Prof. Geertz (Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton) regards the
anthropologist as one who uncovers layers of meaning in one culture
and translates them into the terms of another culture - in the mode
of his classic analysis of a Balinese cockfight, in The
Interpretation of Cultures. Here, less convincingly, he is
exploring theories and the tension between various forms of "local
knowledge" (art, common sense, custom) and "generalized knowledge."
What emerges is a glass bead game of intellectual fashions
(semiotics, hermeneutics) and chronic namedropping - as when Geertz
writes of social scientists, disenchantment with scientific methods
and metaphors: "The penetration of the social sciences by the views
of such philosophers as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, or
Ricoeur, such critics as Burke, Frye, Jameson, or Fish, and such
all-purpose subversives as Foucault, Habermas, Barthes, or Kuhn
makes any simple return to a technological conception of those
sciences highly improbable." It is also improbable that anyone but
the players will know what is going on. Geertz delights to think,
for example, that what he and Lionel Trilling do is essentially the
same thing. Literary criticism and interpretive anthropology are
"not just cognate activities. They are the same activity
differently pursued." This leads to "meta-commentary" ("what
Trilling thinks about what Geertz thinks about what the Balinese
think, and what Geertz thinks about that") - though there is more
worry about under-interpretation than overinterpretation. If all
this talk led to dramatic new insights in the empirical essays (the
one, for instance, on charisma in Tudor England, Hindu Java, and
Muslim Morocco), we would eagerly follow the new path out of the
theoretical maze. But it leads simply to more talk. In the lengthy
essay on "Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective," Geertz reminds
his Yale Law School audience that "Law may not be a brooding
omnipresence in the sky. . . but it is not, as the down-home
rhetoric of legal realism would have it, a collection of ingenious
devices to avoid disputes. . . . An Anschauung in the marketplace
would be more like it." After highflying mecta-commentaries and
Anschauungs, the final recommendation is a down-to-earth,
peace-making plea. "If there is any message. . . . It is that the
world is a various place. . . and much is to be gained,
scientifically and otherwise, by confronting the grand actuality
rather than wishing it away in a haze of forceless generalities and
false comforts." Did most anthropologists ever believe otherwise?
Does the anthropologist really have a new set of clothes? Given
Geertz's eminence, some may think so. (Kirkus Reviews)
This sequel to The Interpretation of Cultures is a collection of
essays which reject large abstractions, going beyond the mere
translation of one culture into another, and looks at the
underlying, compartmentalized reality.
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