This week, I am challenged to make meaning and coherent sense out of the assignments we have read, viewed and listened to. The textual images from the passage in Geertz’s Chapter 2 attributed to L. V. Helms concerning the self-immolation of three Balinese women in the late 1800’s (Geertz, 1983) and the film documentary based on the mass suicide of the 909 victims of Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 (Nelson, 2007) have frankly, overwhelmed my senses and challenged my thought process. I hardly know where to begin with this reflection. Perhaps returning Geertz’s writings can assist.
In three chapters of Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (Geertz, 1983) Geertz has given us much to think about interpretation and anthropological inquiry. But his definition of interpretive explanation on page 22 of Chapter 1 Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social thought helps me make sense of the words, sounds and images I mentioned in the first paragraph of this reflection.
Interpretive explanation – and it is a form of explanation, not just exalted glossography – trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images utterances, events, customs, all the usual objects of social-scientific interest mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are.
Geertz goes on to suggest that interpretive inquiry, “attempts to formulate how this people or that, this period or that, this person or that makes sense to itself, and understanding that, what we understand about social order, historical change, or psychic functioning in general.”
Geertz has made two points here which I will relate to the Peoples Temple. First, any attempt to conduct an interpretive explanation of the Peoples Temple needs to focus on what the Peoples Temple meant to the members of the Peoples Temple. According to Geertz, an interpretive explanation would attempt to understand what the customs of the Peoples Temple meant to the membership and what the actions, like the mass suicide, meant to the membership. The second point Geertz makes in the above quote is that generalization, can only occur once the meaning of the events, actions, customs to the members of the People’s Temple themselves, is understood.
The film gives insight into the meaning of the action of life-taking by presenting interviews, recorded statements and written communication of several members of the Peoples Temple. I will quote five members here, each one offering a different meaning. Eugene Smith a survivor said, “we wanted to make a change, it never happened but one thing I can say is at least we tried, and we didn’t sit back and wait on the laurels of somebody else, we tried, and yes it was a failure, and yes it was very tragic, but at least we tried.” Another survivor, Stanley Clayton, said, “I ain’t used the term suicide and I ain’t never goin to use the term suicide, that man killed them.”
Jim Jones provided his own meaning when he said, ‘there’s nothing to death, it’s just stepping into another plane…we didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Another survivor said, “There was nothing dignified about it, it was nothing to do with revolutionary suicide, it was nothing about making a (profanity omitted) statement, it was just senseless waste, a senseless waste and death.” Finally, in a note left at the scene, one victim said, “let all the story of this Peoples Temple be told… if nobody understands, it matters not. I am ready to die now darkness settles over Jonestown on its last day on earth.”
Despite these individual meanings, all different, expressed by survivors and victims, it is still quite difficult for me to compose any statement that would attempt to generalize their interpretation. Perhaps that is why the film focused on making meaning by interviewing the various people involved as well as the recorded public as a way of telling the story from the viewpoint of the participants.
References
Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Nelson, S. (Producer/Director). (2007). Jonestown: The life and death of peoples temple [Motion Picture]. WGBH Educational Foundation and Firelight Media.
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