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THE RESOLUTE IRRESOLUTION OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ

THE RESOLUTE IRRESOLUTION OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ COLUMNS Richard A. Shweder Clifford Geertz, arguably the best-known and most influential American anthropologist of the past several decades, died of a broken heart on October 30, 2006, at the age of eighty — the result of “complications” following heart surgery. All this, according to initial death notices. Two days later, on November 1, the New York Times published an obituary.1 It was a friendly portrait — organized largely around brief characterizations and reviews of ten of his books — in which Geertz was depicted somewhat vapidly as “the eminent anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people’s lives.” The obituary then managed to freely associate his writings with an extraordinary jumble of views: that objective knowledge of the true meaning of things is not possible and that “ethnographic reality does not exist apart from anthropologists’ written versions of it”; but that “cultures and peoples should speak for themselves”; and that, at the same time, anthropologists should be empirically rigorous and draw explanatory conclusions of their own about the meaning of a peoples’ symbols by actually observing them 1. Andrew L. Yarrow, “Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80,” http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

THE RESOLUTE IRRESOLUTION OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ

Shweder, Richard A.
Common Knowledge , Volume 13 (2-3) – Apr 1, 2007
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References (10)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
© 2007 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
0961-754X
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-2007-001
Publisher site
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Abstract

COLUMNS Richard A. Shweder Clifford Geertz, arguably the best-known and most influential American anthropologist of the past several decades, died of a broken heart on October 30, 2006, at the age of eighty — the result of “complications” following heart surgery. All this, according to initial death notices. Two days later, on November 1, the New York Times published an obituary.1 It was a friendly portrait — organized largely around brief characterizations and reviews of ten of his books — in which Geertz was depicted somewhat vapidly as “the eminent anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people’s lives.” The obituary then managed to freely associate his writings with an extraordinary jumble of views: that objective knowledge of the true meaning of things is not possible and that “ethnographic reality does not exist apart from anthropologists’ written versions of it”; but that “cultures and peoples should speak for themselves”; and that, at the same time, anthropologists should be empirically rigorous and draw explanatory conclusions of their own about the meaning of a peoples’ symbols by actually observing them 1. Andrew L. Yarrow, “Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80,”

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2007

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