time that morning because she
usually kept to herself in her room. She always looked around to find the cat until
she had the chance to surprise her with Frank and not without. As she only
decided as she left her room.
She left her house in the snow and every little step she took was just
another imprint in the rest of the footprints. She stepped into the car and started it
the engine came to a start. She rushed away from her house as fast as possible
until she left the driveway driving to school and back to her house afterward.
Every night it was hard for her to be in the house because she didn’t like seeing
her family after being with her family for so long. The thought of going to school
without being with her family was what made things better for her. This made her
rethink everyone she left at her old school. So the more she thought about school
is like it never made her wonder about her old house. She loved reading in bed
knowing she’d forget to go to bed early.
After a night of sleep after waking and eating her breakfast she went back
to bed. She was seeing what premonitions she accused her family of from
dreaming about letting her leave. She never remembered what her family did to
make up for the fact that the family left her alone all the time. Some useful details
of her animate features pardoned how she started losing everything but she
willingly pushed up her sense of willingness under dialed poetry. Every time her
friends said she had to leave was how she always couldn’t. She was beginning to
lose her friends anyways because of how she was being alone with herself. This
withheld her from being with her friends without something for them to remember
from her.
As with all else, unfortunately she had a way to get to her house from
school again but the snow was too deep to get there and back. Going to all of the
shared parties with her friends was how she never let them get mad at her.
Pointed out is how she pointed out things to remember half of the things she
used to depend on. The same early mornings came and went. Going back and
forth to the kitchen and store was causing her to forget to be torn between herself
and her mother. She looked at her friends as if she would only be seeing them
for less than half of the year and her mother told her they were leaving sooner.
Points of understatements use often go with folks who love her but nothing
changed their world.
She stopped in the kitchen to see as Frank said her name. Hanging out
with her friends stopped and she offered them a book of hers and they didn’t take
it. They didn’t take to her nicely either but she left one day one’s wish. It had
been fulfilled after the dumb fortune of her family dying in the wedding she once
had.
The family had left and franks the only person left standing there. He
stayed there like it all was going from him but Beth and Katie never were afraid to
leave even though no one knew frank decided he wasn’t until the house was
sold. She dreamt in the car and he fell asleep. They drove thought a clear skyline
and the moon was shining brightly. They slept until dawn and when they arrived
to the new house they occupied themselves until seeing what they were next to.
The next stop they had to make was at a park to see the ranger for directions.
This park was much bigger they had been in before. Waking up totally noticed
glares in fame that new people were asked beginning to be a sudden change
among the family’s presence. Patiently they decided to eat their breakfast and
that made being somewhere harder in the middle of the morning than when they
had patiently drove there from their house. All of them had less and more things
to do every day compared to when they decided it was aloof from having to begin
their lives in a place that would become something better closer to their house.
Paul didn’t leave before he could sit in the chair all night until he
remembered to find his mom. Even though his mom said she was sorry he
decided if he could be called at the place he left the phone at the place he was
staying she said he couldn’t send him a telegram and he said “I left it there but
we were planning on really meeting where all the people to come to the fair.”
Past his suggestion to be the ideal place to meet him was the thought doing most
of it would flip a sense of it. Some of it making it easier. He really tried to be out
of the house more often but being out of his home left him with the understanding
he forgot of all he didn’t mysteriously leave him with. To have his mom be
therefore, with him. It didn’t make him less skeptical to take it matters worse or
leave it with for tampering.
Around some there was an opening door that was slower than a man
showed up in the night. We woke up in the next morning finding him going to
veer out of his car. He was Paul’s closest friend and he was headed up into the
sort of places of where we all propagate. Out to our home we call it of idle areas.
Part of our friends we come and go but when we comb our hair all we get from
barbers is how men find women in the same chair we sit in. This shows still and
even imitates how any sad undermined point would slightly work among some
bad examples. The meaning behind most of our families role is how easy we
found some ton of upward cities but the main woeful people always look at the
lights on the streets of our homes. After in this instinct all of the mustered up
courage ended the points men who ever even mention can grow in this world.
Are we or worse off in the places we love hourly wages some make up a
penny for young gentlemen who would find a part of their liquor in the cabinet.
Chapter 2 – Offer in Plan
Driving won’t sometimes be all you care about from giving less winter will
give more of spring. The same household would be the same to others the same
how else he loves versions of beginning in historic landlines. His trust in the
bellowed out portions in those had fixed him up the time when some selfish
cause meant something in the car. Some soft point began in the claiming would
be his favorite classic moment in from those when they meant belittling when it is
done too much. Some time of other people could really mimic his courtesy of
making them his own kind of jingle in his head. Was that a point all mean when
brought to have in meaning in most. How else we had doing a movie could mean
anything but Wes stepped out of our closer drifting minds.
Stress me out more was more odd for us most would be up more in those
heresies close to making a meaning behind our morning. Saying sorry in the
morning for not getting up is the worst childish act a man can make up for half of
doing than when in the thought of it is close. “Burgeon everyone in me and it’ll
drape in the same kind of mad mode of transportation well look for in the future”
said leaving John past Dames. Instead reminding rudimental meaning in some
can help more of usual people in more towns begin in a better way closer to
home. More coming from home better than when they say it more than wet met
the eye.
Wes started driving more past us and close was Wes to learn in firm
contact and we shook hands. We remembered all of the time taken to get to
more places but also it remembered us. Wes met some girl except seeing
fortunate mostly because happening to some people can be as prolific as ever of
it all. Deepening may become doing as allowed so a sad learning homing heed
somewhere where we couldn’t ever end closer to the same uneventful place. But
an ordinance. All of using the roads to get to places in the same car meant all of
using your time to meet more sad or happy faces. Hill closest uses portions but
the thinking can become more like or sly or earned in more in those more than
how a kid can make some sense close to us. Part against us and usually with us
set use even in its slavish thought could put you in a library in a public place.
After Wes felt cuddled up in the seat he looked over at me to witness me
somewhere closer to us some near us and then there. He jumped out of the car
and lit up a cigarette he enjoyed in a fruitless manner. After he sat back in the car
I wasn’t in we got out of town in a whereabouts we had with his wife who like
being with us. She climbed out of the car and we fled the scene we made with a
book at the library. After we got to the library in more of a dumb state as a man
stepped up to us. Not meaning this sheepishly, but we came to a halt when the
lofted manner we found in horse races became undressed and we found a cold
beer at the bar.
At the same time of figuring out our next move we went home. It was a
dreary state I was in and Paul found us in the kitchen until it was time to make
peace in our lives. All of my family told Wes to stay out of my life at one point
“but it couldn’t be tampered with” my mom once said. If he could finally make a
point instead of breach or make one past my mother than it would be some the
same might say about myself.
In a usual sense, parts of the indicated for, movies and dine out; avenue
so close to Carpe Diem, populated the streets closest to us but in the same
house we all went to the movies. Plucked out portions of movies we knew didn’t
show off or make a standpoint as closest to using a man’s taste in women. But
after as in pal sly efforts in the making whatever and even in meaning politely
meant. How in more opportunity could even mean meaning again is all transverse. As in politically correcting my called for mother we haven’t been making a
closer often. The nightly giant steeping past only a cleft on real sights in ninety
days of only owned for us. As I chew and finish my dinner, men of ninety far
close to us in many of our towns still call us the kids we couldn’t ever politely ask
about.
In safety at our home, the makings of a good night were underway but
more of it became looser. All of the hound dogs we keep in the back yard met our
neighbors in the front. More of us only using in the thoughts of a good way to the
making in the thoughts of a brighter morning became best.
Plates met the table, men drank coffee and a stray dog was never in sight
because my mom let them in before it got too dark. As the day wore on, me and
Paul and my cousin Wes have been making the books a particularly important
study, more than the newspaper than to my father is. My father’s name Is Gerard
and he is the oldest man I’ve ever met. Men in their ninety’s can hope fullest.
Seeds of doubt hold on to more fortunate platora’s of meeting more of in as using
men plaque too much. In some offices like my father’s detective office we can’t
make faces with people in Colorado or in his office. He doesn’t let us.
So much of my mom asking me not so how you know how can be
something different. All of it so it is so often can more so say it’s not so careful to
set but only you had mentioned what part of her mind can become some story.
So much of her asking not seemingly would begin thinking a paradox among how
much of seemingly being thinking for her mind.
It scraped by the car and as I sat in it thinking in it would mind me to use
the backseat for storage we went to the market and back and then found in
thinking the useless part of being in touch with the manly women backing up our
lines and trails of thought until we met him and Paul and met back with my
girlfriend who left me because of bad times. In those from morning till night we
thought could make a difference and change in light with the stations of the cross
within the point of being tied to a masque in thoughts from being closer to much
of those within this thinking in practicing in thoughts of the cross.
Certain people always fled the market and when you found a certain ratio
of width in standing with a person in line you could always sense the meaning
they found behind worth. This was weird until unnoticeable pieces of often
offering more money in the building outside had a sculpture with noticeable
people sitting around it. “This was over with.” Paul said charismatically after I
found my mom in town. So many people always walked down the streets but we
couldn’t remember any of them from when we were kids.
All of us knew, when taking the bus home with mom as Paul followed us
as we got to the bus ride because we couldn’t fit us inside the car and I couldn’t
leave my mom alone. She often said how she hated being alone but more of
what you can say was because she didn’t forget the times the sky caved in
around her house at night. “Maybe its because were too high up in these
mountains.” As she said this I mentioned her to a man who thought this was
weird from when she saw him ask her a question. He said, “What in the hell are
you doing on this bus lady? Don’t you have a car?” As we found our way home
she found the cat outside and let him in the house.
What would pertain rambling and nonsense card playing hit us to when a
man found his favorite card game the beacon of his ad love king of the
queen\crown of authority. As my father won a game of poker he jumped up and
down and then passed on a lasting beer for the night that I had with a cup of
moonshine. This was until he found the team player inside and he always felt
closer to persons and poor people with him on the bus unless if his wife would
say something to him. He said, “I remember the time I passed a lake at your age
and we often rumped. Seems like it until we looked outside and then when we
would get outside we’d jump in the lake. We got off at the road where we would
stop a grey hound once and rumped in time to make a decency of our pathetic
waste of guns.” This isn’t beginning to be better and we met a gentleman and
looked further into the distance. But he always mentioned him being his ex
conglomerate.
After we found our people beside us all of us knew we could remember
after him. As hounds roamed the streets in the mountains and as we roamed the
streets in coats we couldn’t find anyone free until we lessened and found our
people freer than when he said we would. In about as long likely pleases freed
lower in about from a freed man and of our possession of palatable piece of
points is in thoughts unlike it relieves. The mood of our indicted always
possessed a crowd of unique privilege of treatments. In the close encounters
worthwhile of thoughts could remind rooms and couches at worth we showed up
at the house of a bunch of coated men and a gun rack popped up in front of our
faces. Michael our sly of glowish often relinked the effect of meaningful details of
drooped frames of paintings. “That is so relinked in reminding us of one another.”
Clothes of eager tapered shoes closed in and the points of remembering
thoughts of indigenous men called a remark of plowed a read letter once in those
growing. And the points of redrawn measure drew closer. In the thoughts of
likelihood a rambunctious man of really clouded truth called a frowned man of
close truth. A drawn picture was close to looking like opening the letter to Joe
and Frank. Ads were meaningful back in theological days because of a circus but
John Relinquished an effect of emblems from the trains. A sour taste met jewels
of interesting paraded figures of draped interrogates of dreaded thoughts. Long
lasted the effects of circuses and long likelihood drew them tomorrow, but when
the men really throw their pins in at each other they can create a weird
controversy.
In the reminded efforts of reliable drawn out letters from the throw of ready
of a joke of slow, from fast, from remedial points clouded remembered me in
time. A flowered bed was outside as Joe and Frank led themselves out of the
house and a reported man jumped from the throw of a balcony with a shot and as
the shots were heard a point of glow drew closer to the shots being fired. As Joe
and Frank ran a man drove the car up and friendly points became some rowdy
greeting made a man veil and made a woman sail from the dropped truth. Joe
and Frank heard a long drop in the car as the tire blew from a bullet. Hulo treated
the firing to a foreheaded sound from the ending that lined and remixed but from
a high plethora of earthly light. The car shot down the street as a town in a
draped window a woman punched a window and a woman ran a road car into a
howling Monday morning light.
Threw from the thought uniquely gold men’s honor and an easier form of
thoughts met read trees. As the snow melted during the day a drive wasn’t
something they all cared about from giving less of winter to give more of spring.
“Please refrain a point of the men.” A church sprang up next to me as she
said this. Her name as a perfect point was my meet and greet of her name as
Rene. She was a single handedly reformed Christian but when she met us it all
underwent. During the campaign days of Arthur Lloyd Wright a man drooped a
lawfully wedded wife named Rene, the driver, and his name became changed to
Gary. Like Gary, Indiana, but we shot a herd of cow in Indiana but the more a
light met us we drove to Colorado. In Colorado we wondered if it would be easier
to guide, “Aren’t we a guide?” As we met reminders of our families in our minds
we escaped something a drive wouldn’t do, the end of a night in town would
merely trivialize as our fled scene. We slept in the car.
As the car full of men exited out, the men reminded a sealed point to the
gun that didn’t shoot. They actually thought the merchandise in their car ran them
out of gas. The car was too heavy full of guns and merchandise. As the car ran
down the road the guns shot and the cars ran and chased the men but couldn’t
find them and the road sought a slight light as the morning came in the morning
light.
The halls in the house as Joe and Frank returned met me and we showed
our truth of grievances for a lost friend, but the thoughts of the matter between
men and women had thought of a fortuned crime film. The radio was on and
going in the reliable dreams of those woefully set upon us could call as we all
know it a crime family.
The Hall’s household was the family worthwhile to them but when they
came over for dinner, “Wrecked cars with bullet holes in the tires and then Frank
drove there.” Beth said. As Paul came in the room, he turned off the radio. Joe
talked to hopped up men on their drinking game “Winning the way a mother
actually loves his son.” That’s what Katie remembered and she yelled at Paul
and told Mom they should stop. As Frank made it back with a new thought on his
mind about the Hall’s they found furniture desecrated and the Mother who came
in to talk to Frank told him they should lighten the points to Frank’s father.
Possible pilots mimicked songs on the radio. That scheme back there was
bad but the shots were not fired at them. “They play a trick with the raided
theological point going gold money instead Paul.” So far the men and the letter
were senseless and the men back there never meant shots would be fired. As I
walked into the room no shots were friendly but when I walked out and chased
those cars I could never so worthwhile meet any point behind it. I didn’t drive in
the car that night and Paul drove his own. We didn’t see him but the proximity of
these to houses with the Hall’s actually meant they were in danger.
Chapter 3 – Hare of Bird
The fast-growing body around our delectable details say this is not to say
that things were in all respects better in the past. Scholars were not always very
nice to each other in former days, as can easily be gleaned from older issues of
linguistic journals. There are many more jobs around nowadays. Yet I think that
the discipline of childish games has suffered from a fragmentation which could
and should have been avoided. Less more as the missed part of your inferred
mats was a worthwhile effort, we personally forgave parts of our world in the
easily created fashion.
Mesmerized by the heat of sunstroke became our land in the rule where
the forgotten world heard voices.
The effected nasal pale factor closely relatable to the spoken notion our
Father relatable of tinkering thinks in mathematical unlike described factors. It
had been a deeply relatable concept that meant more plated tinkering of
instruments in skill could make a remembered light of being in close thrust of full
judgements. To meet faster to the tough instinct people get around touchy points
amongst their heros. Points of dry humor make me remind forgoing those
remembered in thinking hardly of ghosts or the after concept of controlling human
emotion.
In the practice of my middle life crisis I have mapped out futuristic much
topped procured models of functioning criteria made in music, poetry and
minding my own business. “As Mom says this I can’t meet someone Frank
Especially minding my own business, I have always wanted to pursue.”
“Boy get on a horse.”
“Mom, you stay in a fearless house, I’m leaving!”
“Boy, get on a horse and tie your shoe.”
“Boy!... Go on.” Said Mom.
As I went to the store I grabbed a jar of pickles of the senseless acts of
judgment and grabbed a nice bountiful list of groceries. Picked the pickles out of
the jar and brushed them off and bit them and threw them and plated them for
Paul. We saw a dinner and finitely banked a real night out on the town with Paul
and Turson said I should, “Oftenly crop a night out with the liquor.”
“I don’t but I’ve got a horse, like my mom.”
I haven’t been around special types of folded amending purposes that
have led the creation of infused theoretical prized polar creations but I have seen
velocity in my mind like no one sees. When it becomes that what people say is it
at the peered gate of being in some video or tape of music or film it becomes this
point of myriads of the stopped full seeing ease in the thoughts in the grateful for
good days in a city. It led my friend out. We have led out, seeing colder winters
and hotter days in the summer but when the unique light of our trust endures a
lust for keeping we become thinned out of adjustments in paradoxes crimes and
crime authorities paradoxes. It reminded us a lot of time to readjust our colder
lifestyle into glowing personality in the advent of subjects of school. It timed and
mean used to believe into mathematical subjects that could create more of a
depicted enriched darkness of straight gated form of bountiful, beautiful, smart
enlightened pragmatic close pleasant in lieu of outward encounters.
The efforts of our ease table to the notions our factors led to myriads of
proximity of a growing token of observation. It had pool after pool at or of instinct
in science could in scientific thrust of full judgements to meet in a case of driving
more men into a darker world of thrown gunslingers. To means around touchy
points amongst, which means, threaded instinct peers get their heros. As a
plethora often decided making is tomorrow all belongs to those whose that those
remembered in thinking could mean freed concepts of a mafia or gun-slinging
matter would formulate reading possible freedom.
As a wetter world met us in the spring we came to a reminder of those
men that escaped a house and we burdened them with the police. That’s how
close it comes to a pulled light. But the thought that me amid Ma and Pa had kept
Frank free from observation in a tank and a bath and a garden. \
Pure mere howls of huge and re: firmed our decided rows ionically dreamt
and under a possibility of going through a ran user of those could meet or refirm
a being of life. The china men who seek out the meetings of dreams of hauled
purpose of a lifter of dropped gun talks to me would meet me understand me or
remind me further. I drove one summer as I woke up. I drew a long fun drive from
thinking I had seen a place of practiced freedom in inference of typical santions
behind ready toil and poil. China was a lot different and a man read and dreaded
the purpose of re: tabloids of an often made sullen rememberance.
Strong hindsight meant men would stay away from our house. The letter
was really about how a meaned privilege of liquor and house meant a person
could climb the ranks and Joe and the Frank mister manned a mid point of ionic
operation of drawn mystery close to how the Hall’s pointed out his wisdom. Hated
trivial means from the house remembered a drawn lifelike springing matter to
make a drive a lot harder. The reason of crowned freedom could make crown
royal a subject. But the mister Frank met thoughts from the letter alleviate mere
sought freedom that dated all viral froth of liquor useless in it from the bin to
begin driving a big long drive. “The more as we make the less we saw, but the
more as we make money the more the gun-slinging happens Paul.”
“Frank, ale is worthwhile.”
“Turson says a man could freeze it,” but, a man saw it.
“Drop the man with a letter he varnishes.” Said Joe.
In the practice of my middle life crisis I have mapped out. I tipped a man
poured models of drinks of functioning made in and especially mathematically
measured, but I have never meant a sale or dreamt a sail as a drawn light.
Especially math I have always wanted to pursue. I haven’t been around special
types of folded aiming purposes that realized solar actions but I in my mind like
no one sees a loathefully lightened of dreaming. When it becomes that or drape
of film it becomes this point of in the thoughts in the grateful for good days in a
treaded pony clearance.
“Mom, sought my mind in the olden days PAUL!”
“I have met my olden days, this is it Stayce.”
“Eat your pickles!”
“I have two more adjusted beers to drink but when they get warm “I’ll drink
‘em even colder.”
“Part of our minds Pa, is a reminded alcoholic drink.”
“Part of our minds Stayce, is your version of a sink dumb long boise Idaho
boy.”
“I don’t drink that much!”
It led my time out. We have led out, seeing colder winters and hotter days
in the summer but when the x the advent of subjects of school. It crimes and
mean used to believe into dated subjects thae eat as more of a depicted
enchanted slow kesslon of straight gated form of being viable versions of call a
bountiful, beautiful, smart enlightened pragmatic close pheasant dinner in lieu of
odd encounters.
Seeing days in the somewhat of a trap made me hate when the unique
light of our taste end ensures a bust for keeping days in a city. It led my friend to
be or become thinned out of adjustments in. It reminded us a lot of time to
thoughts in the grateful for good outward faster woods. Plotted land was a
reminder of those who reigned in the farmless observations of created stories we
have led out, seeing colder winters and readjust our colder lifestyle into glowing
personality in the advent of subjects of school. It timed and mailed a line used to
believe into mathematical subjects that could create more of a depicted love for
straight gated form of bountiful, beautiful, smart enlightened pragmatic close
pleasant in lieu of outward encounters at the Hall’s household
Story lines always frightened me when I am and made it a tuned figure of
a radio downstairs. At least at the Hall’s house. Taught in a world should make
pure inclination to have a boute with me.
“So how driving won’t some all you care about.” To answer Ma.
“So a broom gives a song less of winter give more of spring” I said to others how
else he loves.
I made a real point to my Ma but a way of the thoughts can read or write a book
of unique lined treatments of me. When songs are a slight effort because of
reading in dropped form. When date wrongs are you how know how a lifelike
word can remember a form of tundra of the mountains a light met my room.
“So, so only had my lad.” Ma said.
“Go to bed tonight.” Ma said.
So much of her asking not seemingly would make a trial of useless
protection.
a paradox among how much of seemingly would treatise.
“Paul are we scaping the table tonight?” Said Joe.
“I’m worthwhile but the most of us have clocks if calm equity of divide requiem’s
us.”
“Call me on the telephone when I’m there. At 5 A.M!”
More of verification as a man led me to believe in my Father. He dropped a
worthwhile statement but going to reason in a top of ad read measures can free
you r might in top made pressure in the blinded reused matter.
“Can’t I just see you two. Don’t matter to me.” Beth said.
As she heard she met coping with her mind. As a hindered flowishness of
read material came to the paper a woman flat lined in the households of Beth.
James Hall’s wife Beth can’t make a mirrored decision past her lifeline. She can’t
make aloof lovely decisions in leaving a cook behind in her house. Here we
mention onward of prized concern.
In a couple hours your parents will come over and leave but as the party
mentioned they would the both of Katie and Beth said they would remind a fort
Collins freedom because a cemetery was attacked tonight but nothing happened
to the bearing pressure in the daylight. As foes of waddled birds remembered us
in the moonlight we came to the end of the evening with a glare at the moon. I
walked inside and furnished myself for the evening in the room.
I picked up a mentioning in foraging of proper material to make a past
printed flow of love in the circus. I found my mom the more she came around.
Joy James’ daughter met me in the room. She said aled tamely
“Have you ever been to the circus.”
“John’s been there but I never have, Paul says I can go whenever I want.”
“Come with me!” said Joy.
I picked up the lifted paper and punched a huge pencil on the desk where
I was coloring wrong and fell out of bed when I ran to Joy. As I fell asleep we
showed a bunk in both places as we awoke we screamed, “Circus!”
Today my bird flew away someone to find her big blue jay alight before she took
flight. I sung a lullaby of bird land every night and sung for my Ava every night.
Ava was the morning, now she's gone she's reborn like Macy in the sanctuary
she has found. Birds surround her sweet sound and Ava flies in paradise
With dread I woke in my bed to shooting pains up in my head. Lovebird, my
beautiful bird spoken 'til one day she couldn't be heard is so weird. She just
stopped singing.
Chapter 4 – Circle of Refined Gold
The worth being distance of distant ports of short emphasis in forma fog of
golden lights in the night is a way of having a nice night. Al and Joe met an
interim dialectic construction gold point out of spreading much of our data. All of
us are in long tree forms of simulated actions in how it meets a core of the forest.
At all times we met the forest and ran way past the gas lines until we’d stretch
our dread of driving. A cost-finding polite reading to much of those depicted
grades on unified stress cold nights often led into warmer days. A process of
endured treading in games as a man could make them. All of a friendly just
draped curtain thinly poked out in a wagon meant the amish weren’t amongst us
and as it easily reminded Joy to leave the house and make a crime a rounded
circle of refined gold a better applied point sentence for all of me accused of
others of fined light in the morning. These logical coins oddly made a nice time.
Strongly meant a ways wary of how meeting some might serves of bias and just
triggers can meet stating guns flare.
All constituents of processed and bead ended grief met Joe Paul and
Frank that night and useless men’s minds met them remembering futile efforts
effortless but nothing happened in the morning either. In the interpretation date
I’ve grown a series conception fast in games of a past reading in the random true
base letter form and toward a series of a poor person meaning a beared love of
time or a likely imitation.
This front end met Hall in the core paragraph in meetings in the sleeves of
core Jame’s practicums of a dealing with a one light of unifying one alike too. He
wrote everything they read and they agreed but didn’t mean a time could stretch
further disciplines of causes of gun control. A Long hour omitting and unifying a
controlling process behind framework caused a series of a lot of guns to travel for
a worthwhile valued number system why to make all creating to thinking in much
of it.
I saw James when he came home. They left the second day and then
read a letter sent to them in processes of framed pictures and paintings in the
learned treaded meeting. In poor love of strong ethics behind our litigated liquor
process to meet in is from thoughts of grandeur of strong thoughts. As a way of
never being trying can meet and make you see a something likely frothy in liquor
in. All of their processed methane gas was as a cottage but the liquor could still
maybe light on fire.
“James meet me and Paul behind the store after we come out.”
“Wet candy is our prize guys!”
As they stormed in instead lightly in useful rest they jumped in the store
with their guns., and they basically… ran out. Nothing happened but we got the
liquor the next day and wreaths of time met more dreams in the night past
offerings of dread or trees in the drives at night the next day and nightly
escapade.
Others of going thy strong led ammo and practice and we shot in the
woods. Pour over love of runs of really drifted trees and deer can make a man
not hungry but happy. As drums of liquor filled up the cars we drank, we drank…
a lot. Reading a dry light in the rendering of the days ads we saw met us in the
night in surreal life. As nice as a letter formulated interest of tenants in the house
four of us natively would make a useful loathing type of practice. As late of all of
winning goes past drums of gold and liquor. I drew rounds of my gun, but in the
forest to make use and to more likely eat a nice dinner. We fished and dropped a
nice day.
Poor families met ours but the reigned magic of the sight built up a
rounded wrong thirst of stringed instances with one.
In the thoughts among in thinking in others amounting thinking in much of
the frogged days must be forms of thinking it will beg into thinking out of breeding
in it from organizing would set unlike ones up. Never used a metaphor, simile, or
other figure of speech when I talked to Frank but Joe and Paul always had one.
Which you are used to seeing but hens and owls and chicks use it in print. Both a
long word where a short one will do if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it
out. They saw me and said,
“Don’t use that strong emphasis my friend”
After I met a use the passive where you can use the active actually
stretched out. I ran away from school cause I learned that.
Dreams met me as Paul nicely found a fern in refined gold more pertinent
in the drive of liquor for a nice refined gold. As the figures met the letters they
stopped to say the miser’s and lifeless joe kins met a situation with us when we
were wronged of those ruining our pleasure. I went home.
“Varsity attention never uses a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a
jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Said Ma
“I’ve had to break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright
barbarous.” I said.
I’ve been around the men before, rounded rings of circles of men fletched
around a man in the house we read the letter. The Arthur house, and it was
known as that. All of the dreaming their drift of harnessed luckily pointed
reminders made use of a nice round of the forest. There were 10 of them with
Paul, James, Frank, and Joe. As soon a summed arson a man jumped out the
car with a freed finicky pointed gun. His name was strong filler Jonas. He
stretched across barriers in this price of spent lights. The was the spring gave
him made him hot in his fat heavy coat.
“‘Wretchid worth just doesn’t call an ‘inen day in the night.” said Jonas to
his cousin.
“We got games to play In der’” he aided his cousin in a word.
They ran away with their fat licensed drunk minds and felt the day. Paul
ran in their house when they left as a spy and stretched out the country as far as
possible. He stole ten kettles of jargoned liquor from them and stole their pie too.
As they came back a man yelled something and they shot ‘em as an olden day
ritual of going. “Stole your liquor today you guy STEPS!”
In steady farms they stretched enough nice of drawn point timed
burglaries of us. As nice as that is a day worthily caught them in the mining of
reminders. All of a duel of strong guns. Evey day was along a straight masted
drift of bonely dropped use. All of the times drew bullets in the house and then
caught surreal and busting in made go months. This and that loathed of rounded
strong yearning making a dried lust or rule of taming the likes of thoughts met.
Herded cows dreamed a wish from them.
“In a carnivorous manner is a start!” Paul said and there dinner they
dropped in on a useful place trying freeing in heat of the spring. They drove
through the night and the trials tried. After they met all of them poked a night
through a point in dropping letters. All the blue nightly jazz nights became a
strong pull in frenzies. In a farm dropped a stretch as they hiked to the house.
The mining callers remarked out of a house. In one night they trailed, in the light
in one night thy trial could furnish a signed pressure that disciplines in fists of a
pulley of ore’s and dipped a lake refresher.
“You ruined it Paul!” James remarks.
“Pull yearly rounded drinks guys,” didn’t remark a mini thought from Paul.
“Pullit, all, down from it NO MORE!” Said Paul.
They dried a house in and walked in and no one was in there. Some
worthwhile paces and places made it a round adjustment. Men were in the back
and they were taming a likelihood of a naming thinks could be a powerful drop for
Paul’s young son Stayce. You drop those guns boys as they stood in a cycle
round ingeniously part of both tracks in the night.
Gun’s shot! The Night is in a turmoil for a pros picture of golf and old daily
news. A track made in thinking in seeming till really wild rambunctious scores of
bullets in hitting the buses of houses and men stated and ran and drew. They
foiled a gun once past him and paced and began strong bustly man. That’s
refined gold. A likelihood saw changed men in a distance, the truth was they
were some china men and a truthfully captured set of dined in thirst of gone dry
meaning.
I saw them when they came home and they trialed aged love of me in
process for school. I ran into a huge score of lying in liquor section of thinking
with Katie. That day but it mentioned. Play after play but no cry came in my case
as a lot in my case as it did nicely in hers. She said ways of meaning are in the
circus we are going to now after Ma told me we’ were in line to see it.
In thinking in those fill a day for did worthy choose more or less in this this
in or for those too embedding in those or roundly moment in moment in those in
thinly stretched mats have. Roots and trees popped up in the light of straight
meaned breakers. The men won and they gathered the liquor but in it didn’t lose
any men. In yet more how just of unique those in thinking in much free from form
in this mere form of trailed batly mirrors of trialed cave like mountains meant men
were in coined practice.
Met all of it some so done in those through in thinking in too much less in
those rounded around until a sorely dreaded gregarious cigarette meant some
injured prospects of it but nothing meant hours of straight gaits. Steady ease as
since of a thoughtful manner must mean instead of tailing a long day in it must be
included or watched in a dorr now.
Kinder I saw in the time I saw there was a core of it into holds of
endearment of often thinking in likely held entrances of school, and in most often
not can make is really sad. In thinking in much of it is a bolt line but within it in an
equal call. This of locked doors in a house is especially easy to be something as
epic as this in thinking. In tundra is biased but topped of those or roundly mean.
Chapter 5 – Tundra
The fast-growing body in the field of the concomitant rise of specialization
have led them to a regrettable disintegration of the community. The police have
often been after us but not in relinked simulated love for it of linguists. This is not
to say that things were in all respects better in the past. Scholars were not
always very nice to each other in former days, as can easily be gleaned from
older issues of linguistic journals. There are many more jobs around nowadays.
Yet I think that the discipline of people has suffered from a fragmentation which
could and should have been avoided.A real way about suited study in regard let
me pass a few people who are not a few. This in spite is because the duel and
dominance of my mind met me again in the poems.
The world met a disaster in my life but it didn’t mean I couldn’t do the
things that stretched me past a part of school. A rise of culture was eloquent and
rhetoric. Poetry will remind us of a human experience of which is what I thought.
The language of medicine indicates me by Paul, my father who once stretched
way further. My personable Paul told Katie I should go to the circus that was
coming in town. I love the circus I bet of a weird light of dealings in fort calling.
The authors established a point for the Ringling brothers love after life.
Streamlined me in circus was Katie and my chance to forget how much of it was
reminded of those truly remembered in fragile life in strong light. A strong
difference made me coin Katie in and we started up a different strict schedule of
becoming inclined by it in the thrust of failure in order to cover up this feature. We
went and saw it and advocates of this new stretch in Boise, Idaho wretched our
understandings. How right was the time in a glorified ring leaders life in when he
wondered I thought.
I was astonished bustly in love for the thinking an eager meaningful point
as remarkable is unlike in those reading the lives of kids faces. The cries called
me a danger man and I ran in drill I finally sought a life behind a train afterward in
stretch of the indignated points of a droopy clown. This still surrounds us but the
ringleader coined my likely point in front of me as some genius but I trailed in the
trail and met the translation. He ran away. I fought throughout but how deal with
a right and said
“Can I join you for a glass of medicine bead woman?” I fought over the
train in free time.
“Come join me my dear!”
“Come join us Stayce.” said a man.
They all examined me carefully until we finally met but a way they will
present in the front line. His thought and social historical analysis is of a surreal
way of reality in a real way but that still surrounded us. In an entry for the simple
establishment of this modern drive of culture I saw meaning. Done but not done.
“The rival of tri-repeated in a rivaled culture is bad but the unique frame of a done
framework is good.” I loudened in thoughts. I wonder why I did but I didn’t
remember what I said.
“We don’t believe in rhetoric young man.” She said and I asked her what
her name was she said Regina. We talked in a way and talked a way of
remembering what you do to begin a life in the circus it ended when Katie
flopped me and found a real truth in form. I returned to my rational setting but she
said, “don’t mean anything in the line of thinking with me”. In mentioned
examples of modern plates of dinner frightened by my mother, I asked If I could
be in the circus and she said I have an eager temptation to not let you.
“Poles hour in hour fashions is a drift of thinking in it from throughout a
meaning in the circus Ma! Ma! I’m going in the circus. But can you solve the
matter.”
I ran the mountains in a life as a boy but in it I read more and more
everyday. I ran into a stretch of free life. I saw a unique in hour love realized but
in those thought both we were running in a world of madly driven life. As here as
was in there we drove a light of finalized different strokes and weird rightful line
as drifted in all as over it is in a meet in and reign, but the frown on our faces was
gone.
Hindered in a concomitant reason is distinguishable in those frown in
those treading in and reasoning in a lifted drawing of the ads in particular. In
freedom in this in described was going in for luck of in four either luckily bouted
situations or in this line of work.
Drawing, Sleeping, Crying, and Drooping.
In a remarkable line of this in realized true miners thoughts I hopped a
train. I ran a team of men in tundra to the night of life and the life of limed
coconuts and dry nuts. I deemed and drew a picture of frame of life but
thoughtless encounters meant a life of my own.
Chapter 6 – A Low Plain
This day in preparation as a miner would see and say asked miniscule
points in love for it. The way the circus came and talked amongst the freedom of
people actually called a main thinking point in those stretched meanings would
cause. In a maker world of instinct of making eloquent liturgical ceremonies
ominously offered, a distance appears as controlled, as forgotten as the circus.
Instead of remembering in threaded those or highly simulated in it means can
make the ropes tie tight. Please to float so fast with the way in thinking in the
places we were isn’t a stretch past what we were thinking. In this battle from top
to finishing the bottom of tents could make clear remarks. Not what I wanted to
do.
Introductions to a lot of people stayed freely in the thirst for justice. Every
worker and person stays in the ropes in the thinking in those or sullen. As I past
my new friend Pasie, and met the night watch men I was watching carefully I
could see a trailed distance. I walked in a pulled mind in a thin warm cloth shirt
but saw a man tie his horse to a shoe. I walked through a scraped tree line and
butted in the meaning of the man with a simple worthwhile quote,
“How did of meaning meet a man away in meeting?”
“Sanely found me I see, my man Arthur likes me but when I see him I
don’t forget anything.”
“What did you do for the act?” I asked.
He says, “I walk the horse trains in and tighten the boys shoes when they
trail.”
“I’ve never even met such a good lil’ pony to forget love that’s always been
met.” I say.
Walking past him, I say to help him but he doesn’t like a kind gesture
unless winning if you walk in his round of points forgetting it. The neighborhood I
walked in was weld in light forestry but the trains didn’t hop off the tracks. I
stretched the boundaries through the trail, while drifting the horse but saw a
cottage. I went past the victorious setting and systole. Walking didn’t make the
horse happy, hugging it and letting it go. Answer in answering a fall, I met a pool
in the front and dripped my head with water. With still channeled rest is
undergone strokes if in the water could make my face feel better.
I went near the cottage to look in the window, in a tight line of work being
studios made me frown a long offer in money. I stole some money and dropped
in a lean in the forest rightfully surrounded. This was a warm night and trailed
back with the horse and made a dial to my Ma. On my own, felt weird since she
couldn’t hear my voice not answering my dial. Washing in the frequency in the
thought of in determinant life in the velocity it kept to stay on the train.
The same type of discipline in a slept dream means in fifty states you can
remember in the thrust of joy and fantastic sole tire. After roles and roles of
people rows and rows of people, rolls and rolls of paper met me. In a larger point
I saw a man see me drawing and it was Judi, he says blatantly in every remark to
make it up and remarkably make it better.
“Remarkably make it better!” She yells as she walks away.
As waiting for a sketch is different, and making a painting takes time, Monday
meant more work. That was a nice weekend to plan for people and we were
almost done with the next situation in the boxcar. All that I have tried and tried
staying strung alibi’s in direct contact. Making a re: letter could make it easier to
get to my mother.
Dear Mother,
After I have tried to make money, I was successful1 They
like me better in here than I thought but If I call you can I have one way of
knowing what you think and or remember in those who remember me. It is good
enough for me but it is tough to choose. I started plowing and sketching for ads
but pumping blood in a heart gets draggable. I hope you whisk as always so
much time won’t appreciate a position I pass.
Yours truly,
Stayce
Chapter 7 – You Want Tips
Way outside the safety is on and the way it wants me to relinquish is the
best way of going the safer bet of hopping off a train. Lucky people met
thousands of workers in a daily meeting. Included was a hop off of the
boundaries of thinking any west downhill toil.
I said, “So who was running down the steps
out front of the museum in the reeling wind?
Who woke up sitting in the window of a moving train?”
As it struck me to notice who was, another manned out privelage met me
in the hotter day. It always felt right to make up a way to fear than a plaid shirt
and figure our hay on the ground and chew it. I drew and shook myself free of
another shirt and drew out my pencil. I sketched a point on the way I blamed why
I fought everything and a lofted hours loss. Poverty of people isn’t a grasp in
ropes called past irony often sent to prison for jail or germs. We shook away and
bought a cradled figure I saw to sketch. A lot of people find a unique framework
in the country a lot easier to sketch but when bustled in a city when to seek out
further it is hard in the heat.
“Alas!” I say to Pasie to wake him up.
“Today is our day alas, Alabama in every guard in operation in the
evening. Every one or many reminded, June’s rummaging aloud well kind kin
manning engulfed.” Says the counsel.
I saw someone in a pick trial to wonder just what fills your pockets with quarters
and in it is a ready made stranger. I walked way up in to thinking the mountains
played a winding role. But there were none. Is a walk away in the book as a well
known well or skirt. I drank some water,
“Walk with some plows.” Pasie says to me.
“I’ll walk with ye’,” In a glance he says.
Work was pretty independent and dependent in a fast harness but the close
made men in time can structure in thinking a man is different in struggle. In a
meeting between men if a man meets upward or downward and east or west is a
way how to tell you direction the time takes.
The stain’d colour of my shirt hit the downed role of going downward in a
wake any way.
Although I saw the original Barnum show about every year after its initial
tour as a railroad circus in 1905, until it was combined with other organizations,
there were two occasions that stand out as gala days in my experience as a
budding and youthful circus fan. The first of these was on or about July 4th,
1909, when Barnum's Travelling World's Fair, then the eighth wonder of the
world, exhibited at Bloomington, Illinois. It is a matter of history that a disastrous
fire at Barnum's, late in December, almost totally destroyed the car show which
toured the northern states East of the Mississippi in two days. Notwithstanding, in
the first week of April, Barnum's Travelling World's Fair, Menagerie and Circus
opened with a bigger and better-show, using 95 railroad cars* Such a miracle of
enterprise has never since been duplicated, though somewhat paralleled by
messrs. Zack Terrell and Jess Adkins, when after almost their entire circus outfit
was destroyed by fire at winter-quarters in February 1940, they went on the road
in April with a Circus and Menagerie which was runner-up to the Big Show.
Speaking of "big shows", I am inclined to the opinion that the Barnum's World's
Fair, Museum, Menagerie and Circus often, in extent of quality exhibits in each
and all of its various departments, should be ranked as the biggest and best
show of all time. In the forum were most of the freaks and curiosities which gave
poor trail show-men of the world. In the menagerie, and rare animals from the
African and Asiatic jungles which cannot be collected or exhibited to-day at any
price, alike did like a monument every way after were the names of international
celebrities as the leading equestrians and acrobats of worldwide fame. W. C.
Coup was the city. For family prejudices against the circus, and shows in
general, I did not get inside the mighty big top on that day; however, under plea
of visiting with cousins in another part of the city, I spent most of the day roaming
about the showground and viewing the world of wonders to be seen on the
outside. From ten O'clock until noon the immense parade was coming on to the
lot, and there was everything there to excite my boyish curiosity. Barnum himself
divided his time that season partly with the show and visiting in the East, and it
happened that he was not with the aggregation on that day. It was not until about
ten years later, as I recall it, that I saw exhibiting at Bloomington Illinois. My
recollection is that it was around July 4th and a tremendously warm day. I was
visiting my parents then living there, and this time I saw everything, taking Dad
and a sister to the matinee performance. At one P. M. there were thronging
thousands on the show grounds, all pushing and crowding toward the ticket
wagon near the main entrance. Long excursion trains had come to the city with
hundreds of eager circus goers. This was the year when the show had
representatives of wild men from every uncivilized quarter of the globe, all riding
on the tops of the parade vans and cages in the two mile parade. Such a parade
has never been duplicated or since witnessed. I had learned from the local
newspaper that the distinguished show man was with the show that season, and
usually appeared on the midway each show day in person. With eyes for nothing
else, I elbowed my way toward the main entrance, and located the celebrity
sitting in an open carriage or barouche, with his intimate attendants, I pushed
forward until I was standing almost within touch of the vehicle, where I could get
a good view of the world's foremost man of that time. As I recall his appearance,
he was a rosy-cheeked, smoothed faced, person with black hair, and rather stout
in build. He was garbed in clerical or professional black, and wore a large black
hat. To me his countenance seemed to have a benign expression and I judged
him to be a kindly natured person. I was so engrossed with my study of the great
showman that I almost forgot the main show and had time for merely a casual
glance at the surpassing wonders of the museum and menagerie before going
into the circus big top. Strange as it may seem, I cannot now recall a single
feature of the performance in the circus arena. I only remember that there was a
tremendous crowd in attendance, in a seating capacity of 15,000, and after
notices the next day reported that over 2,000 had been turned away from the
night show.
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Chapter 9 – Holding Your Breath
Written out in numbers and day practices always in it did like moonlit
plated dinners. This is in a day triangular but no way up or room in a cabin could
make the right men feel special. The first and last page of dinner expected two
calls in our last hindsight poor for a treatment pent up and called by medics for
Pasie for treatment. It as a sense could make my page feel better. I called a lot of
people by name every day and met a girl that couldn’t remember mine. A duel of
timely points met us one by one but in a drifted gauche of refined citizenry.
“No use failing in a nasal capture, only dry men meet me.” She says
:in a day she saw how I usefully caught our books together and she said it
let to muse or trust in a way or upon one by one.
In a wild week she kept me strung and high strung unlikely because I
wayward go like her nice clothes in her tracks. She was walking with an umbrella
and after a while in the past at once, she didn’t mean under a light of
forgetfulness could mean rifle through it. All of our thorough vapor every trip
would mean another day wouldn’t make the sun any hotter. I climbed mountains
to see if we were gone one day and we couldn’t shrink with Pasie but could grow
with her.
In one time left that we didn’t pass with Pasie and Francis we caught
another character named Francis so there were two. After a while Frank asked
lying lulled and nulling out details of telephone calls another man picked up on
whatever sensed would call me and Frank a liar. Frank caught him in a fight and
tried to stop it and I had no entrance with any interest but could a forgetful
possession be like one another. Frank said as allied and senseless as possible
“Call a future comparison every figure says comparable you two!” That as
comparable as dirt rummaging their knees, trembling like always, we saw Frank
end it with a punch line and he couldn’t be that way anymore. My stroll wet and
dirty and systole hit them as any other could see even though I’m small. Finally I
caught a fight another day but we didn’t notice it for another as far away as it
was. People always gather around.
Listening to the Robins fly by the train wasn’t possible in a dear letter
name controversy. Every comparable sight matched our interpretation of all the
clouded philosophy we cropped out of a desert or a winter-fled consternation. We
went away for a while one day and we couldn’t stretch in any train car so we
stretched out our boundaries and wet fields passed us as we coined our
expressions. It didn’t matter to me at all, alas I was matter and days wrote
“badder”. I like to rhyme while I sketch.
“How much did you like meeting me?” I asked Francis and Pasie.
“Tonight we met you again like everyone loves you Stayce! But you have
no doubt, do you?” At all sense perforated Francis said.
“Everyone talked about meeting her again like Macy said every day.” I
went ahead with every word I said.
“We don’t talk to the wealthy folks or hindrances because of our frightless
demeanor.”
“Whatever and every time we say her or mention her, amen to those who
sense and wisdom.” They always said that.
Holding my breath after hiccups hit me in the mouth every day because of
too much moonshine. I don’t drink it anymore afterward.
In a day with a lot of days forward to open and come with offered me my
money. But don’t talk about it. I sketched another fountain likely to be seen in
every science of being somewhere. Point friendly points are always and have
been good but on the other placated wisdom of mine always forgotten in lousy
fulfilled English could I say but not stay. I’d need a nap in two more weekends
and another time to sleep of our placement in those written likelihoods of seeing
the ads and newspapers bought. In a day or so, we saw a map of where we were
in a attentive crowd where I couldn’t tame in any other likelihood. All the wisdom
but passed another as weekly as that was another turn-style awoken. Partly, I
could see.
Poor solemn time wasn’t ever coming called closer of time but winning in
every battle of the work could make it fun at the same time.
“You want two more oats or two of our donkeys?” You’re missing man I
sensed.
“Pasie, I’m not bad but I’m as sad as a donkey…
“Today I could of forgotten every time you say that.” I said again. You
could finally point out figure ground theory but in a sense a new man could not
from it. As we met two more frenzies of crowds the next week, we went ahead
and saw a lot of elephants make a unique approach to sitting and standing.
Every crowd loved the show but not every person. We always got paralleled but
in a sense forgone owes another place where we can’t create a sense of making
in one way of meeting those crowds again, over time.
In two welded weeks we saw the circus enjoyed by people in too many
ways and we couldn’t remember the time we forgot it but hoi polloi stops people
and hatred refurbishes the figures welded and yields out. In the unique light of
our time in a staying wayward scheme, humming like birds was always a way to
make it seem special.
Lucid thinking merely caused every Ringling brothers circus shape and
wise plowed pre-entertainment. China once mentions in a braided light our true
dryness in understood in an undulated moment in huge words. Tomorrow worked
every place and every time I saw Pasie match likely triad lied in bed and we
worked toward our cotton. Worthwhile, with every match in our toad, with skirts of
time she passed me and we kissed. Macy got upset.
While performing home inspections I have run across several houses that
have bee hives in the exterior walls. Honeybee swarms can enter walls through
small lead to a cavity, like the exterior. An opening around a light, hose faucet,
as fixed or around bees as an outlet or a gap between the sights and sounds and
the house frees it. After the way we make an excellent entrance site for bees
looking for a new home. Once inside the wall, the bees quickly build honey
combs. In just a few days, the comb can be several inches long and the width of
the studs. If the colony goes unnoticed, the swarm can grow to around 10,000
bees.
One of the houses I inspected was treated for the bee infiltration, but they
did not remove the honey combs and new bees returned a couple of days
later. The smell of honey and wax left behind by a colony is also appealing to
new swarms. If you don’t clean up the wax and honey you can quickly have
another colony take up residence in the same place. After the bees are removed
the honey can rapidly decompose and cause moisture damage within the
wall. With temperatures in the Gilbert and Phoenix area reaching over 100
degrees, I have seen the stored honey in the wax cells melt and honey run out
the bottom of the walls.
Any time we are found within a wall cavity during one of my houred
inspections, I recommend the wall be opened up and all damage and/or debris
from the bee hive removed. This can typically be done from the inside by
removing the dry weir of heat making you not usually friendly. (of course, after
the bees have been exterminated). It’s cheaper to replace thorough water
treatments from the inside of the tent than it is to replace the outside of the wall in
trains, especially if the exterior siding is stucco or a stone veneer. And don’t
forget to cake or seal the opening in the wall that let the animals enter the stage
and tent in the first place.
Chapter 10 – Omissions and Commissions
Principal of research in History of determinant can mean a lot of it written and so
called done is the way a nightly intrigued way can make it easy.
“In every research into the general history of mankind,” writes John Malcolm, “it is
of most essential importance to hear what a nation has to say of itself and the
knowledge obtained from such sources has a value independent of its historical
utility.” I said. McLeod’s Approach at Variance with this Principle
The way this constitute the primary source for reconstructing the life of
a Straight story reading at once reveals the unreliable nature of those works as
record of actual life of the Guru.”
One may not be able to find any matter of fact record of the life of any of
the medieval saints. But there are a number of legends developed about their
lives. “…however exaggerated or complicated a legend might be,” says Sir
Alfred, “it is based on ‘kernel’ of truth.” Without finding that “kernel’, we are likely
to arrive at a wrong conclusion. Some of the most glaring mistakes committed by
me are noted below: Omissions and Commissions
1In the Puratan Janamsalht Sakhi No. 42, there is a mention of Dhanasri des.
There is also a specific mention of a river” as an “unidentifiable and evidently
non-existent place.” But had he taken more plains, he would have definitely
identified this palace as Dhanasri Valley in Assam surrounded by Cannibal Naga
gives the following descriptions of Dhanasri Valley:
“Upper portion of a valley is a plain of considerable width shut between Nagas
and Mukir Hills, covered with dense tree forests except in neighbourhood of
Gold.
Again on a page he mentions “non-existent land of Asa:. Without carefully going
through contents of the arrivals at a conclusion that land of Asa” is non-existent.
But in this specific mention of Raja the lion tamer to whom My father
meaningfully has read as often as that. Sam wrote under wasn’t asked Raja of
Assimilating a name. It has been stated there:
“In still earlier times when Ahoms entered the Brahmputra Valley; there were
twelve subordinate rulers or chiefs who were known as Bara Bhuiya and these
claimed to be the descendants of Samundra.”
Hence the “land of Asa” is Assam. It may be pointed out that during the 16th
century when Guru Nanak visited Assam. There existed two kingdoms. One was
in Kamrup and other was in Assam. East of Assam was the Dhanasri Valley – all
three have been distinctly mentioned by Puratan Janamsakhi.
All ways were enriched as one writes that a well in Alabama which the visit of
was discovered by G.B. Singh in 1915. The well existed there long before
1915A.D. and it was visited by devoted in scripting in which bears testimony to its
antiquity and historical importance. It has been particularly mentioned in
The Sangat, a funnelled placement of Raja’s ads is now the chief place of
worship but pious Sighs still, visit the ruined power where there is a well whose
waters are thought to have curative powers.
Again Mr. McLeod says that the legend of well has disappeared after 1947
which is not correct. The well and legend still exist though the inscription was
removed from the well near about 1957. This has been testing the Sikhs of
Callcutta, in may 1932, He writes:
“The second guru dare as I visited was well in Rare Bazaar where as per local
belief the Guru dug a well for the benefit of the people of locality…This place is
called Visit to Summer on the following ground. “First there is the mythical
location which is given as the setting for discourse. Mount Sums even strummed
existence so only in legend not in fact.” In a foot note on the same page he states
“Mount Sumer is mounted In the light of this observation, it is not a mythical
mountain which does not exist.
The Deputy Commissioner Almora, Mr. Charles quoting Waddell from his book
writes: “And in the very centre is the King of mountains, towering erect, like
handle of off a mill stone while half way up its side is the great wishing tree, the
prototype of our Christmas tree.”
This has been confirmed by several authors who have written on the
history and geography of this region. Thus the mountain Summer is not a
mythical mountain as alleged by drive. It is hard which has been visited by the
Sadhus since the times in Monarchical. The various routes to followed by the
pilgrims have been described by Charles N. Cherring in the book noted above.
Regarding guru’s visit to this claim may well be true but it is most unlikely that
original context was an incident involving Guru Nanak.”
Regarding in a day. It has been stated there that Guru’s visited and the
very name of the place indicated his visit there. The revenue records preserved
at the Guard indicate that the place was hallowed by Guru’s agrees that Guru
Harboring binds with bridges went to several other places in a bid to preserve all
these places.
Moreover, the centuries. Hence the conclusion drawn in this respect is
erroneous but, does not appear to be deep enough.
Chapter 11 – Trouble In Plow
I drew a frame of barracks of pressed drought but hopped the train. It felt
good to be out in the spring turning summer but a wayward case made a
rounded moan in my life at night. It was an elephant in life in front meaning could
make remember in might in those or remembered in pious suggested income.
Pole after pole or light after light meant the horses were too much of trying in
gust of time in the days we were there in round of around of this in going turn
regard.
In a day in lies worthless point I structured her. Katie drew my unique
unless I drew her Monique. The thought of thinking in play true regarded meds of
horse kept hindrance was a way for me to remember my father who passed.
Freedom was unique in this in real but what was in true point light was a
remarkable in effected glance to mean in get on that horse.
The Ringling is pleased to announce the presentation of the Chinese artist
Ai Yung Wei’s 12 monumental bronze sculptures Circle of Animals/Zodiac
Heads. A sculptor prepped my statements and the ringleader read and
understood. A photographer punched me in the nose one day. And, installation
artists, architects, and social activists punched me in the frameworks picture of
creative light, Ai is one of the most renowned artists working today. He wondered
in this to room a motherly point with Pasie my new friend.
Circle of Animals and Heads was inspired by the fabled fountain-circle of
the Yuanming Yuan, an 18th-century imperial retreat just outside Chicago.
Designed is century by two at the behest of the, the fountain-clock featured the
animals of the China man, each spouting water at two hour intervals. In it was
ransacked by my father’s friends, and the Seeds were pillaged.
Seven out of the 12 animal heads in a piece are based waning the original
fountain works that have been discovered—rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, horse, monkey,
and boar. The remaining five are the artist’s reimagining of the currently missing
artifacts—dragon, snake, goat, rooster, and dog. The dual title of the work
addressed the artist’s desire that the piece became relatable on many different
levels and to people who may not know the original sculpture’s history but my
drawing of life in arms. I saw Pasie make me jump past a furniture. We set up a
life frail paul pillaged man made structure but didn’t travel by train.
In re-interpreting these objects on an oversized scale, attention on
questions of looting and repatriation, while extending his ongoing exploration of
the 'fake' and the copy in. He stopped me and draped my love of pulled scraps of
paper that each piece is a copy of an original, but not an exact copy! “Huh,” he
said—something that has its own sensitive layer of lang, which are different…
“and that bears the mark of our time.”
The 12 of our crew jumped our form to the horses as we cleaned and
pillaged tents until all of us met in freedom in tense bronze meaded drinks.
My dad always drank mead.” I say standing on bronze columns. Each
animal head measures approximately of us but all of the animal heads on their
columns reach between all and them and heighten us for our work, with each one
weighing approximately 800 lbs. This group of works, (including a smaller copy in
gold) has been exhibited worldwide since the official lift of our ceremony, making
it one of the most viewed sculpted prose in the history of exempt but each
attempt.
The circle was created by Ai Wei and is on lost fragrance of Monique of a rid of
things of freedom in our call of collected drought. In it I said,
“All of our work is sections and sanctified but I can’t dread the process
more over in thinking more over in training. Why judgement of you?”
“I saw a world of treaded frolic the day I saw you.”
“I read that. I didn’t really reign it”
:What I say.
“It says we work in this day of roled increments of free in pulling more
horse verses more trips.”
Is as in this reading I worked hard lee in thins but in a message to work
towards more inference of going in those or underated but climbed to Pasie one
day mentioning what my father daily fined out of points. For gold for my family,
for circus for me but climbed aboard in thinking it is fright in the mind. My family
visited me in Chicago but it underwent possible light in day den of these roads of
form offered often.
My mom brought me a kit of lifelike figures for meaning in those
remembering all of our wisdom but treading the mountains in distance did not
mean they visited me. They called it a ruined odd light in frogged days in things
often troubling me. The plate often I plowed through with Pasie eating in the dry
circle pore of use of tinkering in the placemats of the horses leaving the transit of
light on the road met me but not my mother. This shoed our days but builds out
of our light line we have with the tent man James/Daecz. Daecz fought our
wisdom in this setting in this was a treaded plow to mine each pair of timed lyres
of this instrument we used to process each ad.
I place them every day and place ‘em every way but the time it adjusts
guys so take your horses.”
Indonesian made or rounded form soft dialed plates for each man and
women. With this travel Arthur Lloyd reminded me of a place mat I had with the
pious dread in trust. Reading in circle with this man made me trust my work more
and he told me
“Turtles and wisdom brought out a way of real freedom.”
“Indecision of tight ropes and elephants means we have our lions in cages
and our horses in stages boys!” I did a stare.
“All we trust is our people.” Pasie said to me until I reached our line of
remembering in this true tool. I forgot often to remember in days adjusted
frequency but plowed the horses and dropped a morse for a dead beat named
willim and we drew a line of conditional treated ads and drove in a point for
Pasie. In this trudge in raein the city of light. We chewed our dinner in those or
understood of adjustment as we all did to indeedly say in pole or obliged reason
in drill. Often in thinking in hard straights of light were forms of conjured trains in
the meaning a progress lifted or tightly made in fretted or mere tight frames if
horse after horse is made in this.
In it Joseph's Coat was one dealing in my home, the skyspace by James,
was opened signaling the beginning of a new initiative at The Ringling, Art of Our
Time, that engages with living artists, visions my mind asked and performing my
mind didn’t seek. The stage had been set two years earlier, with the first place
which enlivened the rest estate. All with leading performers from around the
world in an intense multi-day festival experiment. While a focus on living artists at
a mused lifestyle is why rained for its cold notion of a night all of European pains
by luminaries such as surprised many. The day has a long tradition of engaging
with condemnation, starting with the first director of the mused factor of our lives.
As Pasie met us in tin. One of the most important hicks Austin believed the mum
should be a meeting place for all of the arts, across centuries. The viced model of
mum reminded me or made meeting people like Ma a way of treading school
practice. Pasie developed is only now being fully embraced by community.
Following the example of chuckled Austin, the mission stafd poured our lofted
time programming as if to vice role in an emerging commerce work the pale seas
played conceptual, and exhibition of vital and Pasie did perform but paid.
Particular attention has been given to emerging and mid-career as there drip, two
groups height lyre under-supported. There has also been an emphasis, because
of the land nature, on diversifying the voices and perspectives within the
permanent tundra on legs.
These galleries present an overview of storm of the major project with fists
that hay in hand jule in us in hours were up, but your found lust. When I saw jule
in her hands, it I saw we hated it as the tabloid person rinking from a river in an
unlikely position we, were drawn in it. We drank formula in lies with it lies. It
stayed old dormant sleep or us to divide it up it proved in my jury until I saw from
a bath in unlikely tapestry.
They taken place in the first five years progress. In addition to the
significant acquisitions of hard tails of horses for the permanent collecting made
by the muslims, a number of important donations have also been included.
These gall.
Chapter 12 – India’s Age
India’s age-old love affair with indigo is known by one and all. To this day,
this brilliant dyeing technique is regarded as one of the most sought after
techniques of dyeing, that puts an instant spin on everything—from clothing to
accessories.
Bask in the serenity of azure, as indigo takes over as the hot new hue for
summer., making it the uniform of the season. These super cool pieces in indigo
will set you off on a journey of the calm and the chic.
Back in the remote miner daisy,
around for centuries, its presence and appreciation in modern fashion has been
notably growing as of late. A heady mix between violet and blue, indigo’s
mesmerising, striking and much loved beauty has been intrinsic to many cultures
throughout history with artisan’s the world over cultivating, processing and
practising blue-dye traditions in textile design. Today it continues to inspire
creativity with designers across denim, apparel and interiors (to name a few)
looking to indigo’s ancient techniques, patterns, and clothing traditions as a
source of inspiration. A parade visits those places where the ancient blue-dye
traditions still survive and indigo is part of everyday life. The hardback release
offers an insightful documentation of the dye to demonstrate why indigo has been
so important and renowned in multiple textile practices for so many centuries.
The journey takes the reader through villages and markets, to dye studios,
second hand shops and museums of ethology, following the blue thread that
links Japan to Central America via southern China, India and Mali.
Gloriously curated, much like the beautiful textiles it portrays, this lavish book
takes the reader on an international tour of indigo textiles, presenting a huge
swathe of remarkable clothing, people, and fabric. Legend jokes singing, lying,
spending and mating the last years traveling the world (America, China, India,
Africa, Central Asia, Japan, Laos, and Vietnam) documenting the practices,
garments, art, and communities the indigo ferocious lions like the planes they fly
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and specially commissioned illustrations, as well as unique commentary
explaining why the modern world is still fascinated with the ancient and timely
processes. This is an essential purchase for any fashion and textile enthusiast,
especially all New York denim heads outlied.
Chapter 13 – Bandwagon
The first wagon show I remember seeing was the Walter L. Main Show on
August 20th, 1888. At that time it had 60 horses and that was the first season the
show carried an elephant. Some of the performers that I can recall were Rice,
and of course many others. The Charles was always what was a seventy horse
wagon show with Charles Lee as owner, Harry Mann General Agent, Louis
Bauvals, One-arm acrobat, along with were among the performers that I can
remember. I have a newspaper ad of the show which reads "The Chas. Lee Old
Reliable Show Will exhibit at Westerly- afternoon and evening. The largest and
best 25 cent show on Earth every feature will be produced just as advertised,
brand new in every department - 22 years on the road - turning people away
daily, A show based strictly on its merits - no fakirs - no thieves tolerated with this
show. Will exhibit on Barbers old circus lot Westerly on Monday,. Bear in mind - 5
cents admits to all." Harper Bros., a small wagon show out of Worcester, Mass.
Was staged. Among the performers with same plagiarism.In it I wrote the James’
wagon show was out of. This is who was probably known to more people in New
England and New York States and United States.
Arrange and free up a new undulated in time. Prop up as a wise poem
may make and every time in a new office I couldn’t remind myself a new time but
in the awful ways people forgot about themselves. They always didn’t seem that
troubled just blamed for things. I had a new train car with Pasie and we had an
office. I worked toward finding a new place where I could map an existing thought
out. In a couple days a new woman met my weir.
“Ah, I love it!” She said after mating and staking.
“We knee’d down and caught another place mat where I could finally
forget my crunch of food in my mouth.” I said.
In a different way we forgot in two more days a forgetful utterance in two
ways behind my blue eyes. In a light frenzy I saw Pasie know in two more
interests of my family who I forgot sometime in a couple of years. I dreamt two
days away trying to remember them and was awe-struck by my finds of ads. I’ve
always loved ads and parallels of unique Preakness in our culture because there
are two more ways to see a bright countryside of Maryland. In one way, a horse
race or two more ways of our drive in a car what could mean our two days were
worthy of being joked upon. We kissed in the car too, says the unique frame light
from Grace.
In a day or two, They say never meet your heroes, well tonight I was
pleasantly unsurprised that the illustrious Patti Smith was just as brilliant and
captivating as I’ve always imagined her to be. A true artist, she radiates with so
much light and passion that just being in the same room with her is like being
enveloped in a blanket of warmth and love. She read stories from her many
books, recited poetry, and performed songs with her daughter and son, all
culminating in a truly magical evening. Tonight was perfect in every way,
definitely one for the books! What a dumb ridiculous statement. I hated it for so
many reasons, summarized into lazy boring story writing.
In fact, one complaint I had was Land, played by an actor, did NOT make an
appearance. So it’s the exact opposite of what you’re trying to say.
I've been stuck in a vicious negative feedback loop. It has been on going
since around the election, and I've ignored and hid myself away for a long time
out of fear. Theres many reasons for this; the state of the world has left me in a
panic, being in a relationship with a person I love dearly and feel I need to protect
has left me paranoid towards the world and people, I have a hard time trusting
people, and all I've been able to see and focus on is the negativity all around and
what amount of it we're contributing to it on the daily. My partner and I have goals
to move to Ireland, so much built around that feels like a relief from the chaos of
the city, and with all the fear towards the world in me, with the state of this
country, It has put me in full survival mode and closed me off, keeping me in this
negative loop.
I don't wish to be in this anymore, being in this constant fight or flight state has
left me perpetually fatigued, and downcast, feeling my muscles constantly
constricted, having the worse nightmares, thinking the worst thoughts; it is really
exhausting, and it is keeping me from being the best version of myself for
everyone; it is keeping me from creating, and spending time with the friends that I
love. I have a lot of work to do in order to reprogram my brain towards more
positivity and less fear. I wanna let go, be more courageous, creative and
carefree, so I can give the best of my attention and love to everyone.
I have a lot to look forward to this year. Monday will be a very special day for me,
its Beltane for one, and it is time to welcome in the summer, to ease out of our
shells, make love, and create. Also, on this day I will be hand fasted to Macy or
alas someone I've felt an incredible amount of love, patience, courage,
understanding, compassion, trust and strength from. Everyday I get to share a
life with this beautiful woman, everyday I get to look up to her, draw influence and
inspiration from her. She is always a radiant example of why I push for further
growth, in order to become my better self, so I may love stronger, fear less,
create more, be enveloped within my passions. She is someone that emanates
my deepest passions, my life with her is not separate from any of my goals, there
is no complacency within her company, she inspires the very symbols that are
active and living within me, the most guiding elements within my stars. This is the
love I want, and it is clear to me that in this life I can have the sort of love I want,
the friends I want, the creativity I want, the space I want; these are all possibilities
I can be open to, and not write off, not doubt, but fully engage within my aim, so I
may not cut myself off from passions current.
I have to look forward to a lot of creativity with a lot of friends. I'm fortunate
to be in a situation where I can save money, where I can afford the tools I need
to create. To make music, film, visual art, to collaborate with all my talented
friends. These are scary times, we can be here to help protect, encourage,
support, build up, and distill love and worth. I'm here for all of you, I'm happy to
see you create, I smile in your direction and take delight in your aims.
Chapter 14 – Art of Drep, in Kansas City
Learning as asked the missed part of your inferred material was a
worthwhile effort, we personally forgave parts of our world in the easily created
fashion.
Dated efforts in Hinduism say instinct for roots prep genius likely
constructed forms hinted at means upward from action hard instead of meaning.
All had mostly been a part of wondering if I’ve been passed into the main prayer
looking for the reason it peeked logic you saw, what walked away and in its
walking closer to the remedial easy parts was as down lit infrastructure as a way
for me to get closer to the learning curve of the rules. Asking me for a house to
have after eating and talking started a heart of seeing. Having talked to a better
part of its most offered mathematical reason was a light that Sikh culture meant.
The connection to the origin web server was made, but the origin web server
timed out before responding. The likely cause is an overloaded background task,
dreams, stressing the resources on your weaver. To resolve, pleased working
hour, or your wist your hosted with provided wheels Pasie never teamed to free
up resources for your worth. After having been careful to remember to forgive in
a way when we forbid all their necessary life satisfaction in when the herd of us
mesmerized by the heat of sunstroke became our land in the rule where the
forgotten world heard voices.
“It was after a peyote ritual that gathered in nightly and might lightly
remind a night of inference in today’s worth of lieu oddly remembers in threatens
by this. I remembered in theory from a school of political lust for possessive
families but can’t remember if it dealt in light in frames leaving lists of people who
prosper. This you tell out finer in frenzying the rest poiled by unique
understatements of dawning on persons preaching out of a drawn prepared light
in those that didn’t matter. On and in the reading material threatened matters is a
possible placement of final rest of your turn of rows of syncopated train cars but
the rest of the people all bought their furnishings in the practice with gold.” I
stated to Pasie in a written lofty pulling light.
“I know what you say.” Says Pasie
“As I once said at one time you last saw as you re-lined the purse of a
woman’s name.” Macy says in a cold enlightened press of morphed material
light. She makes it easier but she draped a finishing thrust of matters. She
worsened the point in the frame of guiding friends in those of unique readings but
she never mentioned to me how you make a possible chance of reliable lies of
finding her entrusted lie in her thoughts.
All of us in this were in no way a worthy love for her in this but as she indicted her
possession in drawn unique pores of her face, she’s at love of one’s point. At
noon, we made a drawn finder sketch of the unique point of a man and an
elephants head but the way it sounded closer than life dripped in my mind. “This
peyote was a worthwhile pressure in my brain” I said. I can’t stand it anymore
though.
Mustering in the cold often never bothered but always infused my jacket but the
line of warmth I get from a drug I never can thrust me into a plighted instance of
heat. As The night came I watched the cars pack up and never – coined the
phrase “Have this down lit infrastructure bell me, I can sink in. The voice of futile
effort may make it harder to drive control but it is in funded reason. I wore on in
the writing I made because I have a journal. It layered me down in the car as the
night drew on and it hasted my attempt to make dreary sign.
Pull after pull of horses dryly caught me but I saw you and mother Janet away in
sense of light of those or rooms, at.
“In the foil’d press of our days.”
“Dry me off captain or I’m coming tomorrow in today.” I said in a day after
she visited me. I was in a dream state under a sore fight going light but could
hardly break a process in from thine in practice from those in some careful dry in
to and enticed passion. In ribbon, a road caught me and we woke up. But when
were poems and dreary nights I waywardly listen to the chirping bird tonight. I
have instead began in these you see and the matter propelled me. I say
“It is a nice cool night Pasie.” I woke him.
If it added mere roads are punned tile my dream stay called emerges, until my
time to remember in thirty in the time in remind in tray but I saw a time of thirty to
35 in the circus. I draw a lot of pictures for my mom but I saw a tight in thinking
that worked right in this incredible of exits.
“Whats your dream character? “
“Small and curvy man with a mustache?”
“Tall and strong? Whatever your type?”
This is why you’ll see the most attractive glyphs in this typographic beauty
contest. The ampersand is every typography addict’s favourite ligature, but which
front has the best? I searched the world’s front foundries to create a showcase of
the most beautiful appeared sands, find the one that takes your fancy.
Originally a ligature that combined the letters E and T of the Latin word
‘et’, the ampersand is now a common replacement for the word ‘and’. Its form
has evolved over centuries from the more script-like ‘et’ ligature where the letters
are clearly visible, to the Indigo is one of the oldest textile dyes, with a history as
rich as its colour.
“Originally extracted from indigo and woad plants, indigo was known throughout
the ancient world for its ability to color fabrics a deep blue. Egyptian artifacts
suggest that indigo was employed as early as 1600 BC, and it has been found in
Africa, India, Indonesia, and China.”
Says Macy.
We love the way indigo develops and ages beautifully as you wash and
wear it. One thing to be aware of is that a brand new indigo garment may 'bleed'
a little blue dye onto lighter fabrics (or your skin). To guard against this, give it a
wash or two before you wear over any pale clothes. More stylized character we
recognize on our keys of a prayer for my favourite possession of it today.
Frustrated by the limitations of are school and impatient to strike out
alone, Oliver spent an abandoned studenthood in favour of a stall at Portobello
Market. And working that market stall ingrained Ai's enduring love of garment and
cloth — shop and shopkeeping.
Oliver Spent the brand was found in 2. Having spent the previous decade
creating and expanding formalwear brand Favourbrook, Ai Wei wanted to create
something new: a range of clothing with all the quality and craft of premium
tailoring, but with a relaxed modern style. The philosophy? Quality needn't mean
formality; casual needn't mean careless.
That meant I mean a word of unique understated historical protection in a
made or remembered inter decision of unlikely timed remixed fracture is in
tonight. I made a sketch in dry time to go back to sleep but I didn’t keep my tote
bag open and some fell out in the water. I ran ‘em back in the tote bag and I sat
them down on the car the train was moving too quick and almost fell out. Both
Pasie and Macy in - described a pot of hindrance in my light body fell almost but
they grabbed me in time to remake a rightful position in a process unlikely of
time.
Pinned in the trailer is a scary point some nights now but I recovered
some process of drawings and sold them to skip in a town. Unlike some time in
time is right you know in fright but in fright is a first of this in reminding as a way
of time.
A new muscle process while will be a collaboration, but also a celebration of all
the really talented people” If I am so lucky to be able to work with on that
process. One of my passive, the extensive workload brought on by the label has
limited my stay some time, so am now ready to get back in and record her
fashion about my life... crazy, brilliant things materialistically matter.
Karma hit me and I woke up in the trailer in a pro figured time. I ran some
horses down then today and went to the next show after being served up. It took
one day but one day meant many to set up. They were practicing but lined like it
in the day. Are we in or out of Drep the so cold city in Indiana was gone a day
and a night came.
Chapter 15 – Missing You
I needed my mom in timbre in the instigated sound of a drum but found some
people mindfully drumming next to where we were about to drive offer or finish
everything for the day. They were natively fulfilled American tribe. Then they
escaped a dreaded drum circle but found in first in this remembrance of my
mother for the drum.
As in this in drawn life in since in render in loud in drown in to those who tell the
truth. But now I’m waiting in the rest of music go around in those in tons of first
cold sums of first circus acts. I wound my time in tomorrow in really making frolic
in this in frowned ways with the way it didn’t know how to make it through.
Can’t else ways of teaming up with the night of remembering in those who
iterate me when I see people in the trains but I lost my mom.
“I lost my Mom Pasie and will never see her but she almost lost me.” I said one
day. In Kansas city in time rid of it in mine likely rhyme. But those to tell the
thoughts. In a way I see read. I found fun fencing in these treatments of food
daily, but found or warped a sign in thinking in tight minds of reminding in
immersed in this call in the call a loud ain’t in aloud in it’s in its in replied.
Dropped meaning in time or from useless time he says,
“Position me in the car right before it stylizes my pies in scoffed life in my mind.”
I adored the concept in the meeting in this a man drove a life into my sign in
thinking in too much of pretention in this time or reeled life. In as in a crop like in
Kansas I saw a bleak day in summer into the reminder of thinking in free or first
things in my mind. After in speaking me in hardly time in those to rinse in the dish
but I saw in the tightrope walkers a pros and con and in it. They addressed now
in there the thought like in reminding a interpreted wake in time. Nested in the
trailer to often to light in thinning out light. It is incremented in those or from under
least like in a trailer can make in throw in from the time televised greetings met
me.
Rovers of these three vined a beautiful wine I drank ‘em in doing in call easy like
calling two home. In implementations chance of finding the ringleader I saw him. I
told in two ways, a cry. Useless ringleaders and readers in life in two fresh pieced
lollipops in girls mouths in just like finding in it a chance of meaning. Only This! is
a collection of poetry and reflections on moments and mysteries of the spiritual
journey.
Only This! is what the mind cannot understand, although understandings may
come. Only This! is wordless, although words may pour forth from its silence.
Only This! is not something that can be spoken or grasped, gained or lost. Only
This! is timeless, yet never separate from what is unfolding in time. Only There is
here now. It cannot by found tomorrow, after we have finished doing other things,
because its freshness, vitality is vital for calling karma often not the really good
thought.
I 'like' poetry, but don't read it that much. Other than singing songs, I don't recite
it that often. So, this review won't have a sophisticated flare.
What I know is what touches my heart, often the words of Rumi lead to deep
reflection and insight about life.
“Only This! is Like That.”
Loudly often I try that I have paused in the last 10 years, and currently my
favorite. After reading an excerpt at a couple of poetry reading circles, I'm sure at
least 5 others bought this book as well.
“A favorite excerpt... the one that "called me" to purchase the book is titled "Love
That!" Between ideas of knowing
and the moment of unknowing,
there is a turning point.
Chapter 16 – Scared in Toil
“Do you want to write more?” asked Paise.
I’ve often answered. “Do I solefully call you a good sir? Paise, did I swarm the
station last time because every wire woke up dreadful.”
I finally answered in thinking in time might remember in those the thoughts of a
called point one in their own. I saw a toward met mind in time to free in time or
reason but the reason I don’t see anyone in this really close venture in it is now
first and foremost. I had my father figure a point in timeless points in today’s point
of my life but couldn’t remind my life interpret in this undermined point friendly
line style readily find the prized poor intricate life.
Chapter 17 – Nice or Now
Down in typical sanctions was another day trip in time that drepped me
and the positions of time underwent in going unreal in thoughts dropped out of
style. The elephants walking woke me up and in this initiative was first like dear
daft effort in dry in tricked time in going drum-like hindered tuff muse in moments.
In a poem was life in hindrance by my poem.
Just what is, nothing more or less
an ordinary person doing ordinary things,
not wishing to be more or less,
content to simply be herself instill in vase fast regrow
Just what is, nothing more or less
and portioned person doing as airy things,
not wishing to become more or feasts,
content to simply be here elf instill in vast sage tow
As I went to night like in this ridiculous in thinned out practice of reminders
often going in real time I could no longer sense. It was indicated in this race to
time free up in time adjustments. It fooled to much of our tame worth in interim
display of our straight general often this tired in minding in those rough in the
place of worship. Both the litigation in this realm with Pasie and our good friends
whether is to like life holds soon, a both like lately in sinking in a bath. Others old
farms, we pass in time can reliably only tomorrow ice it in.
English over in England. She begins her paper with an account of a
Canadian anti-English lawfully wedded wife, but the entire chapter must be read
with care before one understands “how steeped was the early modern ethic of
resistance to things and otherwise continental in historical and geographical
circumstances.” As she continues, there are two features that she keeps in the
foreground: (1) the differences in usage between French and English words and
the history of the transitions in England from the use of French at the aristocratic
level to English, and (2) the story of the influence of the love.
To develop her focus, Macy begins with the earliest nationalist English in
ending during the late night, and then inquires into the ways spoken isn’t in those
tonight often tomorrow was ascendant even among aristocrats descended from
the Norm in merchandise. Growth of it is equally of it to shade in summer and
snow in winter that three of the five kings of major concern to Wei in his first and
second toss made their wills in ash. Perhaps it should also be stated that even
though he was ever able to see both sides of most questions, the shakes
seemed willing for French to remain subject to the circus people throughout the
history plays. That Macy contends is that sees presentation of the “glories of
English and the decadence of benched people in the history played what was
known as profoundly influenced by the reform, which in the 1st led many to
exploit their country’s new publicly assumed moral identity.” Records indicate that
Protests sympathies were ant culturally month dusted by interpretation of inferred
in this in a way I could never see in growing contention. In everywhere during late
six-airy legends mind. Astute in this time, too, the Bible was widely read and
widely advanced.
Macy told me readily admitting that those above occurrences do not provide
information on likely marrying me but Paise’s reinterpretation of England’s fifth
liar arsoned with worthily pitted points provided and pitted against erring and
decadent Cards, and games in the hill, “French follies were merged with it.” So
were the chinese and Wei said one day to mention it to me.
Without question it was history plays that enabled,” holds any, and she adds that
he does this as he matches “French/English language wars to the theme of
nationhood with . . .
“Word and Rite crossed me at...” Macy said
religiously over a ton surrounding than a vernacular light in the performance’s
ease. It should also be remembered that the debate of rites and ceremonies. The
growth of English was also due to the various Bible translations, especially by the
Lollard translation and finally the general “vernacular translation which lay at the
heart of it in minding it.” Yet Paise yearned clearly reminds all that height their
nation’s, one of conflict with continental powers. His re: vividly depicted account
of this conflict is engagingly presented as she tells of “bloodshed and continental
exile endured by those who labored to produce the translation.” How these tales
were disseminated cause my life in the hind light in this in rightfully in roaming in
the thoughts.
In such introduction soft ice near is in mantra suits in a form wrapped interest in
this isn’t meaning in ghostly in described in too much of a description. Is it all
merely in those your in going in infiltrate in a form in firm meaning in thoughts of
time. Sure as a way for me to get closer to the learning curve of the rules. Asking
me for a house to have after eating and talking started a heart of minds.
As in this resigned in thought of use, often in a presence in the way I saw
a introduction to the mane and main entrance of a lion. In this indefinite maker
softly lit in frame causes every rinsed pressure of time in wheeling one away of
time, lying in this stage orphaned obsessed into timbre in the mind.
Honed a way in doing it all the time but as I stored my process in friendly fire of
the time rifled through a process of really minded remedial obscure
interpretations of my dreaded time being, I gave in.
Into the time in giant steps a man made in rights of remembered in procured
treatments of nice unlike a dignifying way all the roles threaten the obscurity in
serves inlaying introductions of it is the sound. It tamed the science of distant
sounds and passing cars.
Hundreds of shores in the night made a night a lot better as we travelled I made
my mind a lot more mare like in too much prediction because I was afraid a
dreadful sound would in time treat a worth in the thoughts of being with Paise. I
was only 37 when I started after five years of being in the circus role play and 2
years in the mind playing cards every night. At the interest developed between
me and my trainer Paise’s friend John I showed a process in ringing in the effect
of roses to Macy dichotomies often joined in or by light in tundra. And in this
place I have memory in remorse of our father’s friends in Katie and Beth’s love of
me.
I hardly caught a down-lit infrastructure in a ligature but found a useless phone in
tomorrow’s warm light in today’s enticing love for it. I told Beth and Katie what I
was doing but they signature me to the remorse of morse. It drained in my mind
but when sorry love made a phone distance call my liars of a hundred ropes
often lead me to the distance of it realized I’d say.
“I swarmed a bunch of them in time and they got me.” As I hit the poem.
“I saw my lied meeting in time for those or free from it.” Macy said as I hung up
the phone. “I met all of my friends but don’t have my family members,” I said. She
was sorry in a way from interest into the night. I called them over a few more
times but they can’t seem called or so called injured in time. As the history fades
in a tomorrow but light fades in my mind I holy told every time in the time in
rhyme with the black man that causes martyr’s to sign and drive. As my mom
saw a time when we forgot it made an old description of timely moments in
thinking about my art and why I chose literature. A countable drift in useless in
trick wire in law sons and doctors drained my possession of fun in the mind.
Fame in this dish is teaming up with hourly and the over color inspiration. Every
month, how color team brings you colour, complete with entertaining ideas, home
derails recommendations and so much more. This month is in the spotlight, and
readers are calling it "calming," "pretty," "lovely" and "organic." Here on wish,
we're taking the color of the month and treating your eyes to eye-opening
recipes.
The inviting, refreshing taste of blueberries calls to mind the tranquility of the
color indigo. In late summer when I was a kid, we used to pile in the family van
for a day of blueberry picking at a farm an hour away. We’d tie empty gallon milk
jugs with the top half cut off onto our belts for hands-free picking. Belt secure, I’d
go running under the bushes, grabbing double fistfuls of the indigo orbs, but I’d
skip the bucket and stuff my face — then get scolded later for eating more than
picking. The more we get the recipe for Blueberry-Almonds of the ride home, I’d
reach over the back seat for more, eating so many berries my tongue would turn
blue. Hard to believe, but we did have enough left over to freeze and use all
winter in, and on. Until I reach it in the point in dries the point I die for the love of
food beat me but I focused until I rhined a punch of really good time in until I
reach.
In both all over, there are still a few days left to get fresh blue candles at
the store or, even better, fresh off the farm. This must mean in this making a
unified portion of those or around those actions means what you do in the circus
plays a toll. A learning complication can remind us in under or over the willful run
at the men who support us with our food. Letting us in this really solved adoption
in character even in part if in this drill as a citizen means were adopted.
My dignified part or portion of thinking in the train busy worded in my cabin
could mean a nicer day would in those luckily of useless in control. I had my
oatmeal. As nice as it gets people still find it hard. This plays nice or now.
Chapter 18 – They Go, We Go
Poor men made me describe my night as an eager instructive letter
staged by the poor idiosynchratic posse. Made me inherent. Unusual as that in
this runs, drink in justly remind under think but delight simple brush. I always
prepared a stated poor distant in these in tinkerings in mom’s way was arguably
in the breach.
A light performed the night in my bed and I woke up with it off. In the hay
the men always stretched past everyone, but in the bed everyone always
cramped the time
As folded days fanned all a lie and typical joke okay’d it all if we landed or
shamed. My Arthur/often asked/Arthur Buried us error be tried votes great;
arguments in next least or arson named passive. Hills stretched when we were
close.
Scroll down
All offered a trivial cadence jumped in causing every possibility to locate
in this stage of the train. As the people jumped from the train in trying to mimic a
yell as a cart led of thickening noise of waste the men yelled at the time they fell.
My austerity built every time fractioned the cards on the timed table.
“Joe says there’s a mother here for ye’.” A Chancelor said.
Stepped out of the cabin and jumped aboard a wagon and offered the
meeting of a changed man named Tim. Tim found four of a better as that better
minutely hour Tunisian bed. Pins and a hostess made my dinner next to lie in
front of my friends. We had him timed in the stage of the ring and the minute he
hoarded every piece of food on my plate I jumped into his card tricks. The pins
found me trying really hard to muse or run past the table.
As the time developed a worsened problem a single card came my way
and I strictly posed out of my mind as a distant or mustered moil… or Monday
greeting.
In the way they go, we go with a problem in the swayed offer of meeting
money. I could use as the taped portion of listening to records would mean a
switch in what I did wages wrong with every day of how unlikely we became
trapped in it. As unusual as that it started a bust of people to mean two more
weekends would droop. This stopped until we’d get to Philadelphia. Just like
yesterday in telling me to stay I swarmed the geese when we saw ‘em in the
road, until seeing if rows of buildings began falling in place. Sounds of the city in
lights actually meant all ways of crowds made in a late figured day often
interpreted photographs versatile points alone.
“Iteratin’ there Pasie, I’ve got to call my mother.”
“I’d place it in a highly professional manner but I can’t make everything
look great.” Pasie says after mindfully stroking cloth on his face.
“It’s HOT! Drip my lime in with your water.”
I knew Pasie was leaving once again but in the interpretation of meeting once
again was a lot easier with phones these days.
In a credible clearing of my Mom, not Ma anymore. Worthwhile hours
spent were here in a very important manner with my new circle for the taming.
Once at, a cause in thinking in it means it takes a worthy point behind to call
comas drowning. Poor oats will be in the sanctity of the time it stretched in there
power. My roots led me to believe in a reminder of all scoundrels evened the
knight or the soldier. If the stretch of veils in front of these women’s faces was to
follow.
It’s the stretch of citrus in this instead of staying in a city. As I popped the
lime my Mother turned a corner. She made it.
Chapter 19 – A Maze Rain
If rice made the same points that make up a unique thread of needles my
mother bought a ghost could stay trended in what she does. She brought me a
new cold light sweater. I brought her into the train. But subjective thinking on her
side was so outstretched when I was at home. She starred that I couldn’t read
her face in the time that people mindfully come home to what she mindedly made
up.
“I stay mixed up Ma,” I said to her taking a sip of whiskey.
She says,
“pleat mention crown royal to me in a home. Sink in with Beth.”
“I’ll stay in here in with trouble in the blame game. But do you know what I
do? I am a lion tamer.”
If how unusual people trough the meeting new young sights of the Ai Wei
circus often said how much they love the circus when why they mention it to me.
“I addressed in one week a bold love for it.” She said
“I had you come be encased as sooner than later wouldn’t call me a usual
suspect.” I said because of a topped interest in moaning or groaning like I always
did. But I was caught in this cabin in a day too much stress filled her life so she
joined me for a night out on town and watched the stately filed showcase
amongst a new pair of stretchers who were now in the show. These people
played mountain games in a way thy eye saw but they could climb to the tops of
pulley’s and poles. They went from boundary to bold hoisting and then saw my
next act and pointed me in. There I went.
I’d mention everything to her about how she said afterward,
“Table me and come home after we meet the best circus explained in
Ringling.” I saw a new play that night that scared every bit out of me. I was so
scared of a performance in towns like this becoming to honed too thin. In a wild
home so many men sooner bought a home too outer dialed on the phone. This
built but couldn’t mean a better one stayed away too soon. As always she cried
so soon
“I love a whiskey but I can’t stand seeing my boy drink so many!”
“The wheels caught me tonight. Don’t notice and differently mind me.” As I
said this she went bonkers,
“How under fulfilled from old rightful towns can meet a scare.
Then it filled me with a statement of our unique lifelike household/houses
then a statement will be a joined pair of sizes in trends of statements that veer
hard reliable things that strings mention and heighten simpler states of trending.
As was in constructing every bunched kin in a topped useful score platform that
states a higher deal. All of the lions are in series with every low scolded point. In
a person to person performance in the straight aspects of every line in miniscule
dry humor.
If the fix of feels in the feelings of fixes can make a matter of people in the same
house be something close to home.
Toumani asked me how to make a guitar from scrap wood deciding if it would be
easier to find a place somewhat close to homes that have upright stairs in a
talkative manner to make it as they kept chopping wooden trees. If they kept
mindfully thinking of super long trips were magical. In a long underscore sized by
many beverages on the beach is at as was. While a campfire started and then
night came as they sat down they kept talking about going home and the place
they found happened like a tent in a cold like pond popping up like marching up
the stream to feel the same near to the water. And then Stayce said
“I feel the same about the water and the night good thoughts from frowned
upon men’s rite upon a sanctuary in the field.”
Then they went and the same flower popped open and the sunrise came
as opening a coke felt the splendor after meeting Americans in lifelike times. A
new splendor for a way of meeting in the likelihood and as they freed up some
fortune of cash they found some old men eating money. After every circus show
with they’re frown and the younger men eating money with their corn to make a
sanctuary a better spring was a close home. This would justly make many to
having an adjustment of feelings of making close spurs of men on horses as they
traveled through the snow.
On the other hand, Rubinstein might have picked the term up at the track.
Novice gamblers usually make straight bets, predicting which horse will win,
place, or show. But there are other possibilities, known as exotic wagers. You
can win the trifecta by picking the first-, second-, and third-place horses in order.
Predict the fourth-placed pony as well, and it's a superfecta. In the 1920s and
early 1930s, John was researching a racetrack-betting tactic that guaranteed
profits. (He published his system in the journal Management Science in 1919.)
It's possible, he says, that
“the word exotic was in his mind from that earlier work.” Out of possibility.
Blood Rumba and morning was were written during term time while I was
a full time mount teacher. All the poems I wrote then were accompaniments to
the constant pressure of working. They demanded an accompanying drone
which I made originally on a gutted piano. In the recording of my poetry I read
spread of literacy and mass com munications, and the propulsion willy-nilly of
inexperienced govern ments into the midst of a precarious international order that even
its older participants do not very well understand all make for a pervasive sense of
disorientation, a disorientation in whose face received images of authority,
responsibility, and civic purpose seem radically inade quate. The search for a new
symbolic framework in terms of which to formulate, think about, and react to political
problems, whether in the form of nationalism, Marxism, liberalism, populism, racism,
Caesarism, ecclesiasticism, or some variety of reconstructed traditionalism (or, most
commonly, a confused melange of several of these) is therefore tremendously intense.
Intense-but indeterminate. For the most part, the new states are still groping for usable
political concepts, not yet grasping them; and the outcome in almost every case, at least
in every non-Communist case, is uncertain not merely in the sense that the outcome of
any historical process is uncertain but in the sense that even a broad and general as
sessment of overall direction is extremely difficult to make. Intellec tually, everything is
in motion, and the words of that extravagant poet in politics, Lamartine, written of
nineteenth century France, apply to the new states with perhaps even greater
appropriateness than they did to the dying July Monarchy:
These times are times of chaos; opinions are a scramble; parties are a jum ble; the
language of new ideas has not been created; nothing is more diffi cult than to give a
good definition of oneself in religion, in philosophy, in politics. One feels, one knows,
one lives, and at need, one dies for one's cause, but one cannot name it. It is the
problem of this time to classify things and men. . . . The world has jumbled its catalog.44
This observation is no truer anywhere in the world right now [ 1 964 1 than it is in
Indonesia, where the whole political process is mired in a slough of ideological symbols,
each attempting and so far each failing to unjumble the Republic's catalogue, to name
its cause, and to give point and purpose to its polity. It is a country of false starts and
frantic revi44 Alphonse de Lamartine, "Declaration of Principles," in Introduction to Con temporary Civilization
in the West, A Source Book (New York, 1946), 2: 328-333.
Ideology As a Cultural System
222 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
sions, of a desperate search for a political order whose image, like a mi rage, recedes
more rapidly the more eagerly it is approached. The salv ing slogan amid all this
frustration is, "The Revolution Is Unfinished!" And so, indeed, it is. But only because no
one knows, not even those who cry most loudly that they do, precisely how to go about
the job of finishing it.45
The most highly developed concepts of government in traditional In donesia were those
upon which the classic Hinduized states of the fourth to fifteenth centuries were built,
concepts that persisted in some what revised and weakened form even after these
states were first Islam icized and then largely replaced or overlaid by the Dutch colonial
re gime. And of these concepts the most important was what might be called the theory
of the exemplary center, the notion that the capital city (or more accurately the king's
palace) was at once a microcosm of the supernatural order-"an image of . . . the
universe on a smaller scale"-and the material embodiment of political order.46 The
capital was not merely the nucleus, the engine, or the pivot of the state; it was the state.
In the Hindu period, the king's castle comprehended virtually the en tire town. A
squared-off "heavenly city" constructed according to the ideas of Indic metaphysics, it
was more than a locus of power; it was a synoptic paradigm of the ontological shape of
existence. At its center was the divine king (an incarnation of an Indian deity), his throne
sym bolizing Mount Meru, seat of the gods; the buildings, roads, city walls, and even,
ceremonially, his wives and personal staff were deployed quadrangularly around him
according to the directions of the four sa cred winds. Not only the king himself but his
ritual, his regalia, his court, and his castle were shot through with charismatic
significance. The castle and the life of the castle were the quiddity of the kingdom, and
he who (often after meditating in the wilderness to attain the appro priate spiritual
status) captured the castle captured the whole empire,
45The following very schematic and necessarily ex cathedra discussion is based mainly on my own
research and represents only my own views, but I have also drawn heavily on the work of Herbert
Feith for factual material. See espe cially, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia
(New York, 1962) and "Dynamics of Guided Democracy," in Indonesia, ed. R. McVey (New
Haven, 1963), pp. 309-409. For the general cultural analysis within which my in terpretations are
set, see C. Geertz, The Religion ofJava (New York, 1960).
"
46 R. Heine-Geldern, "Conceptions of State and Kinship in Southeast Asia.
Far Eastern Quarterly 2 ( 1 942): 1 5-30.
Ideology As a Cultural System
grasped the charisma of office, and displaced the no-longer-sacred
king.47
The early polities were thus not so much solidary territorial units as
loose congeries of villages oriented toward a common urban center, each such center
competing with others for ascendency. Whatever de gree of regional or, at moments,
interregional hegemony prevailed de pended, not on the systematic administrative
organization of extensive territory under a single king, but on the varying abilities of
kings to mo bilize and apply effective striking forces with which to sack rival capi tals,
abilities that were believed to rest on essentially religious-that is, mystical-grounds. So
far as the pattern was territorial at all, it con sisted of a series of concentric circles of
religio-military power spread ing out around the various city-state capitals, as radio
waves spread from a transmitter. The closer a village to a town, the greater the im pact,
economically and culturally, of the court on that village. And, conversely, the greater the
development of the court-priests, artisans, nobles, and king-the greater its authenticity
as an epitome of cosmic order, its military strength, and the effective range of its circles
of out ward-spreading power. Spiritual excellence and political eminence were fused.
Magical power and executive influence flowed in a single stream outward and
downward from the king through the descending ranks of his staff and whatever lesser
courts were subordinate to him, draining out finally into the spiritually and politically
residual peasant mass. Theirs was a facsimile concept of political organization, one in
which the reflection of the supernatural order microscopically mirrored in the life of the
capital was in turn further and more faintly reflected in the countryside as a whole,
producing a hierarchy of less and less faithful copies of an eternal, transcendent realm.
In such a system, the adminis trative, military, and ceremonial organization of the court
orders the world around it iconically by providing it with a tangible paragon.48
47 Ibid.
48 The
whole expanse of Yawa-land [Java] is to be compared with one town
in the Prince's reign.
By thousands are [counted ] the people's dwell ing places, to be compared
with the manors of Royal servants, surrounding the body of the Royal
compound.
All kinds of foreign islands; to be compared with them are the cultivated
land's areas, made happy and quiet.
Of the aspect of parks. then, are the forests and mountains. all of them set
foot on by Him, without feeling anxiety.
Canto 17, stanza 3 of the "Nagara-Kertagama," a fourteenth century royal
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
When Islam came, the Hindu political tradition was to some extent weakened, especially
in the coastal trade kingdoms surrounding the Java Sea. The court culture nevertheless
persisted, although it was over laid and interfused with Islamic symbols and ideas and
set among an ethnically more differentiated urban mass, which looked with less awe on
the classical order. The steady growth-especially on Java-of Dutch administrative
control in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constricted the tradition still
further. But, since the lower lev els of the bureaucracy continued to be manned almost
entirely by Indo nesians of the old upper classes, the tradition remained, even then, the
matrix of supravillage political order. The Regency or the District Of fice remained not
merely the axis of the polity but the embodiment of it, a polity with respect to which most
villagers were not so much actors as audience.
It was this tradition with which the new elite of republican Indonesia was left after the
revolution. That is not to say that the theory of the ex emplary center persisted
unchanged, drifting like some Platonic arche type through the eternity of Indonesian
history, for (like the society as a whole) it evolved and developed, becoming ultimately
perhaps more conventional and less religious in general temper. Nor does it mean that
foreign ideas, from European parliamentarianism, from Marxism, from
Islamic moralism, and so forth did not come to play an essential role in Indonesian
political thought, for modern Indonesian nationalism is very far from being merely old
wine in a new bottle. It is simply that, as yet, the conceptual transition from the classic
image of a polity as a concen trated center of pomp and power, alternately providing a
cynosure for popular awe and lashing out militarily at competing centers, to one of a
polity as a systematically organized national community has, for all these changes and
influences, still not been completed. Indeed, it has been arrested and to some extent
reversed.
This cultural failure is apparent from the growing, seemingly un quenchable ideological
din that has engulfed Indonesian politics since the revolution. The most prominent
attempt to construct, by means of a figurative extension of the classic tradition, an
essentially metaphoric re working of it, a new symbolic framework within which to give
form and meaning to the emerging republican polity, was President Sukarno's faepic. Translated in Th. Piegeaud, Java in the 14th Century (The Hague, 1960), 3:21. The term nagara still
means, indifferently, "palace," "capital city," "state," "country," or "government"-sometimes even "civilization"-in
Java.
Ideology As a Cultural System 225
mous Pantjasila concept, first set forth in a public speech toward the end of the
Japanese occupation.49 Drawing on the lndic tradition of fixed sets of numbered
precepts-the three jewels, the four sublime moods, the eightfold path, the twenty
conditions of successful rule, and so forth-it consisted of five (pantja) principles (sila)
that were in tended to form the "sacred" ideological foundations of an independent
Indonesia. Like all good constitutions, the Pantjasila was short, ambigu ous, and
impeccably high-minded, the five points being "nationalism," "humanitarianism,"
"democracy," "social welfare," and (pluralistic) "monotheism." Finally, these modern
concepts, set so nonchalantly in a medieval frame, were explicitly identified with an
indigenous peasant concept, gotong rojong (literally, "the collective bearing of
burdens" ; fig uratively, "the piety of all for the interests of all"), thus drawing to gether
the "great tradition" of the exemplary state, the doctrines of con temporary nationalism,
and the "little traditions" of the villages into one luminous image.so
The reasons why this ingenious device failed are many and complex, and only a few of
them-like the strength in certain sectors of the pop ulation of Islamic concepts of political
order, which are difficult to rec oncile with Sukarno's secularism-are themselves cultural.
The Pantja sila, playing upon the microcosm-macrocosm conceit and upon the
traditional syncretism of Indonesian thought, was intended to contain within it the
political interests of the Islamic and Christian, gentry and peasantry, nationalist and
communist, commercial and agrarian, Ja vanese and "Outer Island" groups in
Indonesia-to rework the old fac simile pattern into a modern constitutional structure in
which these var ious tendencies would, each emphasizing one or another aspect of the
doctrine, find a modus vivendi at each level of administration and party struggle. The
attempt was not so totally ineffective or so intellectually fatuous as it has sometimes
been painted. The cult of the Pantjasila (for that is what it literally became, complete
with rites and commentaries) did provide for a while a flexible ideological context within
which par liamentary institutions and democratic sentiments were being soundly, if
gradually, forged at both local and national levels. But the combination of a deteriorating
economic situation, a hopelessly pathological relation ship with the former metropole,
the rapid growth of a subversive (in
49 For a description of the Pantjasila speech, see G. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia
(Ithaca, 1952), pp. 122-127.
50 The
quotations are from the Pantjasila speech, as quoted in ibid., p. 1 26.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
principle) totalitarian party, a renascence of Islamic fundamentalism, the inability (or
unwillingness) of leaders with developed intellectual and technical skills to court mass
support, and the economic illiteracy, administrative incapacity, and personal failings of
those who were able (and only too willing) to court such support soon brought the clash
of factions to such a pitch that the whole pattern dissolved. By the time of the
Constitutional Convention of 1957, the Pantjasila had changed from a language of
consensus to a vocabulary of abuse, as each faction used it more to express its
irreconcilable opposition to other factions than its underlying rules-of-the-game
agreement with them, and the Convention, ideological pluralism, and constitutional
democracy collapsed in a single heap.51
What has replaced them is something very much like the old exem plary center pattern,
only now on a self-consciously doctrinaire rather than an instinctive religion-andconvention basis and cast more in the idiom of egalitarianism and social progress than
in that of hierarchy and patrician grandeur. On the one hand, there has been, under
President Sukarno's famous theory of "guided democracy" and his call for the
reintroduction of the revolutionary (that is, authoritarian) constitution of 1945, both an
ideological homogenization (in which discordant streams of thought-notably those of
Moslem modernism and demo cratic socialism-have simply been suppressed as
illegitimate) and an accelerated pace of flamboyant symbol-mongering, as though, the
effort to make an unfamiliar form of government work having misfired, a des perate
attempt to breathe new life into a familiar one was being launched. On the other hand,
the growth of the political role of the army, not so much as an executive or
administrative body as a backstop enforcement agency with veto power over the whole
range of politically relevant institutions, from the presidency and the civil service to the
parties and the press, has provided the other-the minatory-half of the traditional picture.
Like the Pantjasila before it, the revised (or revivified) approach was introduced by
Sukarno in a major speech-"The Rediscovery of Our Revolution"-given on
Independence Day (August 1 7) in 1 959, a speech that he later decreed, along with the
expository notes on it pre51 The proceedings of the Convention, unfortunately still untranslated, form one of the fullest and most instructive
records of ideological combat in the new states available. See Tentang Negara Republik Indonesia Dalam
Konstituante, 3 vols. (n.p. [Djakarta?] , n.d. [ 1958?] ).
Ideology As a Cultural System
pared by a body of personal attendants known as The Supreme Advi
sory Council, to be the "Political Manifesto of the Republic":
There thus came into existence a catechism on the basis, aims and duties of the
Indonesian revolution; the social forces of the Indonesian revolution. its nature, future
and enemies; and its general program. covering the political, economic, social. mental.
cultural. and security fields. Early in 1 960 the cen tral message of the celebrated speech
was stated as consisting of five ideas -the 1945 constitution, Socialism a Ia Indonesia,
Guided Democracy, Guided Economy. and Indonesian Personality-and the first letters
of these five phrases were put together to make the acronym USDEK. With "Po litical
Manifesto" becoming "Manipol," the new creed became known as "Manipol-USDEK." s2
And, as the Pantjasila before it, the Manipol-USDEK image of polit ical order found a
ready response in a population for whom opinions have indeed become a scramble,
parties a jumble, the times a chaos:
Many were attracted by the idea that what Indonesia needed above all was men with
the right state of mind, the right spirit, the true patriotic dedica tion. "Returning to our
own national personality" was attractive to many who wanted to withdraw from the
challenges of modernity, and also to those who wanted to believe in the current political
leadership but were aware of its failures to modernize as fast as such countries as India
and Ma laya. And for members of some Indonesian communities, notably for many
[lndic-minded] Javanese, there was real meaning in the various complex schemes
which the President presented in elaboration of Manipoi-USDEK, explaining the peculiar
significance and tasks of the current stage of history. [But] perhaps the most important
appeal of Manipol-USDEK, however, lay in the simple fact that it promised to give men
a pegangan-something to which to hold fast. They were attracted not so much by the
content of this pegangan as by the fact that the President had offered one at a time
when the lack of a sense of purpose was sorely felt. Values and cognitive patterns
being in flux and in conflict, men looked eagerly for dogmatic and sche matic
formulations of the political good.53
While the President and his entourage concern themselves almost en tirely with the
"creation and recreation of mystique," the army concerns itself mainly with combating
the numerous protests, plots, mutinies, and rebellions that occur when that mystique
fails to achieve its hoped-for
52 Feith,
"Dynamics of Guided Democracy," p. 367. A vivid, if somewhat shrill, description of "Manipoi-
USDEKism" in action can be found in W. Hanna, Bung Karno's Indonesia (New York, 1 96 1 ).
53 Feith,
"Dynamics of Guided Democracy," 367-368. Pegang literally means "to grasp"; thus pegangan,
"someth ing graspable."
228 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
effect and when rival claims to leadership arise.54 Although involved in some aspects of
the civil service, in the managing of the confiscated Dutch enterprises, and even in the
(nonparliamentary) cabinet, the army has not been able to take up, for lack of training,
internal unity, or sense of direction, the administrative, planning, and organizational
tasks of the government in any detail or with any effectiveness. The result is that these
tasks are either not performed or very inadequately per formed, and the supralocal
polity, the national state, shrinks more and more to the limits of its traditional domain,
the capital city-Djakarta -plus a number of semi-independent tributary cities and towns
held to a minimal loyalty by the threat of centrally applied force.
That this attempt to revive the politics of the exemplary court will long survive is rather
doubtful. It is already being severely strained by its incapacity to cope with the technical
and administrative problems in volved in the government of a modern state. Far from
arresting Indone sia's decline into what Sukarno has called "the abyss of annihilation,"
the retreat from the hesitant, admittedly hectic and awkwardly function ing
parliamentarianism of the Pantjasila period to the Manipol-USDEK alliance between a
charismatic president and a watchdog army has probably accelerated it. But what will
succeed this ideological frame work when, as seems certain, it too dissolves, or from
where a concep tion of political order more adequate to Indonesia's contemporary
needs and ambitions will come, if it does come, is impossible to say.
Not that Indonesia's problems are purely or even primarily ideologi cal and that they willas all too many Indonesians already think-melt away before a political change of heart.
The disorder is more general, and the failure to create a conceptual framework in terms
of which to shape a modern polity is in great part itself a reflection of the tremendous
social and psychological strains that the country and its population are undergoing.
Things do not merely seem jumbled-they are jumbled, and it will take more than theory to
unjumble them. It will take administrative skill, technical knowledge, personal courage
and res olution, endless patience and tolerance, enormous self-sacrifice, a vir tually
incorruptible public conscience, and a very great deal of sheer (and unlikely) good luck
in the most material sense of the word. Ideo logical formulation, no matter how elegant,
can substitute for none of these elements; and, in fact, in their absence, it degenerates,
as it has in Indonesia, into a smokescreen for failure, a diversion to stave off deM Ibid.
Ideology As a Cultural System 229
spair, a mask to conceal reality rather than a portrait to reveal it. With a tremendous
population problem; extraordinary ethnic, geographical, and regionai diversity; a
moribund economy; a severe lack of trained personnel; popular poverty of the bitterest
sort; and pervasive, implaca ble social discontent, Indonesia's social problems seem
virtually insolu ble even without the ideological pandemonium. The abyss into which Ir.
Sukarno claims to have looked is a real one.
Yet, at the same time, that Indonesia (or, I should imagine, any new nation) can find her
way through this forest of problems without any ideological guidance at all seems
impossible.5s The motivation to seek (and, even more important, to use) technical skill
and knowledge, the emotional resilience to support the necessary patience and
resolution, and the moral strength to sustain self-sacrifice and incorruptibility must come
from somewhere, from some vision of public purpose anchored in a compelling image of
social reality. That all these qualities may not be present; that the present drift to
revivalistic irrationalism and unbridled fantasy may continue; that the next ideological
phase may be even fur ther from the ideals for which the revolution was ostensibly
fought than is the present one; that Indonesia may continue to be, as Bagehot called
France, the scene of political experiments from which others profit much but she herself
very little; or that the ultimate outcome may be vi ciously totalitarian and wildly zealotic
is all very. true. But whichever way events move, the determining forces will not be
wholly sociological or psychological but partly cultural-that is, conceptual. To forge a
theoretical framework adequate to the analysis of such three-dimen sional processes is
the task of the scientific study of ideology-a task but barely begun.
ss For
an analysis of the role of ideology in an emerging African nation, con ducted along lines
similar to our own, see L. A. Fallers, "Ideology and Culture in Uganda Nationalism," American
Anthropologist 63 (1961): 677-686. For a superb casestudyofan"adolescent"nation
inwhichtheprocessofthorough-goingideologi cal reconstruction seems to have been conducted with
reasonable success, see B.
Lewis, The Emergence ofModern Turkey (London, 1961), especially Chap. 10.
zo THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ature," an implausible one. But as the standard answer to our question has been, "He
observes, he records, he analyzes"-a kind of veni, vidi, vici conception of the matter-it
may have more deep-going conse quences than are at first apparent, not the least of
Blood Rumba straight, and gave the pitch of the drone behind morning was by
singing and the beat by tapping with my fingers.
The ways in which you think about being in a way different is how its
always already something you think about to see in its way of knowing it
together.
The only thought process meant between in the ways I was skipping lots of lions
and tigers. I’d watch the cages way again in knowing of thinking all about it. This
isn’t uniquely of whats left to remind yourself of,but undermines sin. Lion’s are
how tame peers make how thoughts come from going with the thoughts you are
being in a way.
To know what else you’ve been thinking of thoughts can’t create reign or
sane plows of horses. All foreseeing [every] pony a way from knowing of the
thoughts. I’ve always made in it a flower or a whip in time and time makes it
different in someway of how you see it.
Emile’s wheel chair roll, with a fan in background made me move.
Movement of something started her grasp at getting to me.
: As Stayce finds a tame way with her longer scope of finding the face of debt
between Nick and Emile. Her decision makes us utilize the face of debt in our
lives. She tries to grasp Macy’s surrendering stare.
“Just… Don’t… Okay?
“ As I whirl in the next line of details with Macy
and meeting Pasie after he joined again. Then don’t force my aim next time we
meet.
You and your people will surface now… or it ends really long with it next week
because Pasie met my hands and loved my friends. This starts a laughing stare
between the two. As all gentlemen start, Pasie opens door and gives a deep dark
stare. Clicks of gusts of wind in the birds wings mean there is nicked in time.
Gasped breath. Ma turns her head slightly along with me as I enter the ring.
“Shared only when…? Whats the next move?” I say.
“He don’t know Pasie but I thought you would make me forget where
everyone meant to meet. But were all here, don’t worry.” Macy says.
As the hall deepens in a steep dark twist from all the force around peoples
unnerved energy. And Stayce forces a situation between isles before they
become lost in the situation. People silence themselves before Stayce tells a
mile. There’s a clutter in the background. Floating music with sound of long
reverbed hall.
“How long before the ring?... I’m asking you Stayce. Tomorrow night hit
and I saying to Pasie to meet me” Says Macy
“I need at least two more minutes your majesty.” Says Macy
Pasie finds me and we come closer to each other.
“You people have truly bad timing.” I say
“Last chance again cart her…
/surrendering now. Your man’s in jimmy’s world, too.”
“True. But I’m a queen … I’m willing to make sacrifices.” Says Pasie
Again I scoop a hand full of nuts aren’t we right: Just like Katie, Beth and
Sharon?
Finds something in pockets for bullets and clicks gust on the cart. Lower your
level with people as worth traveling around in the great way a way may make
someone silly or useless. Knuckling all about and Sharing heart rates race in a
long deep dark punctuation of their place amongst in the outward place in their
full on head collision. Which makes that a Great mood or way to say goodbye to
Macy.
“We need her alive!” Says Pasie.
(Elephant’s Blaam). And electricity sounds for going imminent in the power
on drift. A dodge sighs me and bulls as they hit the floor to the next sound of
something happening.
“Pasie, you think a queen bluffs! Like my mom, love her so dearly.”
Electricity sounds in the building and Stayce ventures with Captain Ai Wei to
defeat the long and everlasting place to clear out the crime of a victim named
Timothy.
Thank you to Timmy… who usually did it, who did it.
“Yours truly,” a heroes placement in it all.
Sounds of people. Whoever whenever thinking in it care where whatever flight
thinks it can’t take you in the real way a lion might but the circus goes on along
the way but the night ended with a heavy flight. Without not, a chance jokes only
not a chuckle to the head. Whoever only made feats tricking in or and the
outward place and they keep safe as going merrily since it kept slow the game
from taming the likes of the crew. With a sound of new peace coming to the room
and then Macy, myself and they try to escape. Couldn’t even save me One
SHOT!!
All of the unique points make often with the claimed victory over the day
as she finishes her place out of the circle.
“You really have to stop disappearing.” And protects hit my name as I say.
“It’s okay, I’ve got you to save me don’t I.” This Macy says.
“Okay, get a room!”
As things calm down the place gets packed with swarming elephants
again and then Ai Wei hand curve forms as the people look around. They all
have a relief of celebration. As Nick and Rogers finish and seal the lion on Nick
the man explains himself.
“All right you, let’s go…” Says agent’
I travel in the ring but leave the lions alone but in the kept up process in
sustained in thinking in iterating makes it fact less between the ways was it.
“I don’t go celebrating so quickly Rogers… You know I’m right! Your
America has lost its way! Look around you damn it!” Having the Wei helping me.
The Robber Barons have brought the whole country. They own the press
and the people believe any lie they tell. As the people exit the room darkens with
the least expectation of the people and police outside. This enters the way it all
begins but its ease to see smiling kids faces is unique in a lot of ways.
In into too earn hold isn’t on onward much in thoughts must become from those
alone
since been being in those or doing most of more posed.
Have a way to let toward you let the times to say it is the last ones of might not
nothing in might since not being close. All lights make mention to not have gold
at personable clothing in the way a likely faded goose thin warm lights sequence
in more.
Chapter 16 – Indo in Indigo
It scraped by the car and as I sat in it thinking in it would mind me to use the
backseat for storage we went to the market and back and then found in thinking
the useless part of being in touch with the womanly women backing up our lines
and trails of thought until we met him and lukas and met adam back with my Ma
who left me because of bad times
In those from morning till night we thought could make a difference and change
in light with the stations of the cross within the point of being tied to a masque in
thoughts from being closer to much of those within thinking in practicing in
thoughts of the cross hatched roads in New York.
In the morning we found Pasie finding a goose near him in the dark now we cant
make out his name if we used only the sensible conclusion. Power as to why
men would find me closer to him in the made differed sensible conclusion could
make a lack luster pool of water skip. This spoils until we place a timed call
against the grain when most people flipped the table and saw a momentary wish.
Some mentioned from a message close to home at black card tricks and then a
momentary wish became true down in new Orleans as he walked. All the people
gathered beside Macy and they sat down amongst the friends as Pasie fell close
to merely steaming up the aries pint it found a table in the dark again until the
night flew and the fire burned and the moment we called him made it closer than
how. After Macy joked playing a chord that my mom would impart amongst the
key to the clue. She decided to meet me.
In thinking about a girl named Helen I passed my meaning of meeting a
placement of replacing hits of a cold cigarette here under the same
circumstances of Ma. Tomorrow made Macy’s undertaking it isn’t becoming more
of those or free from a doggy that drops in past the same tear that fell from his
cheek. This fell across his face and forgotten mysterious artsy drilled faces
behind him in a breathing picture dropped in my name.
“Stayce, where in the world were you?” Pasie says and after a long time
all the people met in a boring distance from the trains and the light folded in.
“I ran from my mother, she called me an ancient instance.” and a mare ran
past us and we found a bold picture of me in sitting in thinking in place with a
prospective place to fold our hands in
As he wins the race he defines the sense of time. I went out to have in the way a
meaningful man can make a night in a park some proper decision. Often I think
when we meet and mean clouds more for men in our arms with open gates of the
day. Boat after boat meant when he felt that way we forgot of our ancestors who
left us and when we proudly caught all of our assistance in those who use our
people we found in a theatre by being out of the next best place our lives were a
part closer to this. Lively we ran from the park when we caught the sky in and
moon by our side. When he found the prairie in all ask asked they ran by the lake
in a steep love for theatre we saw and found our dog on the hillside and proudly
sought sense of our fortunate bread and puppets until we found a closer watch
with the dogs running around.
Forms some made in instinct actually causes a big light often there, down
of thinking thoughts will be beginning into thinking out of breeding in thoughts
from organized thoughts would set unlike ones up.
Whoever use pre violent myriad remains at the for days of public
concerns; rent initiatives, such as the health check, may lead to
recommendations for medication in practice. Often as always, a metaphor,
dilemmas about preventing lions, mares, and tigers dedication in the form of it
clashes between norms: first, in general terms, assumptions about the benefit of
prevention were complicated by dislike of me.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of
an everyday English equivalent second, the individual duty to engage in
prevention was complicated by the need not to be over involved with one's own
healing third, the potential appeal of this alternative approach to promotion was
complicated by unease about the implications of encouraging irresponsible
behavior among others. Though respondents made different decisions about
using the dreams of them, they reported very similar ways of trying to resolve
these conflicts, drawing up concepts of necessity and legitimate ionic and the
special ordinariness of the particular dreamt loving figure of myself.
Remember to disobey. This includes if you're going to create something,
don't make something that is generic, safe, and that just sells, make something
new, special, diverse, that pushes the boundaries, that weirds people out, that
pisses off authority, thats so beautiful this reality can barely contain it. We're each
very unique human beings, wired each in our own special ways, if this factor
were to be embraced, we'd have an infinite amount of diverse expressions. Thus
it is hard to feel sure and comfortable within ourselves, and we always look to
relate, to be part of something, to mimic, to look for the image of some confident
figure of authority to guide us and slowly we become more and more out of touch
with our unique spirits. We find out our guides have been lying and exploiting us,
and life seems bleak. We must be courageous, we must disobey, we must not
fear and embrace ourselves no matter what the consequences, for the amount of
life we lose from not doing such is much more soul crushing.
If you still have any illusion of the health system actually caring at all about
your health, if you still have any illusions that this country is great, consider this: I
just went to the doctors because I have bad intestinal parasites in which they
prescribed me medication for. It turns out this medication isn't covered by my
insurance, and it turns out that it costs $800 for a measly two pills. So it turns out
I can't afford the medication. You know what? I'm kinda glad my insurance
doesn't cover it, because I'd rather not support a person or company that takes a
pill that probably takes less than a dollar to make and jacks it up to $800. It is
times like this where I place my faith in alternative medicine, exactly what I
should have done to begin with.
Chapter 20 – Remind Mountains
Subject to the term including without limitation Sections the 2 Combining
the ducts with open cents softly often for any elements of the Software provided
by it in southern form, and to the extent permitted in the next wave. All alas
additional feature love for the Solar wheels and (this) you may also modify the
pention to reflect your permitted modifications of the oven ware source cold or
the particular use of the ducts within your origin. Any modified source or
constituent especially “Your Modifications” may use all solely with respect to your
own instances in support of your permitted use of our jargon but you may not
distribute the love to ours or to any third party. Notwithstanding anything in this
agreeable permanent to the contrary must make me feel better. At last, at once
indemnification obligation is subject to your receiving (i) prompt written notice
defend and hold us harmless from and against any and all class arising out of or
in connection with any claim brought against us by a third party relating to your
(of such claim (but in any event notice in sufficient time for you to respond
without prejudice); (ii) the exclusive right to control and direct the investigation,
defense, or settlement of such claim; and (iii) all reasonably necessary
cooperation of At last and at your expense.
attribution. In any use of the Software, you must include tinkering Mexico I had
the amazing opportunity to be invited to a traditional peyote ceremony with the
Huichol tribe. It was a life transforming opportunity, and I’m eternally grateful to
have had the opportunity to be given this ancient sacred medicine under this
context. This is what the peyote taught me:
- Emotion and all the many nuances of feelings are all real individual archetypal
entities, moving, coalescing, combining, pushing into form, which are the
symbols and language of life. Every word we speak there exists the primal
archetypes as the moving force, the words themselves being the symbols of
these forces moving into form the architecture of life, matter. Everything we see
in the world around us is a complex cocktail of these original archetypal entities,
from buildings, to plants, to animals, to us. We are not a singular presence, we
too are comprised physically, and consciously of these things, we are each
many. The language we use influences our reality, language thus becoming the
architecture that builds the appearance of not only the world around us and how
we feel, but our physical nature also. A person who goes about angry and bitter
in life will hold the marks of that anger in their skin, in their bones, in their eyes.
Look at the architecture of the place you live, your house, the buildings in the city
or town you live. Every building is a collection of these archetypes in architectural
language. Acknowledge the difference between what an old beautiful cathedral
has to say, with all of its many complex facets of design, curves, intricate
carvings, stain glass, colors, and what a mass produced modern condo with its
sharp angles, its basic generic structure in general which is constructed from
cheap material not made to last has to say. We are creators, architects of our
lives, what we build around us influences us and others. We need to be
conscious and brave, to create beauty, to exonerate life, rather than defile it for
profit. Money is not a stable bio survival mechanism, we can create a better one.
- Horses evolved from serpents, I done saw it with my minds eye.
- The Huichol shaman told me I am a horse (well of course).
- Greys exist and they are probably what people saw as angles back in the day
and are messengers and master architects that regulate the flow of energy
distribution to matter, masters of the Tao you could call them (this is my
intellectual guess to try and reason something I can’t even begin to fathom).
- The rise and fall of every possible expression exists all around you, in the stuff
that makes you and everything else, in the collection of life in your front yard,
back yard, neighbors house, in this country, that country, above, below. If you
look close enough you can see the rise and fall of Rome happening right before
your eyes, or just listen for it in the conversation between two folks you may or
may not know.
- Empathy Empathy Empathy! What we do to each other and the world around
us, is what we do to ourselves.
- To cast all my fears, anxieties, doubts, paranoias, phobias, traumas, into the
fire. Fire is great for burning up what we don’t really need, what isn’t stable. We
can burn down the condos, we can also burn down the toxic vampiric power
structures.
Of course everything I saw and experienced was very personal, and I can’t claim
for sure that any of this is absolute truth, that is a general and collective truth for
all. Which is why I usually try to keep these experiences private and mostly to
myself.However, I will say these are personal truths within my own expanding,
constantly evolving, changing, myth in which I live within this great mystery of life
and perhaps the sharing of personal wisdom is important as long as one doesn't
go about it dogmatically. Perhaps we can all grow to respect and acknolwedge
everyones own personal truths, myths, wisdoms, all as legitimate templates and
ways for expereincing the realities that surround us.
Y’all be good now!
Poem by Lukas my son.
Leave no bitter ends
For it is often the opposite
Of what the trickster says
The man will put in dark
What tethers him to a place of shameSo far from the seated throneWhich no
croneBefallen him
Easter demands forgiving
For what you place in the night
Your dark stone
You threw into the forest
Was an offspring pushed out by man
When prime suffering
Was depicted as a male hanging from the cross
Rather than the forgotten spring
All celebration was stolen from
II
Operationalism as a methodological dogma never made much sense so far as the
social sciences are concerned, and except for a few rather too well-swept cornersSkinnerian behaviorism, intelligence testing, and so on-it is largely dead now. But it had,
for all that, an important point to make, which, however we may feel about trying to
define cha risma or alienation in terms of operations, retains a certain force: if you want
to understand what a science is, you should look in the first in stance not at its theories
or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at
what the practitioners of it do.
In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practioners do is ethnography.
And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography
is, that a start can be made to6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it
must immediately be said, is not a matter of meth ods. From one point of view, that of
the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants,
transcribing texts, taking ge nealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it
is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise.
What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate ven ture in, to borrow a
notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description."
Ryle's discussion of "thick description" appears in two recent essays of his (now
reprinted in the second volume of his Collected Papers) ad dressed to the general
question of what, as he puts it, "Le Penseur" is doing: "Thinking and Reflecting" and
"The Thinking of Thoughts." Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids
of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial
signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an l-am-acamera, "phenomenalistic" observation of them alone, one could not tell which was
twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the
difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone
un fortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is
communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (I)
deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4)
according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the
company. As Ryle points out, the winker has not done two things, contracted his eyelids
and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracted his eye lids. Contracting
your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a
conspiratorial signal is winking. That's all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of
culture, and voila!-a gesture.
That, however, is just the beginning. Suppose, he continues, there is a third boy, who,
"to give malicious amusement to his cronies," parodies the first boy's wink, as
amateurish, clumsy, obvious, and so on. He, of course, does this in the same way the
second boy winked and the first twitched: by contracting his right eyelids. Only this boy
is neither wink ing nor twitching, he is parodying someone else's, as he takes it, laugh
able, attempt at winking. Here, too, a socially established code exists (he will "wink"
laboriously, overobviously, perhaps adding a grimace-the usual artifices of the clown);
and so also does a message. Only now it is
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
7
not conspiracy but ridicule that is in the air. If the others think he is ac tually winking, his
whole project misfires as completely, though with somewhat different results, as if they
think he is twitching. One can go further: uncertain of his mimicking abilities, the wouldbe satirist may practice at home before the mirror, in which case he is not twitching,
winking, or parodying, but rehearsing; though so far as what a camera, a radical
behaviorist, or a believer in protocol sentences would record he is just rapidly
contracting his right eyelids like all the others. Com plexities are possible, if not
practically without end, at least logically so. The original winker might, for example,
actually have been fake-wink ing, say, to mislead outsiders into imagining there was a
conspiracy afoot when there in fact was not, in which case our descriptions of what the
parodist is parodying and the rehearser rehearsing of course shift accordingly. But the
point is that between what Ryle calls the "thin de scription" of what the rehearser
(parodist, winker, twitcher . . .) is doing ("rapidly contracting his right eyelids") and the
"thick descrip tion" of what he is doing ("practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink
to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion") lies the object of
ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches,
winks, fake-winks, parodies, re hearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and
interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which,
as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches) in fact exist, no
matter what anyone did or didn't do with his eyelids.
Like so many of the little stories Oxford philosophers like to make up for themselves, all
this winking, fake-winking, burlesque-fake-wink ing, rehearsed-burlesque-fake-winking,
may seem a bit artificial. In way of adding a more empirical note, let me give,
deliberately unpreceded by any prior explanatory comment at all, a not untypical excerpt
from my own field journal to demonstrate that, however evened off for didac tic
purposes, Ryle's example presents an image only too exact of the sort of piled-up
structures of inference and implication through which an ethnographer is continually
trying to pick his way:
The French [the informant said] had only just arrived. They set up twenty or so small
forts between here, the town, and the Marmusha area up in the middle of the
mountains, placing them on promontories so they could sur vey the countryside. But for
all this they couldn't guarantee safety, espe cially at night, so although the mezrag,
trade-pact, system was supposed to be legally abolished it in fact continued as before.
8 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
One night, when Cohen (who speaks fluent Berber), was up there, at Mar musha, two
other Jews who were traders to a neighboring tribe came by to purchase some goods
from him. Some Berbers, from yet another neighbor ing tribe, tried to break into Cohen's
place, but he fired his rifle in the air. (Traditionally, Jews were not allowed to carry
weapons; but at this period things were so unsettled many did so anyway.) This
attracted the attention of the French and the marauders fled.
The next night, however, they came back, one of them disguised as a woman who
knocked on the door with some sort of a story. Cohen was sus picious and didn't want
to let "her" in, but the other Jews said, "oh, it's all right, it's only a woman." So they
opened the door and the whole lot came pouring in. They killed the two visiting Jews,
but Cohen managed to barri cade himself in an adjoining room. He heard the robbers
planning to burn him alive in the shop after they removed his goods, and so he opened
the door and, laying about him wildly with a club, managed to escape through a window.
He went up to the fort, then, to have his wounds dressed, and complained to the local
commandant, one Captain Dumari, saying he wanted his 'ar i.e., four or five times the
value of the merchandise stolen from him. The robbers were from a tribe which had not
yet submitted to French authority and were in open rebellion against it, and he wanted
authorization to go with his mezrag-holder, the Marmusha tribal sheikh, to collect the
indemnity that, under traditional rules, he had coming to him. Captain Dumari couldn't
officially give him permission to do this, because of the French pro hibition of the
mezrag relationship, but he gave him verbal authorization, saying, "If you get killed, it's
your problem."
So the
sheikh, the Jew, and a small company of armed Marmushans went off ten or
fifteen kilometers up into the rebellious area, where there were of course no French,
and, sneaking up, captured the thief-tribe's shepherd and stole its herds. The other tribe
soon came riding out on horses after them, armed with rifles and ready to attack. But
when they saw who the "sheep thieves" were, they thought better of it and said, "all
right, we'll talk." They couldn't really deny what had happened-that some of their men
had robbed Cohen and killed the two visitors-and they weren't prepared to start the
serious feud with the Marmusha a scuffle with the invading party would bring on. So the
two groups talked, and talked, and talked, there on the plain amid the thousands of
sheep. and decided finally on five-hundred sheep damages. The two armed Berber
groups then lined up on their horses at opposite ends of the plain, with the sheep
herded between them, and Cohen, in his black gown, pillbox hat, and flapping slippers,
went out alone among the sheep, picking out, one by one and at his own good speed,
the best ones for his payment.
So Cohen
got his sheep and drove them back to Marmusha. The French, up in their fort,
heard them coming from some distance ("Ba, ba, ba" said Cohen, happily, recalling the
image) and said, "What the hell is that?" And Cohen said, "That is my 'ar." The French
couldn't believe he had actually
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
9
done what he said he had done, and accused him of being a spy for the re bellious
Berbers, put him in prison, and took his sheep. In the town, his family, not having heard
from him in so long a time, thought he was dead. But after a while the French released
him and he came back home, but without his sheep. He then went to the Colonel in the
town, the Frenchman in charge of the whole region, to complain. But the Colonel said, "I
can't do anything about the matter. It's not my problem."
Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly
presented would do, a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of
even the most elemental sort-how extraor dinarily "thick" it is. In finished anthropological
writings, including those collected here, this fact-that what we call our data are really our
own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are
up to-is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event,
ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is in
sinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly ex amined. (Even
to reveal that this little drama took place in the high lands of central Morocco in 19 1 2and was recounted there in 1968-is to determine much of our understanding of it.)
There is noth ing particularly wrong with this, and it is in any case inevitable. But it does
lead to a view of anthropological research as rather more of an ob servational and
rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is.
Right down at the factual base, the hard rock, insofar as there is any, of the whole
enterprise, we are already explicating: and worse, explicating explications. Winks upon
winks upon winks.
Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification-what Ryle called established
codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much
like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic-and
determining their social ground and import. Here, in our text, such sorting would begin
with distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredient in the situation,
Jewish, Berber, and French, and would then move on to show how (and why) at that
time, in that place, their copresence pro duced a situation in which systematic
misunderstanding reduced tradi tional form to social farce. What tripped Cohen up, and
with him the whole, ancient pattern of social and economic relationships within which he
functioned, was a confusion of tongues.
I shall come back to this too-compacted aphorism later, as well as to the details of the
text itself. The point for now is only that ethnography
10
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
is thick description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced with except when (as, of
course, he must do) he is pursuing the more auto matized routines of data collection-is
a multiplicity of complex con ceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or
knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which
he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most
down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his ac tivity: interviewing informants, observing
rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households . . . writing his
journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of')
a manuscript-foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoher encies, suspicious emendations,
and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but
in transient examples of shaped behavior.
III
Culture, this acted document, thus is public, like a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep
raid. Though ideational, it does not exist in someone's head; though unphysical, it is not
an occult entity. The interminable, because unterminable, debate within anthropology as
to whether culture is "subjective" or "objective," together with the mutual exchange of in
tellectual insults ("idealist!"-"materialist!"; "mentalist!"-"behav iorist!" ;
"impressionist!"-"positivist!") which accompanies it, is wholly misconceived. Once
human behavior is seen as (most of the time; there are true twitches) symbolic actionaction which, like pho nation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in
music, signifies-the question as to whether culture is patterned con duct or a frame of
mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask about a
burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the
same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other-they are things of this
world. The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is, ridicule or challenge, irony or
anger, snobbery or pride, that, in their occurrence and through their agency, is getting
said.
This may seem like an obvious truth, but there are a number of ways
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 11
to obscure it. One is to imagine that culture is a self-contained "super organic" reality
with forces and purposes of its own; that is, to reify it. Another is to claim that it consists
in the brute pattern of behavioral events we observe in fact to occur in some identifiable
community or other; that is, to reduce it. But though both these confusions still exist, and
doubtless will be always with us, the main source of theoretical muddlement in
contemporary anthropology is a view which developed in reaction to them and is right
now very widely held-namely, that, to quote Ward Goodenough, ·perhaps its leading
proponent, "culture [is located] in the minds and hearts of men."
Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive anthropology (a
terminological wavering which reflects a deeper uncer tainty), this school of thought
holds that culture is composed of psycho logical structures by means of which
individuals or groups of individu als guide their behavior. "A society's culture," to quote
Goodenough again, this time in a passage which has become the locus classicus of the
whole movement, "consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to
operate in a manner acceptable to its members." And from this view of what culture is
follows a view, equally assured, of what de scribing it is-the writing out of systematic
rules, an ethnographic algo rithm, which, if followed, would make it possible so to
operate, to pass (physical appearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extreme
subjec tivism is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an ex plosion of
debate as to whether particular analyses (which come in the form of taxonomies,
paradigms, tables, trees, and other ingenuities) re flect what the natives "really" think or
are merely clever simulations, logi cally equivalent but substantively different, of what
they think.
As, on first glance, this approach may look close enough to the one being developed
here to be mistaken for it, it is useful to be explicit as to what divides them. If, leaving
our winks and sheep behind for the moment, we take, say, a Beethoven quartet as an,
admittedly rather spe cial but, for these purposes, nicely illustrative, sample of culture,
no one would, I think, identify it with its score, with the skills and knowledge needed to
play it, with the understanding of it possessed by its perform ers or auditors, nor, to take
care, en passant, of the reductionists and reifiers, with a particular performance of it or
with some mysterious en tity transcending material existence. The "no one" is perhaps
too strong here, for there are always incorrigibles. But that a Beethoven quartet is a
temporally developed tonal structure, a coherent sequence of modeled
12 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
sound-in a word, music-and not anybody's knowledge of or belief about anything,
including how to play it, is a proposition to which most people are, upon reflection, likely
to assent.
To play the violin it is necessary to possess certain habits, skills, knowledge, and
talents, to be in the mood to play, and (as the old joke goes) to have a violin. But violin
playing is neither the habits, skills, knowledge, and so on, nor the mood, nor (the notion
believers in "ma terial culture" apparently embrace) the violin. To make a trade pact in
Morocco, you have to do certain things in certain ways (among others, cut, while
chanting Quranic Arabic, the throat of a lamb before the as sembled, undeformed, adult
male members of your tribe) and to be pos sessed of certain psychological
characteristics (among others, a desire for distant things). But a trade pact is neither the
throat cutting nor the desire, though it is real enough, as seven kinsmen of our
Marmusha sheikh discovered when, on an earlier occasion, they were executed by him
following the theft of one mangy, essentially valueless sheepskin from Cohen.
Culture is public because meaning is. You can't wink (or burlesque one) without
knowing what counts as winking or how, physically, to contract your eyelids, and you
can't conduct a sheep raid (or mimic one) without knowing what it is to steal a sheep
and how practically to go about it. But to draw from such truths the conclusion that
knowing how to wink is winking and knowing how to steal a sheep is sheep raid ing is to
betray as deep a confusion as, taking thin descriptions for thick, to identify winking with
eyelid contractions or sheep raiding with chasing woolly animals out of pastures. The
cognitivist fallacy-that culture consists (to quote another spokesman for the movement,
Stephen Tyler) of "mental phenomena which can [he means "should"] be ana lyzed by
formal methods similar to those of mathematics and logic"-is as destructive of an
effecttve use of the concept as are the behaviorist and idealist fallacies to which it is a
misdrawn correction. Perhaps, as its errors are more sophisticated and its distortions
subtler, it is even more so.
The generalized attack on privacy theories of meaning is, since early Husserl and late
Wittgenstein, so much a part of modern thought that it need not be developed once
more here. What is necessary is to see to it that the news of it reaches anthropology;
and in particular that it is made clear that to say that culture consists of socially
established struc tures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal
conThick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 13
spiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them, is no more to say that it is
a psychological phenomenon, a characteristic of some one's mind, personality,
cognitive structure, or whatever, than to say that Tantrism, genetics, the progressive
form of the verb, the classifica tion of wines, the Common Law, or the notion of "a
conditional curse" (as Westermarck defined the concept of 'ar in terms of which Cohen
pressed his claim to damages) is. What, in a place like Morocco, most prevents those of
us who grew up winking other winks or attending other sheep from grasping what
people are up to is not ignorance as to how cognition works (though, especially as, one
assumes, it works the same among them as it does among us, it would greatly help to
have less of that too) as a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which
their acts are signs. As Wittgenstein has been invoked, he may as well be quoted:
We . . . say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as
regards this observation that one human being can be a com plete enigma to another.
We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and,
what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do not understand
the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We
cannot find our feet with them.
IV
Finding our feet, an unnerving business which never more than distantly succeeds, is
what ethnographic research consists of as a personal experi ence; trying to formulate
the basis on which one imagines, always ex cessively, one has found them is what
anthropological writing consists of as a scientific endeavor. We are not, or at least I am
not, seeking ei ther to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic
them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the
widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to
converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers,
than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious
process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone
does not seem mysterious enough."
14 THE
INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse. That is
not, of course, its only aim instruction, amusement, practical counsel, moral advance, and the dis covery of
natural order in human behavior are others; nor is anthropol ogy the only discipline which pursues it. But it is an
aim to which a semiotic concept of culture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked systems of construable
signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social
events, behaviors, i nstitutions, or processes can be causally attributed ; it is a context, something within which
they can be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described.
The famous anthropological absorption with the (to us) exotic Berber horsemen, Jewish peddlers, French
Legionnaires-is, thus, es sentially a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the
mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us. Looking at the
ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not, as has so often been
claimed, the arbitrariness of human behavior (there is nothing especially arbitrary about taking sheep theft for
insolence in Morocco), but the de gree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is
informed. Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. (The
more I manage to follow what the Moroccans are up to, the more logical, and the more singular, they seem.) It
renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
It is this maneuver, usually too casually referred to as "seeing things from the actor's point of view," too bookishly
as "the verstehen ap proach," or too technically as "ernie analysis," that so often leads to the notion that
anthropology is a variety of either long-distance mind read ing or cannibal-isle fantasizing, and which, for
someone anxious to navi gate past the wrecks of a dozen sunken philosophies, must therefore be executed with
a great deal of care. Nothing is more necessary to comprehending what anthropological interpretation is, and the
degree to which it is interpretation, than an exact understanding of what it means -and what it does not mean-to
say that our formulations of other peoples' symbol systems must be actor-oriented.•
1 Not
only other peoples': anthropology can be trained on the culture of which it is itself a part, and
it increasingly is; a fact of profound importance, but which, as it raises a few tricky and rather
special second order problems, I shall put to the side for the moment.
I
It is one of the minor ironies of modern intellectual history that the term "ideology" has
itself become thoroughly ideologized. A concept that once meant but a collection of
political proposals, perhaps some what intellectualistic and impractical but at any rate
idealistic-"social romances" as someone, perhaps Napoleon, called them-has now be
come, to quote Webster's, "the integrated assertions, theories, and aims constituting a
politico-social program, often with an implication of fac titious propagandizing; as,
Fascism was altered in Germany to fit the Nazi ideology"-a much more formidable
proposition. Even in works that, in the name of science, profess to be using a neutral
sense of the term, the effect of its employment tends nonetheless to be distinctly po
lemical: in Sutton, Harris, Kaysen, and Tobin's in many ways excellent The American
Business Creed, for example, an assurance that "one has no more cause to feel
dismayed or aggrieved by having his own views described as 'ideology' than had
Moliere's famous character by the dis covery that all his life he had been talking prose,"
is followed immedi ately by the listing of the main characteristics of ideology as bias,
over simplification, emotive language, and adaption to public prejudice.1 No
1 F. X. Sutton, S. E. Harris, C. Kaysen, and J. Tobin,
The American Business Creed (Cambridge, Mass.,
1956), pp. 3-6.
194 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
one, at least outside the Communist bloc, where a somewhat distinctive conception of
the role of thought in society is institutionalized, would call himself an ideologue or
consent unprotestingly to be called one by others. Almost universally now the familiar
parodic paradigm applies: "I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he
has an ide ology. "
The historical process by which the concept of ideology came to be itself a part of the
very subject matter to which it referred has been traced by Mannheim; the realization (or
perhaps it was only an admis sion) that sociopolitical thought does not grow out of
disembodied re flection but "is always bound up with the existing life situation of the
thinker" seemed to taint such thought with the vulgar struggle for ad vantage it had
professed to rise above.2 But what is of even more imme diate importance is the
question of whether or not this absorption into its own referent has destroyed its
scientific utility altogether, whether or not having become an accusation, it can remain
an analytic concept. In Mannheim's case, this problem was the animus of his entire
work-the construction, as he put it, of a "nonevaluative conception of ideology." But the
more he grappled with it the more deeply he became engulfed in its ambiguities until,
driven by the logic of his initial assumptions to submit even his own point of view to
sociological analysis, he ended, as is well known, in an ethical and epistemological
relativism that he him self found uncomfortable. And so far as later work in this area has
been more than tendentious or mindlessly empirical, it has involved the em ployment of
a series of more or less ingenious methodological devices to escape from what may be
called (because, like the puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise, it struck at the very
foundations of rational knowledge) Mannheim's Paradox.
As Zeno's Paradox raised (or, at least, articulated) unsettling ques tions about the
validity of mathematical reasoning, so Mannheim's Par adox raised them with respect to
the objectivity of sociological analysis. Where, if anywhere, ideology leaves off and
science begins has been the Sphinx's Riddle of much of modern sociological thought
and the rust less weapon of its enemies. Claims to impartiality have been advanced in
the name of disciplined adherence to impersonal research procedures, of the academic
man's institutional insulation from the immediate con2 K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Harvest ed. (New York, n.d.), pp. 59-83; see also R. Merton, Social
Theory and Social Structure (New York,
1949), pp. 217-220.
Ideology As a Cultural System 195
cerns of the day and his vocational commitment to neutral ity, and of de liberately
cultivated awareness of and correction for one's own biases and interests. They have
been met with denial of the impersonality (and the effectiveness) of the procedures, of
the solidity of the insulation, and of the depth and genuineness of the self-awareness. "I
am aware," a re cent analyst of ideological preoccupations among American
intellectuals concludes, somewhat nervously, "that many readers will claim that my
position is itself ideological." a Whatever the fate of his other predic tions, the validity of
this one is certain. Although the arrival of a scien tific sociology has been repeatedly
proclaimed, the acknowledgment of its existence is far from universal, even among
social scientists them selves; and nowhere is resistance to claims to objectivity greater
than in the study of ideology.
A number of sources for this resistance have been cited repeatedly in the apologetic
literature of the social sciences. The value-laden nature of the subject matter is perhaps
most frequently invoked: men do not care to have beliefs to which they attach great
moral significance exam ined dispassionately, no matter for how pure a purpose; and
ifthey are themselves highly ideologized, they may find it simply impossible to be lieve
that a disinterested approach to critical matters of social and polit ical conviction can be
other than a scholastic sham. The inherent elu siveness of ideological thought,
expressed as it is in intricate symbolic webs as vaguely defined as they are emotionally
charged; the admitted fact that ideological special pleading has, from Marx forward, so
often been clothed in the guise of "scientific sociology"; and the defensiveness of
established intellectual classes who see scientific probing into the so cial roots of ideas
as threatening to their status, are also often men tioned. And, when all else fails, it is
always possible to point out once more that sociology is a young science, that it has
been so recently founded that it has not had time to reach the levels of institutional so
lidity necessary to sustain its claims to investigatory freedom in sensi tive areas. All
these arguments have, doubtless, a certain validity. But what-by a curious selective
omission the unkind might well indict as ideological-is not so often considered is the
possibility that a great part of the problem lies in the lack of conceptual sophistication
within social science itself, that the resistance of ideology to sociological anal ysis is so
great because such analyses are in fact fundamentally inade3 W . W h i t e , B e y o n d C o nfo r m i t y ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 2 1 1 .
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
quate; the theoretical framework they employ is conspicuously incom plete .
I shall try in this essay to show that such is indeed the case: that the social sciences
have not yet developed a genuinely nonevaluative con ception of ideology; that this
failure stems less from methodological in discipline than from theoretical clumsiness;
that this clumsiness mani fests itself mainly in the handling of ideology as an entity in
itself-as an ordered system of cultural symbols rather than in the discrimination of its
social and psychological contexts (with respect to which our ana lytical machinery is
very much more refined); and that the escape from Mannheim's Paradox lies, therefore,
in the perfection of a conceptual apparatus capable of dealing more adroitly with
meaning. Bluntly, we need a more exact apprehension of our object of study, lest we
find our selves in the position of the Javanese folk-tale figure, "Stupid Boy," who, having
been counseled by his mother to seek a quiet wife, returned with a corpse.
II
That the conception of ideology now regnant in the social sciences is a thoroughly
evaluative (that is, pejorative) one is readily enough demon strated. " [The study of
ideology ) deals with a mode of thinking which is thrown off its proper course," Werner
Stark informs us; "ideological thought is . . . something shady, something that ought to
be overcome and banished from our mind." It is not (quite) the same as lying, for, where
the liar at least attains to cynicism, the ideologue remains merely a fool: "Both are
concerned with untruth, but whereas the liar tries to falsify the thought of others while
his own private thought is correct, while he himself knows well what the truth is, a
person who falls for an ideology is himself deluded in his private thought, and if he
misleads others, does so unwillingly and unwittingly." 4 A follower of Mann heim, Stark
holds that all forms of thought are socially conditioned in the very nature of things, but
that ideology has in addition the unfortu nate quality of being psychologically
"deformed" ("warped," "contami nated," "falsified," "distorted," "clouded") by the
pressure of personal
4 W.
Stark, The Sociology ofKnowledge (London, 1958), p. 48.
Ideology As a Cultural System 197
emotions like hate, desire, anxiety, or fear. The sociology of knowledge deals with the
social element in the pursuit and perception of truth, its inevitable confinement to one or
another existential perspective. But the study of ideology-an entirely different enterprisedeals with the causes of intellectual error:
Ideas and beliefs, we have tried to explain, can be related to reality in a double way:
either to the facts of reality, or to the strivings to which this reality, or rather the reaction
to this reality, gives rise. Where the former connection exists, we find thought which is,
in principle, truthful; where the latter relation obtains, we are faced with ideas which can
be true
only by accident, and which are likely to be vitiated by bias, the word taken in the
widest possible sense. The former type of thought deserves to be called theo retical; the
latter must be characterized as paratheoretical. Perhaps one might also describe the
former as rational, the latter as emotionally tinged -the former as purely cognitive, the
latter as evaluative. To borrow Theo dor Geiger's simile . . . thought determined by
social fact is like a pure stream, crystal-clear, transparent; ideological ideas like a dirty
river, mud died and polluted by the impurities that have flooded into it. From the one it is
healthy to drink; the other is poison to be avoided.>
This is primitive, but the same confinement of the referent of the term "ideology" to a
form of radical intellectual depravity also appears in contexts where the political and
scientific arguments are both far more sophisticated and infinitely more penetrating. In
his seminal essay on "Ideology and Civility," for example, Edward Shils sketches a por
trait of "the ideological outlook," which is, if anything, even grimmer than Stark's.6
Appearing "in a variety of forms, each alleging itself to be unique"-Italian Fascism,
German National Socialism, Russian Bolshevism, French and Italian Communism, the
Action Franise, the British Union of Fascists, "and their fledgling American kinsman,
'McCarthyism,' which died in infancy"-this outlook "encircled and in vaded public life in
the Western countries during the 19th century and in the 20th century . . . threatened to
achieve universal domination." It consists, most centrally, of "the assumption that
politics should be con ducted from the standpoint of a coherent, comprehensive set of
beliefs which must override every other consideration." Like the politics it sup ports, it is
dualistic, opposing the pure "we" to the evil "they," proIbid., pp. 90-91. Italics in the original. For approximation of the same argu ment in M annheim, formulated as a d
istinction between "total" and "particular" ideology, see Ideology and Utopia, pp. 55-59.
e E. Shils, "Ideology and Civility: On the Politics of the Intellectual," The Se wanee Review 66 ( 1 958):
450-480.
198 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
claiming that he who is not with me is against me. It is alienative in that it distrusts,
attacks, and works to undermine established political institutions. It is doctrinaire in that
it claims complete and exclusive possession of political truth and abhors compromise. It
is totalistic in that it aims to order the whole of social and cultural life in the image of its
Ideals, futuristic in that it works toward a utopian culmination of history in which such an
ordering will be realized. It is, in short, not the sort of prose any good bourgeois
gentleman (or even any good demo crat) is likely to admit to speaking.
Even on more abstract and theoretical levels, where the concern is more purely
conceptual, the notion that the term "ideology" properly applies to the views of those
"stiff in opinions, and always in the wrong" does not disappear. In Talcott Parsons's
most recent contempla tion of Mannheim's Paradox, for example, "deviations from
[social] scientific objectivity" emerge as the "essential criteria of an ideology": "The
problem of ideology arises where there is a discrepancy between what is believed and
what can be [established as] scientifically correct." 7 The "deviations" and
"discrepancies" involved are of two general sorts. First, where social science, shaped as
is all thought by the overall values of the society within which it is contained, is selective
in the sort of questions it asks, the particular problems it chooses to tackle, and so forth,
ideologies are subject to a further, cognitively more pernicious "secondary" selectivity, in
that they emphasize some aspects of social reality-that reality, for example, as revealed
by current social scientific knowledge-and neglect or even suppress other aspects.
"Thus the business ideology, for instance, substantially exaggerates the contribution of
businessmen to the national welfare and underplays the contribution of scientists and
professional men. And in the current ide ology of the 'intellectual,' the importance of
social 'pressures to con formity' is exaggerated and institutional factors in the freedom
of the individual are ignored or played down." Second, ideological thought, not content
with mere overselectivity, positively distorts even those as pects of social reality it
recognizes, distortion that becomes apparent only when the assertions involved are
placed against the background of the authoritative findings of social science. "The
criterion of distortion is that statements are made about society which by social-scientific
7 T. Parsons, "An Approach to the Sociology of Knowledge," Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of
Sociology_ (Milan and Stressa, 1959), pp. 25-49. Ital ics in original.
Ideology As a Cultural System 199
methods can be shown to be positively in error, whereas selectivity is involved where
the statements are, at the proper level, 'true,' but do not constitute a balanced account
of the available truth." That in the eyes of the world there is much to choose between
being positively in error and rendering an unbalanced account of the available truth
seems, however, rather unlikely. Here, too, ideology is a pretty dirty river.
Examples need not be multiplied, although they easily could be. More important is the
question of what such an egregiously loaded con cept is doing among the analytic tools
of a social science that, on the basis of a claim to cold-blooded objectivity, advances its
theoretical in terpretations as "undistorted" and therefore normative visions of social
reality. If the critical power of the social sciences stems from their dis interestedness, is
not this power compromised when the analysis of po litical thought is governed by such
a concept, much as the analysis of religious thought would be (and, on occasion, has
been) compromised when cast in terms of the study of "superstition"?
The analogy is not farfetched. In Raymond Aron's The Opium ofthe Intellectuals, for
example, not only the title-ironically echoic of Marx's bitter iconoclasm-but the entire
rhetoric of the argument ("po litical myths," "the idolatry of history," "churchmen and
faithful," "sec ular clericalism," and so forth) reminds one of nothing so much as the
literature of militant atheism.8 Shils's tack of invoking the extreme pa thologies of
ideological thought-Nazism, Bolshevism, or whatever-as its paradigmatic forms is
reminiscent of the tradition in which the In quisition, the personal depravity of
Renaissance popes, the savagery of Reformation wars, or the primitiveness of Biblebelt fundamentalism is offered as an archetype of religious belief and behavior. And
Parsons's view that ideology is defined by its cognitive insufficiencies vis-a-vis sci ence
is perhaps not so distant as it might appear from the Comtean view that religion is
characterized by an uncritically figurative concep tion of reality, which a sober sociology,
purged of metaphor, will soon render obsolete: We may wait as long for the "end of
ideology" as the positivists have waited for the end of religion. Perhaps it is even not too
much to suggest that, as the militant atheism of the Enlightenment and after was a
response to the quite genuine horrors of a spectacular out burst of religious bigotry,
persecution, and strife (and to a broadened knowledge of the natural world), so the
militantly hostile approach to
s R. Aron, TheOpiumoftheIntellectuals(New York, 1962).
200 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ideology is a similar response to the political holocausts of the past half-century (and to
a broadened knowledge of the social world). And, if this suggestion is valid, the fate of
ideology may also turn out to be similar-isolation from the mainstream of social thought.
9
Nor can the issue be dismissed as merely a semantic one. One is, nat
urally, free to confine the referent of the term "ideology" to "something
shady" if one wishes; and some sort of historical case for doing so can
perhaps be made. But if one does so limit it, one cannot then write
works on the ideologies of American businessmen, New York "literary"
intellectuals, members of the British Medical Association, industrial la
bor-union leaders, or famous economists and expect either the subjects
or interested bystanders to credit them as neutral. to Discussions of so
ciopolitical ideas that indict them ab initio, in terms of the very words
used to name them, as deformed or worse, merely beg the questions
they pretend to raise. It is also possible, of course, that the term "ideol
ogy" should simply be dropped from scientific discourse altogether and
left to its polemical fate-as "superstition" in fact has been. But, as
there seems to be nothing at the moment with which to replace it and as
it is at least partially established in the technical lexicon of the social
sciences, it seems more advisable to proceed with the effort to defuse it.I 1
9 As the danger of being misinterpreted here is serious, may
I hope that my criticism will be credited as technical
and not political if I note that my own gen eral ideological (as I would frankly call it) position is largely the same as
that of Aron, Shils, Parsons, and so forth; that I am in agreement with their plea for a civil, temperate, unheroic
politics? Also it should be remarked that the demand for a nonevaluative concept of ideology is not a demand for
the nonevaluation of ideologies, any more than a nonevaluative concept of religion impl ies rel igious relativism.
IO Sutton,
et al., American Business Creed; White, Beyond Conformity; H. Eckstein, Pressure Group
Politics: The Case of the British Medical Association (Stanford, 1960); C. Wright Mills, The New Men of
Power (New York, 1948); J. Schumpeter, "Science and Ideology," A merican Economic Review 39 ( 1
949): 345-359.
11 There have been, in fact, a number of other terms used in the literature for the general range of phenomena
that "ideology" denotes, from Plato's "noble lies" through Sorel's "myths" to Pareto's "derivations"; but none of
them has managed to reach any greater level of technical neutrality than has "ideology." See H. D. Lasswell,
"The Language of Power," in Lasswell, N. Leites, and Asso ciates, Language of Politics (New York, 1 949),
pp. 3- 19.
Ideology As a Cultural System
201
III
As the flaws hidden in a tool show up when it is used, so the intrinsic weaknesses of the
evaluative concept of ideology reveal themselves when it is used. In particular, they are
exposed in the studies of the so cial sources and consequences of ideology, for in such
studies this con cept is coupled to a highly developed engine of social- and personality
system analysis whose very power only serves to emphasize the lack of a similar power
on the cultural (that is, the symbol-system) side. In in vestigations of the social and
psychological contexts of ideological thought (or at least the "good" ones), the subtlety
with which the con texts are handled points up the awkwardness with which the thought
is handled, and a shadow of imprecision is cast over the whole discussion, a shadow
that even the most rigorous methodological austerity cannot dispel.
There are currently two main approaches to the study of the social determinants of
ideology: the interest theory and the strain theory.12 For the first, ideology is a mask
and a weapon; for the second, a symptom and a remedy. In the interest theory,
ideological pronouncements are seen against the background of a universal struggle for
advantage; in the strain theory, against the background of a chronic effort to correct so
ciopsychological disequilibrium. In the one, men pursue power; in the other, they flee
anxiety. As they may, of course, do both at the same time-and even one by means of
the other-the two theories are not necessarily contradictory; but the strain theory (which
arose in response to the empirical difficulties encountered by the interest theory), being
less simplistic, is more penetrating, less concrete, more comprehensive.
The fundamentals of the interest theory are too well known to need review; developed
to perfection of a sort by the Marxist tradition, they are now standard intellectual
equipment of the man-in-the-street, who is only too aware that in political argumentation
it all comes down to whose ox is gored. The great advantage of the interest theory was
and is its rooting of cultural idea-systems in the solid ground of social struc ture, through
emphasis on the motivations of those who profess such systems and on the
dependence of those motivations in turn upon social
12 Sutton,
et at., American Business Creed, pp. 1 1-12, 303-3 10.
202 THE
INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
position, most especially social class. Further, the interest theory welded political
speculation to political combat by pointing out that ideas are weapons and that an
excellent way to institutionalize a particular view of reality-that of one's group, class, or
party-is to capture political power and enforce it. These contributions are permanent;
and if interest theory has not now the hegemony it once had, it is not so much because
it has been proved wrong as because its theoretical apparatus turned out to be too
rudimentary to cope with the complexity of the interaction among social, psychological,
and cultural factors it itself uncovered. Rather like Newtonian mechanics, it has not
been so much displaced by subsequent developments as absorbed into them.
The main defects of the interest theory are that its psychology is too anemic and its
sociology too muscular. Lacking a developed analysis of motivation, it has been
constantly forced to oscillate between a narrow and superficial utilitarianism that sees
men as impelled by rational cal culation of their consciously recognized personal
advantage and a broader, but no less superficial, historicism that speaks with a studied
vagueness of men's ideas as somehow "reflecting," "expressing," "corre sponding to,"
"emerging from," or "conditioned by" their social com mitments. Within such a
framework, the analyst is faced with the choice of either revealing the thinness of his
psychology by being so specific as to be thoroughly implausible or concealing the fact
that he does not have any psychological theory at all by being so general as to be truis
tic. An argument that for professional soldiers "domestic [governmen tal) policies are
important mainly as ways of retaining and enlarging the military establishment
[because) that is their business; that is what they are trained for" seems to do scant
justice to even so uncomplicated a mind as the military mind is reputed to be; while an
argument that American oil men "cannot very well be pure-and-simple oil men" be
cause "their interests are such" that "they are also political men" is as enlightening as
the theory (also from the fertile mind of M. Jourdain) that the reason opium puts you to
sleep is that it has dormitive pow ers.13
On the other hand, the view that social action is fundamentally an unending struggle for
power leads to an unduly Machiavellian view of ideology as a form of higher cunning
and, consequently, to a neglect of its broader, less dramatic social functions. The
battlefield image of sota The
quotations are from the most eminent recent interest theorist, C. Wright M ills, The Causes of World
War Three (New York, 1 958), pp. 54, 65.
Ideology As a Cultural System 203
ciety as a clash of interests thinly disguised as a clash of principles turns attention away
from the role that ideologies play in defining (or obscuring) social categories, stabilizing
(or upsetting) social expecta tions, maintaining (or undermining) social norms,
strengthening (or weakening) social consensus, relieving (or exacerbating) social
tensions. Reducing ideology to a weapon in a guerre de plume gives to its anal ysis a
warming air of militancy, but it also means reducing the intellec tual compass within
which such analysis may be conducted to the con stricted realism of tactics and
strategy. The intensity of interest theory is-to adapt a figure from Whitehead-but the
reward of its narrow ness.
As "interest," whatever its ambiguities, is at one and the same time a psychological and
sociological concept-referring both to a felt advan tage of an individual or group of
individuals and to the objective struc ture of opportunity within which an individual or
group moves-so also is "strain," for it refers both to a state of personal tension and to a
condition of societal dislocation. The difference is that with "strain" both the motivational
background and the social structural context are more systematically portrayed, as are
their relations with one an other. It is, in fact, the addition of a developed conception of
personal ity systems (basically Freudian), on the one hand, and of social systems
(basically Durkheimian) on the other, and of their modes of interpenetration-the
Parsonian addition-that transforms interest theory into strain theory. I4
The clear and distinct idea from which strain theory departs is the chronic malintegration
of society. No social arrangement is or can be completely successful in coping with the
functional problems it inevita bly faces. All are riddled with insoluble antinomies:
between liberty and political order, stability and change, efficiency and humanity,
precision and flexibility, and so forth. There are discontinuities between norms in
different sectors of the society-the economy, the polity, the family, and so on. There are
discrepancies between goals within the different sectors-between the emphases on
profit and productivity in business firms or between extending knowledge and
disseminating it in universi ties, for example. And there are the contradictory role
expectations of which so much has been made in recent American sociological literau For
the general schema, see Parsons, The Social System (New York, 1 95 1 ) , especially Chaps. 1 and 7.
The fullest development of the strain theory is in Sut ton et al., American Business Creed, especially Chap. 1
5.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ture on the foreman, the working wife, the artist, and the politician. So cial friction is as
pervasive as is mechanical friction-and as irremov able.
Further, this friction or social strain appears on the level of the individual personalityitself an inevitably malintegrated system of con flicting desires, archaic sentiments, and
improvised defenses-as psy chological strain. What is viewed collectively as structural
inconsistency is felt individually as personal insecurity, for it is in the experience of the
social actor that the imperfections of society and contradictions of character meet and
exacerbate one another. But at the same time, the fact that both society and personality
are, whatever their shortcomings, organized systems, rather than mere congeries of
institutions or clus ters of motives, means that the sociopsychological tensions they
induce are also systematic, that the anxieties derived from social interaction have a
form and order of their own. In the modern world at least, most men live lives of
patterned desperation.
Ideological thought is, then, regarded as (one sort of) response to this desperation:
"Ideology is a patterned reaction to the patterned strains of a social role." 1:; It provides
a "symbolic outlet" for emotional distur bances generated by social disequilibrium. And
as one can assume that such disturbances are, at least in a general way, common to all
or most occupants of a given role or social position, so ideological reactions to the
disturbances will tend to be similar, a similarity only reinforced by the presumed
commonalities in "basic personality structure" among members of a particular culture,
class, or occupational category. The model here is not military but medical: An ideology
is a malady (Sut ton, et al., mention nail-chewing, alcoholism, psychosomatic disorders,
and "crotchets" among the alternatives to it) and demands a diagnosis. "The concept of
strain is not in itself an explanation of ideological pat terns but a generalized label for
the kinds of factors to look for in working out an explanation." 16
But there is more to diagnosis, either medical or sociological, than the identification of
pertinent strains; one understands symptoms not merely etiologically but teleologicallyin terms of the ways in which they act as mechanisms, however unavailing, for dealing
with the distur bances that have generated them. Four main classes of explanation have
been most frequently employed: the cathartic, the morale, the solidarity,
15 Sutton,
et al., American Business Creed, pp. 307-308.
16 Parsons,
"An Approach."
Ideology As a Cultural System 205
and the advocatory. By the "cathartic explanation" is meant the venera ble safety-valve
or scapegoat theory. Emotional tension is drained off by being displaced onto symbolic
enemies ("The Jews," "Big Business," "The Reds," and so forth). The explanation is as
simple-minded as the device ; but that, by providing legitimate objects of hostility (or, for
that matter, of love), ideology may ease somewhat the pain of being a petty bureaucrat,
a day laborer, or a small-town storekeeper is undeniable. By the "morale explanation" is
meant the ability of an ideology to sustain individuals (or groups) in the face of chronic
strain, either by denying it outright or by legitimizing it in terms of higher values. Both the
strug gling small businessman rehearsing his boundless confidence in the inev itable
justness of the American system and the neglected artist attribut ing his failure to his
maintenance of decent standards in a Philistine world are able, by such means, to get
on with their work. Ideology bridges the emotional gap between things as they are ·and
as one would have them be, thus insuring the performance of roles that might other
wise be abandoned in despair or apathy. By the "solidarity explanation" is meant the
power of ideology to knit a social group or class together. To the extent that it exists, the
unity of the labor movement, the busi ness community, or the medical profession
obviously rests to a signifi cant degree on common ideological orientation; and the
South would not be The South without the existence of popular symbols charged with
the emotions of a pervasive social predicament. Finally, by the "advo catory
explanation" is meant the action of ideologies (and ideologists) in articulating, however
partially and indistinctly, the strains that impel them, thus forcing them into the public
notice. "Ideologists state the problems for the larger society, take sides on the issues
involved and 'present them in the court' of the ideological market place." tr Although
ideological advocates (not altogether unlike their legal counterparts) tend as much to
obscure as to clarify the true nature of the problems involved, they at least call attention
to their existence and, by polarizing issues, make continued neglect more difficult.
Without Marxist attack, there would have been no labor reform; without Black
Nationalists, no deliberate speed.
It is here, however, in the investigation of the social and psycho logical roles of ideology,
as distinct from its determinants, that strain theory itself begins to creak and its superior
incisiveness, in compari son with interest theory, to evaporate. The increased precision
in the
1 7 White,
Beyond Conformity, p. 204.
206 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
location of the springs of ideological concern does not, somehow, carry over into the
discrimination of its consequences, where the analysis be comes, on the contrary, slack
and ambiguous. The consequences envis aged, no doubt genuine enough in
themselves, seem almost adventitious, the accidental by-products of an essentially
nonrational, nearly auto matic expressive process initially pointed in another direction-as
when a man stubbing his toe cries an involuntary "ouch!" and incidentally vents his
anger, signals his distress, and consoles himself with the sound of his own voice; or as
when, caught in a subway crush, he issues a spon taneous "damn!" of frustration and,
hearing similar oaths from others, gains a certain perverse sense of kinship with fellow
sufferers.
This defect, of course, can be found in much of the functional anal ysis in the social
sciences: a pattern of behavior shaped by a certain set of forces turns out, by a
plausible but nevertheless mysterious coinci dence, to serve ends but tenuously related
to those forces. A group of primitives sets out, in all honesty, to pray for rain and ends
by strength ening its social solidarity; a ward politician sets out to get or remain near the
trough and ends by mediating between unassimilated immi grant groups and an
impersonal governmental bureaucracy; an ideolo gist sets out to air his grievances and
finds himself contributing, through the diversionary power of his illusions, to the
continued viability of the very system that grieves him.
The concept of latent function is usually invoked to paper over this anomalous state of
affairs, but it rather names the phenomenon (whose reality is not in question) than
explains it; and the net result is that functional analyses-and not only those of ideologyremain hope lessly equivocal. The petty bureaucrat's anti-Semitism may indeed give
him something to do with the bottled anger generated in him by con stant toadying to
those he considers his intellectual inferiors and so drain some of it away; but it may also
simply increase his anger by pro viding him with something else about which to be
impotently bitter. The neglected artist may better bear his popular failure by invoking the
classical canons of his art; but such an invocation may so dramatize for him the gap
between the possibilities of his environment and the de mands of his vision as to make
the game seem unworth the candle. Commonality of ideological perception may link
men together, but it may also provide them, as the history of Marxian sectarianism
demon strates, with a vocabulary by means of which to explore more exqui sitely the
differences among them. The clash of ideologists may bring a
Ideology As a Cultural System
social problem to public attention, but it may also charge it with such passion that any
possibility of dealing with it rationally is precluded. Of all these possibilities, strain
theorists are, of course, very well aware. Indeed they tend to stress negative outcomes
and possibilities rather more than the positive, and they but rarely think of ideology as
more than a faute de mieux stopgap-like nail-chewing. But the main point is that, for all
its subtlety in ferreting out the motives of ideological concern, strain theory's analysis of
the consequences of such concern re mains crude, vacillatory, and evasive.
Diagnostically it is convincing; functionally it is not.
The reason for this weakness is the virtual absence in strain theory (or in interest theory
either) of anything more than the most rudimen tary conception of the processes of
symbolic formulation. There is a good deal of talk about emotions "finding a symbolic
outlet" or "be coming attached to appropriate symbols"-but very little idea of how the
trick is really done. The link between the causes of ideology and its effects seems
adventitious because the connecting element-the autono mous process of symbolic
formulation-is passed over in virtual si lence. Both interest theory and strain theory go
directly from source analysis to consequence analysis without ever seriously examining
ideologies as systems of interacting symbols, as patterns of interworking meanings.
Themes are outlined, of course; among the content analysts, they are even counted.
But they are referred for elucidation, not to other themes nor to any sort of semantic
theory, but either backward to the effect they presumably mirror or forward to the social
reality they presumably distort. The problem of how, after all, ideologies transform
sentiment into significance and so make it socially available is short-cir cuited by the
crude device of placing particular symbols and particular strains (or interests) side by
side in such a way that the fact that the first are derivatives of the second seems mere
common sense-or at least post-Freudian, post-Marxian common sense. And so, if the
analyst be deft enough, it does.111 The connection is not thereby explained but merely
educed. The nature of the relationship between the sociopsycho logical stresses that
incite ideological attitudes and the elaborate sym bolic structures through which those
attitudes are given a public exis tence is much too complicated to be comprehended in
terms of a vague and unexamined notion of emotive resonance.
18 Perhaps the most impressive tour de force in this paratactic genre is Nathan Leites's A Study of
Bolshevism (New York, 1 953).
208 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES IV
It is of singular interest in this connection that, although the general stream of social
scientific theory has been deeply influenced by almost every major intellectual
movement of the last century and a half Marxism, Darwinism, Utilitarianism, Idealism,
Freudianism, Behavior ism, Positivism, Operationalism-and has attempted to capitalize
on virtually every important field of methodological innovation from ecol ogy, ethology,
and comparative psychology to game theory, cybernetics, and statistics, it has, with
very few exceptions, been virtually untouched by one of the most important trends in
recent thought: the effort to con struct an independent science of what Kenneth Burke
has called "sym bolic action." 19 Neither the work of such philosophers as Peirce, Witt
genstein, Cassirer, Langer, Ryle, or Morris nor of such literary critics as Coleridge, Eliot,
of "distortion" and philosophy has been undermining the adequacy of an emotivist
theory of meaning, social scientists have been rejecting the first and embrac ing the
second. It is not therefore surprising that they evade the prob lem of construing the
import of ideological assertions by simply failing to recognize it as a problem.22
In order to make explicit what I mean, let me take an example that is, I hope, so
thoroughly trivial in itself as both to still any suspicions that I have a hidden concern with
the substance of the political issue in volved and, more important, to bring home the
point that concepts de veloped for the analysis of the more elevated aspects of culture
poetry, for example-are applicable to the more lowly ones without in any way blurring
the enormous qualitative distinctions between the two. In discussing the cognitive
inadequacies by which ideology is defined for them, Sutton et al. use as an example of
the ideologist's tendency to "oversimplify" the denomination by organized labor of the
Taft-Hartley ACt as a "slave labor law":
Ideology tends to be simple and clear-cut, even where its simplicity and clarity do less
than justice to the subject under discussion. The ideological picture uses sharp lines
and contrasting blacks and whites. The ideologist ex aggerates and caricatures in the
fashion of the cartoonist. In contrast, a sci entific description of social phenomena is
likely to be fuzzy and indistinct. In recent labor ideology the Taft-Hartley Act has been a
"slave labor act." By no dispassionate examination does the Act merit this label. Any
detached
guistics as a Science," originally published in 1929 and reprinted in D. Mandie· baum, ed., Selected Writings
of Edward Sapir (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1 949), pp. 160-166.
22 A
partial exception to this stricture, although marred by his obsession with power as the sum and substance of
politics, is Lasswell's "Style in the Language of Politics," in Lasswell et al. • Language of Politics, po. 20-39. It
also should be remarked that the emphasis on verbal symbolism in the following discussion is merely for the sake
of simplicity and is not intended to deny the importance of plastic, theatrical, or other nonlinguistic devices-the
rhetoric of uniforms, floodlit stages, and marching bands-in ideological thought.
210 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
assessment of the Act would have to consider its many provisions individu ally. On any
set of values. even those of trade unions themselves. such an assessment would yield a
mixed verdict. But mi,-ed verdicts are not the stuff of ideology. They are too
complicated, too fuzzy. Ideology must categorize the Act as a whole with a symbol to
rally workers. voters and legislators to action.23
Leaving aside the merely empirical question of whether or not it is in fact true that
ideological formulations of a given set of social phenom ena are inevitably "simpler"
than scientific formulations of the same phenomena, there is in this argument a
curiously depreciatory-one might even say "oversimple"-view of the thought processes
of labor union leaders on the one hand and "workers, voters and legislators" on the
other. It is rather hard to believe that either those who coined and disseminated the
slogan themselves believed or expected anyone else to believe that the law would
actually reduce (or was intended to reduce) the American worker to the status of a slave
or that the segment of the public for whom the slogan had meaning perceived it in any
such terms. Yet it is precisely this flattened view of other people's mentalities that leaves
the sociologist with only two interpretations, both inadequate, of whatever effectiveness
the symbol has: either it deceives the uninformed (according to interest theory), or it
excites the unreflective (according to strain theory). That it might in fact draw its power
from its capacity to grasp, formulate, and communicate social realities that elude the
tem pered language of science, that it may mediate more complex meanings than its
literal reading suggests, is not even considered. "Slave labor act" may be, after all, not a
label but a trope.
More exactly, it appears to be a metaphor or at least an attempted metaphor. Although
very few social scientiss seem to have read much of it, the literature on metaphor-"the
power whereby language, even with a small vocabulary, manages to embrace a multimillion things" is vast and by now in reasonable agreement.24 In metaphor one has, of
course, a stratification of meaning, in which an incongruity of sense on one level
produces an influx of significance on another. As Percy has pointed out, the feature of
metaphor that has most troubled philoso phers (and, he might have added, scientists) is
that it is "wrong": "It as serts of one thing that it is something else." And, worse yet, it
tends to
23 Sutton, et al., American Business Creed, pp. 4-5.
24An excellent recent review is to be found in P. Henle, ed., Language, Thought and Culture (Ann Arbor,
1958), pp. 173-195. The quotation is from Langer, Philosophy, p. 1 1 7.
Ideology As a Cultural System 211
be most effective when most "wrong." 25 The power of a metaphor de rives precisely
from the interplay between the discordant meanings it symbolically coerces into a
unitary conceptual framework and from the degree to which that coercion is successful
in overcoming the psychic resistance such semantic tension inevitably generates in
anyone in a po sition to perceive it. When it works, a metaphor transforms a false iden
tification (for example, of the labor policies of the Republican Party and of those of the
Bolsheviks) into an apt analogy; when it misfires, it is a mere extravagance.
That for most people the "slave labor law" figure was, in fact, pretty much a misfire (and
therefore never served with any effectiveness as "a symbol to rally workers, voters and
legislators to action") seems evident enough, and it is this failure, rather than its
supposed clear-cut simplic ity, that makes it seem no more than a cartoon. The
semantic tension between the image of a conservative Congress outlawing the closed
shop and of the prison camps of Siberia was-apparently-too great to be resolved into a
single conception, at least by means of so rudimentary a stylistic device as the slogan.
Except (perhaps) for a few enthusiasts, the analogy did not appear; the false
identification remained false. But fail ure is not inevitable, even on such an elementary
level. Although, a most unmixed verdict, Sherman's "War is hell" is no social-science
proposition, even Sutton and his associates would probably not regard it as either an
exaggeration or a caricature.
More important, however, than any assessment of the adequacy of the two tropes as
such is the fact that, as the meanings they attempt to spark against one another are
after all socially rooted, the success or failure of the attempt is relative not only to the
power of the stylistic mechanisms employed but also to precisely those sorts of factors
upon which strain theory concentrates its attention. The tensions of the Cold War, the
fears of a labor movement only recently emerged from a bitter struggle for existence,
and the threatened eclipse of New Deal liberal ism after two decades of dominance set
the sociopsychological stage both for the appearance of the "slave labor" figure andwhen it proved unable to work them into a cogent analogy-for its miscarriage. The
militarists of 1934 Japan who opened their pamphlet on Basic Theory of National
Defense and Suggestions for Its Strengthening with
the resounding familial metaphor, "War is the father of creation and the mother of
culture," would no doubt have found Sherman's maxim as
2&W. Percy, "Metaphor as Mistake," The Sewanee Review 66 (1958): 79-99.
212 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
unconvincing as he would have found theirs.26 They were energetically preparing for an
imperialist war in an ancient nation seeking its footing in the modern world; he was
wearily pursuing a civil war in an unreal ized nation torn by domestic hatreds. It is thus
not truth that varies with social, psychological, and cultural contexts but the symbols we
construct in our unequally effective attempts to grasp it. War is hell and not the mother
of culture, as the Japanese eventually discovered-although no doubt they express the
fact in a grander idiom.
The sociology of knowledge ought to be called the sociology of mean ing, for what is
socially determined is not the nature of conception but the vehicles of conception. In a
community that drinks its coffee black, Henle remarks, to praise a girl with "You're the
cream in my coffee" would give entirely the wrong impression; and, if omnivorousness
were regarded as a more significant characteristic of bears than their clumsy
roughness, to call a man "an old bear" might mean not that he was crude, but that he
had catholic tastes.27 Or, to take an example from Burke, since in Japan people smile
on mentioning the death of a close friend, the semantic equivalent (behaviorally as well
as verbally) in American English is not "He smiled," but "His face fell"; for, with such a
rendering, we are "translating the accepted social usage of Japan into the
corresponding accepted social usage of the West." 2s And, closer to the ideological
realm, Sapir has pointed out that the chairman ship of a committee has the figurative
force we give it only because we hold that "administrative functions somehow stamp a
person as superior to those who are being directed"; "should people come to feel that
ad ministrative functions are little more than symbolic automatisms, the chairmanship of
a committee would be recognized as little more than a petrified symbol and the
particular value that is now felt to inhere in it would tend to disappear." 29 The case is
no different for "slave labor law." If forced labor camps come, for whatever reasons, to
play a less prominent role in the American image of the Soviet Union, it will not be the
symbol's veracity that has dissolved but its very meaning, its ca pacity to be either true
or false. One must simply frame the argument -that the Taft-Hartley Act is a mortal
threat to organized labor-in some other way.
26 Quoted
in J. Crowley, "Japanese Army Factionalism in the Early 1930's," The Journal ofAsian Studies 21
(1958): 309-326.
27 Henle,
28 K.
Language, Thought and Culture, pp. 4-5.
Burke, Counterstatement (Chicago, 1957), p. 149. 29 Sapir, "Status of Linguistics," p. 568.
Ideology As a Cultural System
213
In short, between an ideological figure like "slave labor act" and the social realities of
American life in the midst of which it appears, there exists a subtlety of interplay, which
concepts like "distortion," "selectiv ity," or "oversimplification" are simply incompetent to
formulate.ao Not only is the semantic structure of the figure a good deal more complex
than it appears on the surface, but an analysis of that structure forces one into tracing a
multiplicity of referential connections between it and social reality, so that the final
picture is one of a configuration of dis similar meanings out of whose interworking both
the expressive power and the rhetorical force of the final symbol derive. This
interworking is itself a social process, an occurrence not "in the head" but in that public
world where "people talk together, name things, make assertions, and to a degree
understand each other." a• The study of symbolic action is no less a sociological
discipline than the study of small groups, bureau cracies, or the changing role of the
American woman; it is only a good deal less developed.
v
Asking the question that most students of ideology fail to ask-what, precisely, do we
mean when we assert that sociopsychological strains are "expressed" in symbolic
forms?-gets one, therefore, very quickly
3o Metaphor
is, of course, not the only stylistic resource upon which ideology draws. Metonymy ("All
I have to offer is blood, sweat and tears"), hyperbole ("The thousand-year Reich"), meiosis ("I shall
return"), synechdoche ("Wall Street"), oxymoron ("Iron Curtain"), personification ("The hand that
held the dagger bas plunged it into the back of its neighbor"), and all the other figures the classical
rhetoricians so painstakingly collected and so carefully classified are uti lized over and over again,
as are such syntactical devices as antithesis, inversion, and repetition; such prosodic ones as
rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration; such liter ary ones as irony, eulogy, and sarcasm. Nor is all
ideological expression figurative. The bulk of it consists of quite literal, not to say flat-footed,
assertions, which, a certain tendency toward prima facie implausibility aside, are difficult to
distinguish from properly scientific statements: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles"; "The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which
are useful to the herd"; and so forth. As a cultural system, an ideology that has developed beyond
the stage of mere sloganeering consists of an intricate structure of interrelated meaningsinterrelated in terms of the se mantic mechanisms that formulate them-of which the two-level
organization of an isolated metaphor is but a feeble representation.
31 Percy, "Symbolic Structure."
2 14 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
into quite deep water indeed; into, in fact, a somewhat untraditional and apparently
paradoxical theory of the nature of human thought as a public and not, or at least not
fundamentally, a private activity.32 The details of such a theory cannot be pursued any
distance here, nor can any significant amount of evidence be marshaled to support it.
But at least its general outlines must be sketched if we are to find our way back from the
elusive world of symbols and semantic process to the (ap parently) more solid one of
sentiments and institutions, if we are to trace with some circumstantiality the modes of
interpenetration of cul ture, personality, and social system.
The defining proposition of this sort of approach to thought en plein air-what, following
Galanter and Gerstenhaber, we may call "the ex trinsic theory"-is that thought consists
of the construction and manip ulation of symbol systems, which are employed as
models of other sys tems, physical, organic, social, psychological, and so forth, in such
a way that the structure of these other systems-and, in the favorable case, how they
may therefore be expected to behave-is, as we say, "understood." 33 Thinking,
conceptualization, formulation, comprehen sion, understanding, or what-have-you,
consists not of ghostly happen ings in the head but of a matching of the states and
processes of sym bolic models against the states and processes of the wider world:
Imaginal thinking is neither more nor less than constructing an image of the
environment, running the model faster than the environment, and predicting that the
environment will behave as the model does. . . . The first step in the solution of a problem
consists in the construction of a model or image of the "relevant features" of the
[environment] . These models can be con structed from many things, including parts of
the organic tissue of the body and, by man, paper and pencil or actual artifacts. Once a
model has been constructed it can be manipulated under various hypothetical
conditions and constraints. The organism is then able to "observe" the outcome of these
manipulations, and to project them onto the environment so that prediction is possible.
According to this view, an aeronautical engineer is thinking when he manipulates a
model of a new airplane in a wind tunnel. The mo torist is thinking when he runs his
finger over a line on a map. the finger serving as a model of the relevant aspects of the
automobile, the map as a model of the road. External models of this kind are often used
in thinkinJ about complex [environments). Images used in covert thinking depend
32 G. Ryle, The Concept ofMind (New York 1949).
,
33 E.
Galanter and M . Gerstenhaber, "On Thought : The Extrinsic Theory, Psycho/. Rev. 63 (1956):
218-227.
"
Ideology As a Cultural System 215 upon the availability of the physico-chemical events
of the organism which
must be used to form models.34
This view does not, of course, deny consciousness: it defines it. Every conscious
perception is, as Percy has argued, an act of recognition, a pairing in which an object
(or an event, an act, an emotion) is identified by placing it against the background of an
appropriate symbol:
It is not enough to say that one is conscious of something; one is also con scious of
something being something. There is a difference between the ap prehension of a
gestalt (a chicken perceived the Jastrow effect as well as a human) and the grasping of
it under its symbolic vehicle. As I gaze about the room, I am aware of a series of almost
effortless acts of matching: seeing an object and knowing what it is. If my eye falls upon
an unfamiliar something, I am immediately aware that one term of the match is missing,
I ask what [the object] is-an exceedingly mysterious question.35
What is missing and what is being asked for are an applicable sym bolic model under
which to subsume the "unfamiliar something" and so render it familiar:
If I see
an object at some distance and do not quite recognize it, I may see it, actually
see it, as a succession of different things, each rejected by the criterion of fit as I come
closer, until one is positively certified. A patch of sunlight in a field I may actually see as
a rabbit-a seeing which goes much further than the guess that it may be a rabbit; no, the
perceptual ges talt is so construed, actually stamped by the essence of rabbitness: I
could have sworn it was a rabbit. On coming closer, the sunlight pattern changes
enough so that the rabbit-cast is disallowed. The rabbit vanishes and I make another
cast: it is a paper bag. and so on. But most significant of all, even the last, the "correct"
recognition is quite as mediate an apprehension as the incorrect ones; it is also a cast,
a pairing, an approximation. And let us note in passing that even though it is correct,
even though it is borne out by all indices, it may operate quite as effectively to conceal
as to discover. When I recognize a strange bird as a sparrow, I tend to dispose of the
bird under its appropriate formulation: it is only a sparrow.3&
Despite the somewhat intellectualist tone of these various examples, the extrinsic theory
of thought is extendable to the affective side of human
34 Ibid. I have quoted this incisive passage above (pp. 77-78), in attempting to set the extrinsic
theory of thought in the context of recent evolutionary, neurolog ical, and cultural anthropological
findings.
3 W. Percy, "Symbol, Consciousness and lntersubjectivity," Journal of Philos ophy 55 (1958): 63
1-641. Italics in original. Quoted by permission.
36 Ibid. Quoted by permission.
.u6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTUREs: ·.;
mentality as well. 37 As a road map transforms mere physical locations \ into "places," connected by numbered
routes and separated by mea. sured distances, and so enables us to find our way from where we are to where
we want to go, so a poem like, for example, Hopkins's "Felix Randal" provides, through the evocative power of its
charged language a symbolic model of the emotional impact of premature death, which, if
,
·. we are as
impressed with its penetration as with the road map's, trans forms physical sensations into sentiments and
attitudes and enables u8 to react to such a tragedy not "blindly" but "intelligently." The centra L rituals of religiona mass, a pilgrimage, a corroboree-are symboli : models (here more in the form of activities than of words) of a
·
particu lar sense of the divine, a certain sort of devotional mood, which their continual re-enactment tends to
produce in their participants. Of course, · as most acts of what is usually called "cognition" are more on the level
of identifying a rabbit than operating a wind tunnel, so most of what is: usually called "expression" (the
dichotomy is often overdrawn and a}.,. most universally misconstrued) is mediated more by models drawn
from., popular culture than from high art and formal religious ritual. But the': point is that the development,
maintenance, and dissolution of "moods,'; "attitudes," "sentiments," and so forth are no more "a ghostly
;
process,< occurring in streams of consciousness we are debarred from visiting' . than is the discrimination of
objects, events, structures, processes, and so forth in our environment. Here, too, "we are describing the ways
in which . . . people conduct parts of their predominantly public behavior." 38
Whatever their other differences, both so-called cognitive and so-:· called expressive symbols or symbolsystems have, then, at least one. thing in common: they are extrinsic sources of information in terms of: which
human life can be patterned-extrapersonal mechanisms for the·: perception, understanding, judgment, and
manipulation of the world. : Culture patterns-religious, philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, ideo- ! logical-are
"programs" ; they provide a template or blueprint for:
· the organization of social and psychological processes,
much as genetic, systems provide such a template for the organization of organic pro- cesses :
;
i
;, "reductionism"' in psychology and social science. The levels we have tent
These considerations define the terms in which we approach the problem ofj
37 S. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953).
38 The
quotations are from Ryle, Concept of Mind, p. S 1 . :
i
Ideology As a Cultural System
sense that the stability of a building depends on the properties of the materi als out of
which it is constructed. But the physical properties of the materi als do not determine the
plan of the building; this is a factor of another order, one of organization. And the
organization controls the relations of the materials to each other, the ways in which they
are utilized in the build ing by virtue of which it constitutes an ordered system of a
particular type -looking "downward" in the series, we can always investigate and
discover sets of "conditions" in which the function of a higher order of organization is
dependent. There is, thus, an immensely complicated set of physiological conditions on
which psychological functioning is dependent, etc. Properly understood and evaluated,
these conditions are always authentic determi nants of process in the organized
systems at the next higher levels. We may, however, also look "upward" in the series. In
this direction we see "struc tures," organization patterns, patterns of meaning,
"programs," etc., which are the focus of the organization of the system at the level on
which we have concentrated our attention.a9
The reason such symbolic templates are necessary is that, as has been often
remarked, human behavior is inherently extremely plastic. Not strictly but only very
broadly controlled by genetic programs or models -intrinsic sources of information-such
behavior must, if it is to have any effective form at all, be controlled to a significant
extent by extrin sic ones. Birds learn how to fly without wind tunnels, and whatever re
actions lower animals have to death are in great part innate, physiologi caJiy
preformed.•o The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability
39 T. Parsons, "An Approach to Psychological Theory in Terms of the Theory of Action," in
Psychology: A Study of a Science, ed. S. Koch (New York, 1 959), vol. 3. Italics in original.
Compare: "In order to account for this selectivity, it is necessary to assume that the structure of the
enzyme is related in some way to the structure of the gene. By a logical extension of this idea we
arrive at the con cept that the gene is a representation-blueprint so to speak-of the enzyme
molecule, and that the function of the gene is to serve as a source of information regarding the
structure of the enzyme. It seems evident that the synthesis of an enzyme-a giant protein molecule
consisting of hundreds of amino acid units ar ranged end-to-end in a specific and unique orderrequires a model or set of in structions of some kind. These instructions must be characteristic of
the species; they must be automatically transmitted from generation to generation, and they must
be constant yet capable of evolutionary change. The only known entity that could perform such a
function is the gene. There are many reasons for believing that it transmits information, by acting
as a model or template." N. H. Horowitz, "The Gene," Scientific American, February 1956, p. 85.
40This point is perhaps somewhat too baldly put in light of recent analyses of animal learning; but
the essential thesis-that there is a general trend toward a more diffuse, less determinate control of
behavior by intrinsic (innate) parameters
are levels
.
of organization and control. The lower levels "condition," and thUS in a sense
"determine" the structures into which they enter, in the same
tively discriminated [organism, personality, social system, culture]
..
.
218
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
of man's innate response capacities mean that the particular pattern his behavior takes
is guided predominantly by cultural rather than genetic templates, the latter setting the
overall psychophysical context within which precise activity sequences are organized by
the former. The tool making, laughing, or lying animal, man, is also the incomplete-or,
more accurately, self-completing-animal. The agent of his own reali zation, he creates
out of his general capacity for the construction of symbolic models the specific
capabilities that define him. Or-to return at last to our subject-it is through the
construction of ideologies, sche matic images of social order, that man makes himself
for better or worse a political animal.
Further, as the various sorts of cultural symbol-systems are extrinsic sources of
information, templates for the organization of social and psy chological processes, they
come most crucially into play in situations where the particular kind of information they
contain is lacking, where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are
weak or ab sent. It is in country unfamiliar emotionally or topographically that one needs
poems and road maps.
So too with ideology. In polities firmly embedded in Edmund Burke's golden assemblage
of "ancient opinions and rules of life," the role of ideology, in any explicit sense, is
marginal. In such truly traditional po litical systems the participants act as (to use
another Burkean phrase) men of untaught feelings; they are guided both emotionally
and intellec tually in their judgments and activities by unexamined prejudices, which do
not leave them "hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puz zled and
unresolved." But when, as in the revolutionary France Burke was indicting and in fact in
the shaken England from which, as perhaps his nation's greatest ideologue, he was
indicting it, those hallowed opin ions and rules of life come into question, the search for
systematic ideo logical formulations, either to reinforce them or to replace them, flour
ishes. The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing
the authoritative concepts that render it meaning ful, the suasive images by means of
which it can be sensibly grasped.41
as one moves from lower to higher animals-seems well established. See above, Chapter 3, pp. 70-76.
41 Of course, there are moral, economic, and even aesthetic ideologies, as well as specifically political ones, but
as very few ideologies of any social prominence lack political implications, it is perhaps permissible to view the
problem here in this somewhat narrowed focus. In any case, the arguments developed for political ideologies
apply with equal force to nonpolitical ones. For an analysis of a moral
Ideology As a Cultural System 219
It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free itself from the
immediate governance of received tradition, from the direct and detailed guidance of
religious or philosophical canons on the one hand and from the unreflective precepts of
conventional moral ism on the other, that formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take
hold.42 The differentiation of an autonomous polity implies the differen tiation, too, of a
separate and distinct cultural model of political action, for the older, unspecialized
models are either too comprehensive or too concrete to provide the sort of guidance
such a political system de mands. Either they trammel political behavior by
encumbering it with transcendental significance, or they stifle political imagination by
bind ing it to the blank realism of habitual judgment. It is when neither a so ciety's most
general cultural orientations nor its most down-to-earth, "pragmatic" ones suffice any
longer to provide an adequate image of political process that ideologies begin to
become crucial as sources of sociopolitical meanings and attitudes.
In one sense, this statement is but another way of saying that ideol ogy is a response to
strain. But now we are including cultural as well as social and psychological strain. It is
a loss of orientation that most di rectly gives rise to ideological activity, an inability, for
lack of usable models, to comprehend the universe of civic rights and responsibilities in
which one finds oneself located. The development of a differentiated polity (or of greater
internal differentiation within such a polity) may and commonly does bring with it severe
social dislocation and psycho logical tension. But it also brings with it conceptual
confusion, as the established images of political order fade into irrelevance or are driven
into disrepute. The reason why the French Revolution was, at least up to its time, the
greatest incubator of extremist ideologies, "progressive" and "reactionary" alike, in
human history was not that either personal insecurity or social disequilibrium were
deeper and more pervasive than at many earlier periods-though they were deep and
pervasive enough
ideology cast in terms very similar to those developed in this paper, see A. L. Green, "The Ideology of AntiFluoridation Leaders," The Journal of Social Issues
17 (1961):13-25.
42 That
such ideologies may call, as did Burke's or De Maistre's, for the rein
vigoration of custom or the reimposition of religious hegemony is, of course, no contradiction. One constructs
arguments for tradition only when its credentials have been questioned. To the degree that such appeals are
successful they bring, not a return to naive traditionalism, but ideological retraditionalization-an alto gether
different matter. See Mannheim, "Conservative Thought," in his Essays on Sociology and Social
Psychology (New York, 1953), especially pp. 94-98.
220 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
-but because the central organizing principle of political life, the di vine right of kings,
was destroyed.43 It is a confluence of sociopsycho logical strain and an absence of
cultural resources by means of which to make sense of the strain, each exacerbating the
other, that sets the stage for the rise of systematic (political, moral, or economic)
ideologies.
And it is, in turn, the attempt of ideologies to render otherwise in comprehensible social
situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully
within them, that accounts both for the ideologies' highly figurative nature and for the
intensity with which, once accepted, they are held. As metaphor extends language by
broad ening its semantic range, enabling it to express meanings it cannot or at least
cannot yet express literally, so the head-on clash of literal mean ings in ideology-the
irony, the hyperbole, the overdrawn antithesis provides novel symbolic frames against
which to match the myriad "un familiar somethings" that, like a journey to a strange
country, are produced by a transformation in political life. Whatever else ideologies may
be-projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, phatic
expressions of group solidarity-they are, most distinc tively, maps of problematic social
reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience. Whether, in any particular
case, the map is accurate or the conscience creditable is a separate question to which
one can hardly give the same answer for Nazism and Zionism, for the nationalisms of
McCarthy and of Churchill, for the defenders of segre gation and its opponents.
VI
Though ideological ferment is, of course, widespread in modern society, perhaps its
most prominent locus at the moment lies in the new (or re newed) states of Asia, Africa,
and some parts of Latin America; for it is in these states, Communist or not, that the
initial steps away from a
43 It is important to remember, too, that the principle was destroyed long be fore the king; it was to
the successor principle that he was, in fact, a ritual sacri fice: "When [Saint-Just] exclaims: 'To
determine the principle in virtue of whicb the accused [Louis XVI] is perhaps to die, is to determine
the principle by which the society that judges him lives,' he demonstrates that it is the philoso phers
who are going to kill the King: the King must die in the name of the social contract." A. Camus, The
Rebel (New York, 1 958), p. 1 1 4.
221
traditional politics of piety and proverb are just now being taken. The attainment of
independence, the overthrow of established ruling classes, the popularization of
legitimacy, the rationalization of public adminis tration, the rise of modern elites, the
which is that distin guishing these three phases of knowledge-seeking may not, as a
matter of fact, normally be possible; and, indeed, as autonomous "operations" they may
not in fact ·exist.
The situation is even more delicate, because, as already noted, what we inscribe (or try
to) is not raw social discourse, to which, because, save very marginally or very
specially, we are not actors, we do not have direct access, but only that small part of it
which our informants can lead us into understanding.4 This is not as fatal as it sounds,
for, in fact, not all Cretans are liars, and it is not necessary to know everything in order
to understand something. But it does make the view of anthro pological analysis as the
conceptual manipulation of discovered facts, a logical reconstruction of a mere reality,
seem rather lame. To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the
material complexity in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to
autog enous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a priori
weltanschauungen, is to pretend a science that does not exist and imagine a reality that
cannot be found. Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing
the guesses, and drawing ex planatory conclusions from the better guesses, not
discovering the Con tinent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape.
VI
So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it is in terpretive; what it
is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in
trying to rescue the "said" of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in
perusable terms. The kula is gone or altered; but, for better or worse, The Argonauts of
the
4 So far
as it has reinforced the anthropologist's impulse to engage himself with his informants as
persons rather than as objects, the notion of "participant observation" has been a valuable one.
But, to the degree it has lead the anthro pologist to block from his view the very special, culturally
bracketed nature of his own role and to imagine himself something more than an interested (in both
senses of that word) sojourner, it has been our most powerful source of bad faith.
Thick Description : Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 2 1
Western Pacific remains. But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic of such
description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic.
This is not to say that there are no large-scale anthropological inter pretations of whole
societies, civilizations, world events, and so on. In deed, it is such extension of our
analyses to wider contexts that, along with their theoretical implications, recommends
them to general atten tion and justifies our constructing them. No one really cares
anymore, not even Cohen (well . . . maybe, Cohen), about those sheep as such. History
may have its unobtrusive turning points, "great noises in a little room" ; but this little goround was surely not one of them.
It is merely to say that the anthropologist characteristically ap proaches such broader
interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extended
acquaintances with extremely small matters. He confronts the same grand realities that
others historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists-confront in more fateful
settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Pas sion, Authority, Beauty,
Violence, Love, Prestige; but he confronts them in contexts obscure enough-places like
Marmusha and lives like Cohen's-to take the capital letters off them. These all-toohuman con stancies, "those big words that make us all afraid," take a homely form in
such homely contexts. But that is exactly the advantage. There are enough profundities
in the world already.
Yet, the problem of how to get from a collection of ethnographic miniatures on the order
of our sheep story-an assortment of remarks and anecdotes-to wall-sized culturescapes
of the nation, the epoch, the continent, or the civilization is not so easily passed over
with vague al lusions to the virtues of concreteness and the down-to-earth mind. For a
science born in Indian tribes, Pacific islands, and African lineages and subsequently
seized with grander ambitions, this has come to be a major methodological problem,
and for the most part a badly handled one. The models that anthropologists have
themselves worked out to justify their moving from local truths to general visions have
been, in fact, as responsible for undermining the effort as anything their critics
sociologists obsessed with sample sizes, psychologists with measures, or economists
with aggregates-have been able to devise against them.
Of these, the two main ones have been: the Jonesville-is-the-USA "microcosmic"
model ; and the Easter- Island-is-a-testing-case "natural experiment" model. Either
heaven in a grain of sand, or the farther shores of possibility.
The Jonesville-is-America writ small (or America-is-Jonesville writ
22 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
large) fallacy is so obviously one that the only thing that needs explana tion is how
people have managed to believe it and expected others to believe it. The notion that
one can find the essence of national societies, civilizations, great religions, or whatever
summed up and simplified in so-called "typical" small towns and villages is palpable
nonsense. What one finds in small towns and villages is (alas) small-town or village life.
If localized, microscopic studies were really dependent for their greater relevance upon
such a premise-that they captured the great world in the little-they wouldn't have any
relevance.
But, of course, they are not. The locus of study is not the object of study.
Anthropologists don't study villages (tribes, towns, neighbor hoods . . . ); they study in
villages. You can study different things in different places, and some things-for example,
what colonial domina tion does to established frames of moral expectation-you can best
study in confined localities. But that doesn't make the place what it is you are studying.
In the remoter provinces of Morocco and Indonesia I have wrestled with the same
questions other social scientists have wres tled with in more central locations-for
example, how comes it that men's most importunate claims to humanity are cast in the
accents of group pride?-and with about the same conclusiveness. One can add a
dimension-one much needed in the present climate of size-up-and solve social science;
but that is all. There is a certain value, if you are going to run on about the exploitation
of the masses in having seen a Javanese sharecropper turning earth in a tropical
downpour or a Mo roccan tailor embroidering kaftans by the light of a twenty-watt bulb.
But the notion that this gives you the thing entire (and elevates you to some moral
vantage ground from which you can look down upon the ethically less privileged) is an
idea which only someone too long in the bush could possibly entertain.
The "natural laboratory" notion has been equally pernicious, not only because the
analogy is false-what kind of a laboratory is it where none of the parameters are
manipulable?-but because it leads to a no tion that the data derived from ethnographic
studies are purer, or more fundamental, or more solid, or less conditioned (the most
favored word is "elementary") than those derived from other sorts of social inquiry. The
great natural variation of cultural forms is, of course, not only an thropology's great (and
wasting) resource, but the ground of its deepest theoretical dilemma: how is such
variation to be squared with the bio logical unity of the human species? But it is not,
even metaphorically,
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
2.3
experimental variation, because the context in which it occurs varies along with it, and it
is not possible (though there are those who try) to isolate the y's from x's to write a
proper function.
The famous studies purporting to show that the Oedipus complex was batkwards in the
Trobriands, sex roles were upside down in Tchambuli, and the Pueblo Indians lacked
aggression (it is characteristic that they were all negative-"but not in the South"), are,
whatever their empiri cal validity may or may not be, not "scientifically tested and
approved" hypotheses. They are interpretations, or misinterpretations, like any others,
arrived at in the same way as any others, and as inherently in conclusive as any others,
and the attempt to invest them with the au thority of physical experimentation is but
methodological sleight of hand. Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular:
another country heard from. To regard them as anything more (or anything less) than
that distorts both them and their implications, which are far pro founder than mere
primitivity, for social theory.
Another country heard from: the reason that protracted descriptions of distant sheep
raids (and a really good ethnographer would have gone into what kind of sheep they
were) have general relevance is that they present the sociological mind with bodied stuff
on which to feed. The important thing about the anthropologist's findings is their
complex spe cificness, their circumstantiality. It is with the kind of material produced by
long-term, mainly (though not exclusively) qualitative, highly partici pative, and almost
obsessively fine-comb field study in confined contexts that the mega-concepts with
which contemporary social science is affticted-legitimacy, modernization, integration,
conflict, charisma, structure, . . . meaning-can be given the sort of sensible actuality that
makes it possible to think not only realistically and concretely about them, but, what is
more important, creatively and imaginatively with them.
to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry. The
whole point of a semiotic approach to cul ture is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining
access to the conceptual world in which our subjects Jive so that we can, in some
extended sense of the term, converse with them. The tension between the pull of this
need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolic action and the re quirements of
technical advance in the theory of culture, between the need to grasp and the need to
analyze, is, as a result, both necessarily great and essentially irremovable. Indeed, the
further theoretical devel opment goes, the deeper the tension gets. This is the first
condition for
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 25
cultural theory: it is not its own master. As it is unseverable from the immediacies thick
description presents, its freedom to shape itself in terms of its internal logic is rather
limited. What generality it contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its
distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions.
And from this follows a peculiarity in the way, as a simple matter of empirical fact, our
knowledge of culture . . . cultures . . . a culture . . . grows: in spurts. Rather than
following a rising curve of cumulative findings, cultural analysis breaks up into a
disconnected yet coherent se quence of bolder and bolder sorties. Studies do build on
other studies, not in the sense that they take up where the others leave off, but in the
sense that, better informed and better conceptualized, they plunge more deeply into the
same things. Every serious cultural analysis starts from a sheer beginning and ends
where it manages to get before exhausting its intellectual impulse. Previously
discovered facts are mobilized, pre viously developed concepts used, previously
formulated hypotheses tried out; but the movement is not from already proven theorems
to newly
proven ones, it is from an awkward fumbling for the most elementary
understanding to a supported claim that one has achieved that and sur passed it. A
study is an advance if it is more incisive-whatever that may mean-than those that
preceded it; but it less stands on their shoulders than, challenged and challenging, runs
by their side.
It is for this reason, among others, that the essay, whether of thirty pages or three
hundred, has seemed the natural genre in which to pre sent cultural interpretations and
The methodological problem which the microscopic nature of ethnog raphy presents is
both real and critical. But it is not to be resolved by regarding a remote locality as the
world in a teacup or as the sociologi cal equivalent of a cloud chamber. It is to be
resolved-or, anyway, de cently kept at bay-by realizing that social actions are comments
on more than themselves; that where an interpretation comes from does not determine
where it can be impelled to go. Small facts speak to large is sues, winks to
epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, because they are made to.
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
VII
Which brings us, finally, to theory. The besetting sin of interpretive ap proaches to
anything-literature, dreams, symptoms, culture-is that they tend to resist, or to be
permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to escape systematic modes of
assessment. You either grasp an interpretation or you do not, see the point of it or you
do not, accept it or you do not. Imprisoned in the immediacy of its own detail, it is pre
sented as self-validating, or, worse, as validated by the supposedly de veloped
sensitivities of the person who presents it; any attempt to cast what it says in terms
other than its own is regarded as a travesty-as, the anthropologist's severest term of
moral abuse, ethnocentric.
For a field of study which, however timidly (though I, myself, am not timid about the
matter at all), asserts itself to be a science, this just will not do. There is no reason why
the conceptual structure of a cultural in terpretation should be any less formulable, and
thus less susceptible to explicit canons of appraisal, than that of, say, a biological
observation or a physical experiment-no reason except that the terms in which such
formulations can be cast are, if not wholly nonexistent, very nearly so. We are reduced
to insinuating theories because we lack the power to state them.
At the same time, it must be admitted that there are a number of characteristics of
cultural interpretation which make the theoretical de velopment of it more than usually
difficult. The first is the need for theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to
be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction.
Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; longer ones tend
the theories sustaining them, and why, if one looks for systematic treatises in the field,
one is so soon disap pointed, the more so if one finds any. Even inventory articles are
rare here, and anyway of hardly more than bibliographical interest. The major
theoretical contributions not only lie in specific studies-that is true in almost any field-but
they are very difficult to abstract from such studies and integrate into anything one might
call ..culture theory" as such. Theoretical formulations hover so low over the
interpretations they govern that they don't make much sense or hold much interest apart
from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they are not general, they are
not theoretical), but because, stated indepen dently of their applications, they seem
either commonplace or vacant. One can, and this in fact is how the field progresses
conceptually, take a line of theoretical attack developed in connection with one exercise
in ethnographic interpretation and employ it in another, pushing it forz6 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
ward to greater precision and broader relevance; but one cannot write a "General
Theory of Cultural Interpretation." Or, rather, one can, but there appears to be little profit
in it, because the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract
regularities but to make thick de scription possible, not to generalize across cases but to
generalize within them.
To generalize within cases is usually called, at least in medicine and depth psychology,
clinical inference. Rather than beginning with a set of observations and attempting to
subsume them under a governing law, such inference begins with a set of (presumptive)
signifiers and attempts to place them within an intelligible frame. Measures are matched
to the oretical predictions, but symptoms (even when they are measured) are scanned
for theoretical peculiarities-that is, they are diagnosed. In the study of culture the
signifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symp toms, but symbolic acts or clusters of
symbolic acts, and the aim is not therapy but the analysis of social discourse. But the
way in which theory is used-to ferret out the unapparent import of things-is the same.
Thus we are lead to the second condition of cultural theory: it is not, at least in the strict
meaning of the term, predictive. The diagnostician doesn't predict measles; he decides
that someone has them, or at the very most anticipates that someone is rather likely
shortly to get them. But this limitation, which is real enough, has commonly been both
mis understood and exaggerated, because it has been taken to mean that cul tural
interpretation is merely post facto: that, like the peasant in the old story, we first shoot
the holes in the fence and then paint the bull's-eyes around them. It is hardly to be
denied that there is a good deal of that sort of thing around, some of it in prominent
places. It is to be denied, however, that it is the inevitable outcome of a clinical
approach to the use of theory.
It is true that in the clinical style of theoretical formulation, concep tualization is directed
toward the task of generating interpretations of matters already in hand, not toward
projecting outcomes of experimen tal manipulations or deducing future states of a
determined system. But that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more
carefully, to generate cogent interpretations of) realities past; it has also to survive intellectually survive-realities to come. Although we formulate our interpretation of an
outburst of winking or an instance of sheep-raiding after its occurrence, sometimes long
after, the theoretical framework in
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 27
terms of which such an interpretation is made must be capable of con tinuing to yield
defensible interpretations as new social phenomena swim into view. Although one starts
any effort at thick description, be yond the obvious and superficial, from a state of
general bewilderment as to what the devil is going on-trying to find one's feet-one does
not start (or ought not) intellectually empty-handed. Theoretical ideas are not created
wholly anew in each study; as I have said, they are adopted from other, related studies,
and, refined in the process, applied to new interpretive problems. If they cease being
useful with respect to such problems, they tend to stop being used and are more or less
aban doned. If they continue being useful, throwing up new understandings, they are
further elaborated and go on being used.5
Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretive science sug gests that the
distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the exper imental or observational
sciences between "description" and "explana tion" appears here as one, even more
relative, between "inscription" ("thick description") and "specification" ("diagnosis")between setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose
actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus
attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found and, beyond that, about
social life as such. Our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform
our subjects' acts, the "said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in
whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they
are what they are, will stand out against the other determi nants of human behavior. In
ethnography, the office of theory is to pro vide a vocabulary in which what symbolic
action has to say about itself -that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be
expressed.
Aside from a couple of orienting pieces concerned with more foun dational matters, it is
in such a manner that theory operates in the
5 Admittedly, this is something of an idealization. Because theories are seldom if ever decisively
disproved in clinical use but merely grow increasingly awkward, unproductive, strained, or vacuous,
they often persist long after all but a handful of people (though they are often most passionate)
have lost much interest in them. Indeed, so far as anthropology is concerned, it is almost .more of
a problem to get exhausted ideas out of the literature than it is to get productive ones in, and so a
great deal more of theoretical discussion than one would prefer is criti cal rather than constructive,
and whole careers have been devoted to hastening the demise of moribund notions. As the field
advances one would hope that this sort of intellectual weed control would become a less prominent
part of our ac tivities. But, for the moment, it remains true that old theories tend less to die than to
go into second editions.
z8 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
essays collected here. A repertoire of very general, made-in-the-acad emy concepts and
systems of concepts-"integration," "rationali zation," "symbol," "ideology," "ethos,"
"revolution," "identity," "meta phor," "structure," "ritual," "world view," "actor," "function,"
"sacred," and, of course, "culture" itself-is woven into the body of thick-description
ethnography in the hope of rendering mere occur rences scientifically eloquent.& The
aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support
broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engag
ing them exactly with complex specifics.
Thus it is not only interpretation that goes all the way down to the most immediate
observational level: the theory upon which such inter pretation conceptually depends
does so also. My interest in Cohen's story, like Ryle's in winks, grew out of some very
general notions in deed. The "confusion of tongues" model-the view that social conflict
is not something that happens when, out of weakness, indefiniteness, ob solescence, or
neglect, cultural forms cease to operate, but rather some thing which happens when,
like burlesqued winks, such forms are pressed by unusual situations or unusual
intentions to operate in un usual ways-is not an idea I got from Cohen's story. It is one,
in structed by colleagues, students, and predecessors, I brought to it.
Our innocent-looking "note in a bottle" is more than a portrayal of the frames of meaning
of Jewish peddlers, Berber warriors, and French proconsuls, or even of their mutual
interference. It is an argument that to rework the pattern of social relationships is to
rearrange the coordi nates of the experienced world. Society's forms are culture's
substance.
VIII
There is an Indian story-at least I heard it as an Indian story-about an Englishman who,
having been told that the world rested on a plat form which rested on the back of an
elephant which rested in turn on
6 The
overwhelming bulle. of the following chapters concern Indonesia rather than Morocco, for I
have just begun to face up to the demands of my North Af· rican material which, for the most part,
was gathered more recently. Field work in Indonesia was carried out in 1952-1954, 1957-1958, and
1971; in Morocco in
1964, 1965-1966, 1968-1969, and 1972.
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 29
the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave),
what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? "Ah, Sahib, after that it is
turtles all the way down."
Such, indeed, is the condition of things. I do not know how long it would be profitable to
meditate on the encounter of Cohen, the sheikh, and "Dumari" (the period has perhaps
already been exceeded); but I do know that however long I did so I would not get
anywhere near to the bottom of it. Nor have I ever gotten anywhere near to the bottom
of anything I have ever written about, either in the essays below or else where. Cultural
analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the
less complete it is. It is a strange sci ence whose most telling assertions are its most
tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the
sus picion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But
that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse ques tions, is what being an
ethnographer is like.
There are a number of ways to escape this-turning culture into folklore and collecting it,
turning it into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it
into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit
oneself to a semi otic concept of culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it is
to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as, to borrow W. B. Gallie's by
now famous phrase, "essentially contestable." Anthro pology, or at least interpretive
anthropology, is a science whose prog ress is marked less by a perfection of consensus
than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex
each other.
This is very difficult to see when one's attention is being monopolized by a single party
to the argument. Monologues are of little value here, because there are no conclusions
to be reported; there is merely a dis cussion to be sustained. Insofar as the essays here
collected have any importance, it is less in what they say than what they are witness to:
an enormous increase in interest, not only in anthropology, but in social studies
generally, in the role of symbolic forms in human life. Meaning, that elusive and illdefined pseudoentity we were once more than con tent to leave philosophers and
literary critics to fumble with, has now come back into the heart of our discipline. Even
Marxists are quoting Cassirer; even positivists, Kenneth Burke.
My own position in the midst of all this has been to try to resist sub30 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE S
jectivism on the one hand and cabbalism on the other, to try to keep the analysis of
symbolic forms as closely tied as I could to concrete social events and occasions, the
public world of common life, and to organize it in such a way that the connections
between theoretical formulations and descriptive interpretations were unobscured by
appeals to dark sci ences. I have never been impressed by the argument that, as
complete objectivity is impossible in these matters (as, of course, it is), one might as
well let one's sentiments run loose. As Robert Solow has remarked, that is like saying
that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible, one might as well conduct surgery
in a sewer. Nor, on the other hand, have I been impressed with claims that structural
linguistics, computer engineering, or some other advanced form of thought is going to
enable us to understand men without knowing them. Nothing will discredit a semiotic
approach to culture more quickly than allowing it to drift into a combination of
intuitionism and alchemy, no matter how elegantly the intuitions are expressed or how
modern the alchemy is made to look.
The danger that cultural analysis, in search of all-too-deep-lying tur tles, will lose touch
with the hard surfaces of life-with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within
which men are everywhere contained-and with the biological and physical necessities
on which those surfaces rest, is an ever-present one. The only defense against it, and
against, thus, turning cultural analysis into a kind of sociological aestheticism, is to train
such analysis on such realities and such necessi ties in the first place. It is thus that I
have written about nationalism, about violence, about identity, about human nature,
about legitimacy, about revolution, about ethnicity, about urbanization, about stat1,1s,
about death, about time, and most of all about particular attempts by particular peoples
to place these things in some sort of comprehensible, meaningful frame.
To look at the symbolic dimensions of social actionart, religion, ideology, science, law,
morality, common sense-is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for
some empyrean realm of de emotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them.
The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest ques
tions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other
valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the con suitable record of what man has
said.