Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential thinkers of our
time, here discusses some of the most urgent issues facing
intellectuals today. In this collection of personal and revealing
essays, he explores the nature of his anthropological work in
relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson
of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World
War II. His reflections are written in a style that both entertains
and disconcerts, as they engage us in topics ranging from moral
relativism to the relationship between cultural and psychological
differences, from the diversity and tension among activist faiths
to "ethnic conflict" in today's politics.
Geertz, who once considered a career in philosophy, begins by
explaining how he got swept into the revolutionary movement of
symbolic anthropology. At that point, his work began to encompass
not only the ethnography of groups in Southeast Asia and North
Africa, but also the study of how meaning is made in all
cultures--or, to use his phrase, to explore the "frames of meaning"
in which people everywhere live out their lives. His philosophical
orientation helped him to establish the role of anthropology within
broader intellectual circles and led him to address the work of
such leading thinkers as Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, William
James, and Jerome Bruner. In this volume, Geertz comments on their
work as he explores questions in political philosophy, psychology,
and religion that have intrigued him throughout his career but that
now hold particular relevance in light of postmodernist thinking
and multiculturalism. "Available Light" offers insightful
discussions of concepts such as nation, identity, country, and
self, with a reminder that like symbols in general, their meanings
are not categorically fixed but grow and change through time and
place.
This book treats the reader to an analysis of the American
intellectual climate by someone who did much to shape it. One can
read Available Light both for its revelation of public culture in
its dynamic, evolving forms and for the story it tells about the
remarkable adventures of an innovator during the "golden years" of
American academia.
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