Works and Lives by Clifford Geertz
The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories—this is magic, that is technology—has long since been exploded. What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy self-absorption—time wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary innocence is long enough.Clifford Geertz's seminal work, The Interpretation of Cultures, was released in 1973. It inspired a generation of scholars and intellectuals, not only anthropologists. After the Fact: Two Nations, Four Decades, One Anthropologist is his most recent book. He is presently a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study's faculty.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780804717472 |
| ISBN 10 | 0804717478 |
| Title | Works and Lives |
| Author | Clifford Geertz |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Stanford University Press |
| Year published | 1989-06-01 |
| Number of pages | 168 |
| Prizes | Winner of National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) 1988 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |