Second, culture took on the sense of moral authority, an Arnoldian equation of culture with high culture and a concomitant mistrust of all things democratic and popular, which debase and ultimately threaten the authority of high culture. Raymond Williams's reinterpretation of culture merits attention because of its departure from previous traditions of defining culture, and because it is a useful foundation for the view of culture proposed later in this discussion. Williams offered a detailed historical analysis of the reasons for the under-theorisation of the British labour movement, and the glaring dislocation of the English proletariat from the ideas, the concepts, the political theory of capitalism. Geertz maintained that cultural analysis is guesswork rather than systematic theorising, which he regarded as a manipulation or reconstruction of reality through analytical practices in search of elegant schemata. Clearly, Geertz trained his critical sights on anthropological trends to extrapolate from material data singularly coherent, even symmetrical systems, orders, properties, and universals in a method that wants to imitate, but is not science.
Interpretation resists scientism.
While this assertion appears disarmingly simple, it is profound in its implications. We arrived back in Lahore after a day's journey by jeep over the bone-dry and dusty roads of rural Punjab. The air was a toxic soup, and the heat was crushing, as it always is in Pakistan in monsoon season. The interior of the vehicle was an oven, and I was feeling sealed and cooked, even with all the windows open. My friend and driver, Ashicksahib and I were soaked with sweat from the journey, and we were eager to finally get out of the jeep as we pulled into the city in the late afternoon.