Non-classical aesthetics in the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz

The subject of the research is the aesthetic discourse in K. Geertz's work "Deep Play," which is examined within the framework and based on the principles of a specific epistemology of anthropological research developed by the author. By characterizing the cockfights that were common on the island of Bali in the 1950s as a work of art, K. Geertz creates a multi-layered aesthetic description of them. He distinguishes the level of expressive means, which includes blood, bets, the crowd, the roosters themselves, projections of status, and fractional struggles; the level of the main experience, "anxiety," to which this diversity is subordinated; and the level at which cockfighting becomes a representation of a universal human event. However, these three levels do not create a unified aesthetics and do not allow for a formulation of the question of what constitutes art in this context. To address the question of the nature of the aesthetic that K. Geertz proposes, we rely primarily on the division of aesthetics into classical and non-classical developed in domestic philosophy. For the analysis of discursive insertions in Geertz's interpretation of the fights, we turn to neo-Kantian philosophy, the interpretation of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, and phenomenological aesthetics. The scientific novelty of this research lies in the suggestion of a new pathway for the reception and conceptualization of Geertz's interpretative approach, which has not yet been realized. Although the problem of poetics and aesthetics of anthropological writing itself is regarded as significant, and the blending of humanitarian and artistic-literary genres is recognized, with new writing practices being developed, the tools of poetics and aesthetics are not utilized. They are overshadowed by numerous critical approaches. However, as demonstrated by Geertz's work and the reception of his writings by his initial critics, incorporating philosophical aesthetics into the anthropological discourse is necessary. Since reception occurs through the "translation" of the perceived into the register of familiar discourses, this article proposes to turn to non-classical aesthetics as a domestic philosophical development. The concept of non-classics appears useful not only as a "name" but also due to its content, capturing the nature of non-classics not as a system but as a tense meaningful field.