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Life among the Anthros and Other Essays Featured article in the Bright Lights Film Journal Avatar metaphorically attacks all martial colonial and expansionist histories which have occurred at the expense of the worlds indigenous peoples and Earths ... NativeTech: Ojibwe Culture Arts History Language People Ojibwe. Links to Culture Art History Language People... for my Shinob friends Rank: #1771626 in BooksBrand: Brand: Princeton University PressPublished on: 2010-07-21Original language: EnglishNumber of items: 1Dimensions: .89" h x 6.40" w x 9.50" l, 1.25 pounds Binding: Hardcover304 pagesUsed Book in Good Condition 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.We Ain't Done Yet With Clifford GeertzBy Etienne RPPeople who set the tone in anthropology have declared Clifford Geertz passe for at least the past twenty-five years. They have written his obituary while he was still alive, and have staged his funeral long before he passed away in 2006. For some, who studied under his supervision, it was a way to come to terms with an Oedipus complex, and to accomplish the ritual murder of the father that Freud saw at the origin of civilization. For others, weary of his scholarly influence, criticizing Geertz's interpretive anthropology was a way to reject all the new trends that redefined the discipline after the seventies and to cling to more antiquated forms of ethnography. Still for others, Geertz was not radical enough, and stopped in midcourse where his postmodern successors were ready to go all the way. Geertz was criticized both from the left and from the right, leaving little ground in the middle.But as this book published in 2010 demonstrates, we aren't quite done yet with Clifford Geertz. Even after his death, the old man still has a few tricks in his bag. Fred Inglis, his faithful commentator, is right to point out that "the more we have of Geertz's work and thought to read, the better." With After the Fact and Available Light, his two last personal essays published well after the age of retirement, we thought we had it all. Here the anthropologist took some distance with his past scholarly work and revealed himself as a masterful storyteller and moralist, distilling a life's lessons for a new generation of readers. What he lacked in avant-gardist virtuosity or radical militantism, he compensated with magnificent prose, a keen sense of humor, and a deep moral commitment to the betterment of mankind. Life Among the Anthros collects essays he published in the New York Review of Books (otherwise known as NYRB) throughout the course of his career, as well as carefully-written lectures he delivered shortly before he died. Readers are therefore able to scan the breadth and depth of his scholarly interests, and to form a more accurate picture of his late work than some of his critics would have us believe.Take some of the allegations that have been charged against Geertz. First comes political aloofness, the idea that Geertz was detached from the struggles of the day and did not commit to a progressive agenda that would have served the cause of the people he wrote about. There is an irony in the fact that this charge is mostly waived by individuals who engage in campus politics, trumpeting a radicalism that stops short of having any influence in the real world. By comparison, Geertz was anything but a detached scholar. He took part in the most pressing debates of our times, and even (as Fred Inglis reports) signed a few petitions when he felt hearing the voice of public intellectuals really mattered. Geertz was the opposite of the hit-and-run ethnographer. He kept returning to Indonesia and to Morocco, the two countries where he conducted fieldwork, and commented on their political development for a wide audience. This political alertness included making forays into journalism and punditry, which he did with natural modesty and stylistic grace.Then there is the reproach of subjectivism and essayism, made by those critics who accuse Geertz of pursuing art-for-art's sake without coming up with overarching theories or grand syntheses. To those who accuse him of making anthropology into literature, he shows that anthropology is first defined by fieldwork, and that doing research in the field involves discovering the other as opposed to only discovering the self. Geertz did cultivate a personal style, and he attached great importance to the art and method of writing ethnography, but for him there was a purpose in the text. His stylistic signature involved the frequent use of hyphenated colloquialisms: as if he had too many words to fit in a sentence, he put them in blocs of simple words linked together by hyphen signs, making familiar expressions part of the description of the unfamiliar. He also used the stylistic figure of chiasmus frequently, displaying inverted parallelism between two clauses in order to make a larger point. By the end of his life, he revisited his earlier carrier frequently in order to draw lessons from the history of the discipline; but he did not confide personal matters, and did not indulge in subjective remembering. The remark he made on Foucault could apply to himself: "whoever he is, or whatever, he is what any French savant seems to need to be these days: elusive."Some scholars acknowledge his early achievements but consider that Geertz suddenly stopped in his tracks after the publication of his two main collections of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures and Local Knowledge. After that, they say, he didn't come up with any new ideas, and was sidestepped by new currents in the discipline that he could only witness from outside. There is some truth in this charge: the most productive period for Geertz was in the sixties, when he came up with a string of influential books and papers that charted a new course for anthropology. But this was also the period when he was closest to the field: with age, teaching duties, and administrative functions, he grew more detached from fieldwork by necessity, and this may explain the law of diminishing returns that affected his scholarly production. For him, anthropology was defined by fieldwork, and his most groundbreaking insights came straight from the field, embedded in "thick descriptions" or "experience-near concepts".In 1970, Geertz moved from Chicago to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, where he created a new school for the social sciences. There he welcomed many of the luminaries who were to set new trends for the reflexive social sciences, including feminist scholars Joan Scott and Judith Butler, and to them he was generous with his time and expertise, as in his essay "On Feminism" that looks in a dispassionate manner at new developments the social studies of science (a field that his former student Paul Rabinow accused him of having completely neglected). Among these radical scholars who visited the Institute for extended periods, Geertz must have felt like the only sane person in a madhouse, but his position gave him a unique perspective to comment on the latest developments in anthropology, as he does in his essay on "An Inconstant Profession".The most vicious attack that was launched at Geertz was the accusation of Orientalism, a most devastating charge among anthropologists. It was made most forcefully by Talad Asad in his Genealogies of Religion, and also by a literature scholar named Brian Edwards in the final chapter of a book titled Morocco Bound. This is complete nonsense. Asad demonizes Geertz as an Orientalist and cites Edwards Said, but a close reading of Orientalism shows that Clifford Geerz is one of the few people whom Said completely exonerates. There is also a lot to be said about the diverging fortunes of Said and Geertz among politically-correct academics. Whereas Geertz was sent to purgatory, the author of Orientalism is still revered by literary critics and social scientists as the man who threw the gauntlet against Western imperialism and opened the gates for postcolonial and subaltern studies. A more realistic assessment of Edward Said's legacy would point to his severe shortcomings as a scholar and to his inability to foresee all the major trends that have affected the Middle East, the region on which he claimed expertise. By contrast, Geertz's essay "Which Way to Mecca", as well as his book Islam Observed, should be required reading for all scholars working on the Islamic revival. Whereas social scientists usually get published by being wrong, Geertz was right on most issues, and his lessons are still valid for twenty-first century readers.A public intellectual not only takes sides, clarifies the debate, and arguments his position in a dispassionate manner: he also influences the orientation that the public debate should take, and contributes to the diffusion of civic mindedness. Here Clifford Geertz's lifelong association with the New York Review of Books is noteworthy. The NYRB is not just another review: it stands for the best American liberalism has to offer. It is all at once non-partisan and committed, urbane and bookish, literary and scientific, grounded in the past and avant-gardist. It breaks academic boundaries and straddles the social worlds of scholarship, journalism, essayism, and literature. It is above all a repository of good prose and literary talent. Book reviews published in its pages offer a model that very few online postings or newspaper columns can achieve. Despite the conservative turn in American politics, no media belonging to the right-of-center galaxy has been able to challenge it. There is simply no substitute to it.And Clifford Geerz was not just another NYRB reviewer. He wrote some of his most influential essays in its pages, only a few of which are included in Life Among the Anthros. By addressing scholarly debates in a non-scholarly fashion, Geertz made anthropology relevant for the learned public. He covered some of the most important controversies that shook up the small world of anthropology: the publication of Malinowski's diaries, which revealed "a crabbed, self-preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow-feeling for the people he lived with was limited to the extreme"; the charge of ethnocide that the book Darkness in El Dorado pressed against Napoleon Chagnon and other chroniclers of the Yanomami; the science wars launched by the social deconstruction of objectivity and the feminist critique of science; and the post-September 11 attempts to "understand Islam". But the range of Geertz's interests was catholic in the extreme. He complained to his editor Fred Inglis that "the NYR sends me books about the down-and-outs, the trouserless and the crazies"--his essay on Jean Genet seems to fit that description. Several of his reviews cover the disappearance of social worlds displaced by the thrust of modernity: the "Last Arab Jews" living in the "theocratic republics" of two villages in the Tunisian island of Jerba; the tribal people of Yunnan in southern China who have preserved a social organization with no marriage, no families, no in-laws, and no stepchildren; or the devastation of the and the inclusion of its surviving tribes into modern society.Much as Geertz's chronicles in the NYRB sets the standard for book reviewing, his essay on the Moroccan town of Sefrou, published in a scholarly journal, shows what intelligent journalism should be like. It starts with a news piece reporting that the municipal council has decreed all house buildings should be repainted in beige. It then reconstructs the history of Sefrou's urban development, pitting old residents ("Real Sefrouis") and new town dwellers ("Outsiders") in a contest about what the "Islamic City" should be like. The "politics of colors" takes vivid form in the opposition between classical medina houses, which are turned inward and look inconspicuous from the outside, and the brightly painted façades of new settlement dwellings, which display the only material wealth that their builders have accumulated. By literally turning the city house inside out, the Outsiders are stating their determination to move from the margins of society to full inclusion into urban city life. Sefrou is, of course, not just another Moroccan locality. It was the town in which Geertz and his students (remember Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco) pitched tent. In May 2000, a conference was held in Sefrou to honor Geertz's contribution to the social sciences. It was particularly gratifying, commented Geertz, because "anthropologists are not always welcomed back to the site of their field studies." Anthropologists should also do well to remove Clifford Geertz from the purgatory, and to welcome him back at the forefront of their discipline.See all 1 customer reviews... Featured article in the Bright Lights Film Journal Avatar metaphorically attacks all martial colonial and expansionist histories which have occurred at the expense of the worlds indigenous peoples and Earths ... NativeTech: Ojibwe Culture Arts History Language & People Ojibwe. Links to Culture Art History Language & People... for my Shinob friends
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