Life Among the Anthros and Other Essays

281 Pages·2010·1 MB·English

life among the anthros and other essays
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CLIFFORD GEERTZ
Life among the Anthros
AND OTHER ESSAYS
Edited by FRED INGLIS
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire ox20 1tw
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geertz, Cliff ord.
Life among the anthros and other essays / by Cliff ord Geertz, edited by Fred Inglis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-691-14358-3 (alk. paper)
1. Anthropology—Philosophy. 2. Anthropology—Research. 3. Anthropology—
Fieldwork. I. Inglis, Fred. II. Title.
gn33.g44 2010
301.01—dc22
009043977
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
Th is book has been composed in Adobe Garamond
Printed on acid- free paper. (cid:2)
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
contents
introduction Th e Comic Vision of Cliff ord Geertz 1
part i Sages and Anthropologists
1967 On Malinowski 15
1969 On Gandhi 21
1978 On Foucault 29
1992 On Genet 39
2001 Ethnography in China 47
part ii Islams and the Fluidity of Nations
1971 In Search of North Africa 61
1975 Mysteries of Islam 71
1985 Th e Last Arab Jews 81
1989 House Painting: Toutes Directions 88
1990 On Feminism 101
2000 Indonesia: Starting Over 112
2001 On the Devastation of the Amazon 123
2003 Which Way to Mecca? Part I 135
2003 Which Way To Mecca? Part II 145
2005 On the State of the World 157
part iii Th e Idea of Order: Last Lectures
2001 Th e Near East in the Far East 169
2002 An Inconstant Profession 185
2004 What Is a State If It Is Not a Sovereign? 200
2005 Shifting Aims, Moving Targets 219
2005 What Was the Th ird World Revolution? 236
acknowledgments and editorial details 253
notes 255
index 265
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life among the anthros and other essays
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introduction
Th e Comic Vision of Cliff ord Geertz
I
Once upon a time, in October 1988, just weeks before the cold war swallowed
itself in a tumble of falling masonry in Berlin, overloaded Trabants pouring
past the raised barriers at Hungarian checkpoints, a sea of vengeful fi sts and
faces booing their hateful overlord off his balcony in Bucharest, a f ull-p age
advertisement in affi rmative defense of being a liberal appeared in the New York
Times.
An unorganized group of prominent academics and intellectuals had united
briefl y to pay up in order to rebut their president, the amiable, lethal, hotly
ideological, charmingly a nti-i ntellectual Ronald Reagan, who had turned “lib-
eral” into a term of open and contemptuous abuse.
It has pretty well stayed that way, the f orty-t hird president notwithstand-
ing, for the succeeding twenty- odd years. Th e signatories said:
Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as
their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been
crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency
in our own country . . . we feel obliged to speak out.1
Cliff ord Geertz was one of the signatories. He had never been a fellow traveler
of a marxisant persuasion, still less the kind of fundamental federalist the U.S.
government hired to do its dirtiest work in Indochina and in Chile. He was a
“quiet American,” all right, but he spoke in the purest accents and very rapidly
the active, historical, self-c ritical, and unmartyred liberalism which John
Dewey took from John Stuart Mill and Th omas Hill Green, and turned it into
the plain prose of the best that Americans thought and said in the twentieth
century.
In one of his fi nest essays, in which he sought to identify both the moral
point and the common ground of all inquiry into the human sciences,2 Geertz
fell to puzzling out “some of the most thoroughly entrenched tropes of the
liberal imagination.” Th e latter phrase is of course the title of Lionel Trilling’s
1