An unabashedly honest ethnography that faces head-on the challenge
of representing the "other" in the social sciences'
"post-post-modernist" climate of uncertainty. As the founder of
"symbolic" anthropology, which he refers to as the "anthropology of
meaning," Geertz (Social Sciences/Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton) has already made an impressive contribution to the
field. This book - a series of reflections on his fieldwork over a
period of some 40 years in two locations: Pare, Indonesia, and
Sefrou, Morocco - vibrantly demonstrates that ethnography which
recognizes the internal complexities and conflicts of anthropology
can still be a viable and worthwhile enterprise. Geertz admits from
the beginning that the reason for weaving his narrative between
these two cultures is that this was the manner in which he came to
"find his feet" in them; it is his own life, rather than any
natural contrast between the two cultures, that gives form to the
narrative. The task Geertz sets himself is nearly impossible: Not
only have the two towns changed in virtually infinite ways, but
Geertz himself and the discipline of anthropology have also
undergone enormous transformations; in addition, local history and
politics are nested within regional and international ones. Geertz
accepts the challenge of describing this metamorphosis in all of
its complexity without resorting to graphs, statistics, and models
of patriarchal lineages. The ethnography that emerges is part
history, part anecdote, part personal narrative, and part theory.
The author likens the process to "Richard Wilbur's Tom Swift,
putting dirigibles together, in the quiet weather, out in the
backyard." Whether he is describing Morocco, Indonesia, Harvard,
the University of Chicago, or Princeton, Geertz respects the
difficulty of relating a past that remains elusive despite
exhaustive field notes. Ironically, this lends his voice a kind of
"ethnographic authority" that he would probably wish to avoid. At
times unwieldy, cumbersome, self-absorbed, detached, and graceless
- in short, quite brilliant. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself
every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two
provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a
North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say
something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative
presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir?
None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has
changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance,
anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which
the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of
anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is
characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also
a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences
amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An
elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in
anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the
purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers.
To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in
Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological
research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold
War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa.
Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of
issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and
personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a
particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a
particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these
sciences are, have been, and should become.
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