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Gentlemen Travellers

Denis Donoghue, 18 December 1986

Between the Woods and the Water 
by Patrick Leigh Fermor et al.
Murray, 248 pp., £13.95, October 1986, 0 7195 4264 2
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Coasting 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins, 301 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 00 272119 8
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The Grand Tour 
by Hunter Davies.
Hamish Hamilton, 224 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 241 11907 3
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... The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently resourceful mind, and a persuasive style, of course, you can stimulate them by going for a walk along the local ...

Many Causes, Many Cases

Peter Hall, 28 June 1990

Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist 
by W.G. Runciman.
Harvester, 253 pp., £30, April 1990, 0 7450 0484 9
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... to the sidelines the panoply of cultural meanings and considerations that a Daniel Bell or Clifford Geertz might employ to explain the direction of society. We see this reflected in Runciman’s masterful essay on the French Revolution. Taking up a number of themes in the recent historiography, he argues that the Revolution was literally ...

Who now cares about Malinowski?

Robert Ackerman, 23 May 1996

After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 
by George Stocking.
Athlone, 570 pp., £50, January 1996, 0 485 30072 9
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... me to lash myself to the mast and stop up my ears to avoid being seduced by the siren song of Clifford Geertz and his fellow ‘symbolic anthropologists’. In his eyes the danger of infection was so great that he suggested that I rethink the idea of going to the Institute at all. I already knew that the study of mythology had for centuries been ...

Hitler in Jakarta

Ira Katznelson, 7 November 1991

Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia 
by Benedict Anderson.
305 pp., $44.95, January 1991, 0 8014 9758 2
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... language of cartoons, films and public monuments in a country which, with the exception of work by Clifford Geertz and by students of ethnicity in plural societies, has been peripheral to the development of Western social science, is an unexpected place to find inventive approaches to some of the most vexing problems in the social sciences. Language and ...

Culture and Personality

Caroline Humphrey, 31 August 1989

Margaret Mead: A Life of Controversy 
by Phyllis Grosskurth.
Penguin, 96 pp., £3.99, May 1989, 0 14 008760 5
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Ruth Benedict: Stranger in the Land 
by Margaret Caffrey.
Texas, 432 pp., $24.95, February 1989, 0 292 74655 5
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... it when she was four and passages about new ways of rearing little boys and girls were underlined. Clifford Geertz puzzled as to why the courtly and sensitive Benedict should have bothered at all with ‘the trappings of activist social science’. Caffrey’s biography gives a psychological answer. Benedict even as a child had a huge anger. Her ...

Façades

Peter Burke, 19 November 1981

The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History 
by Richard Goldthwaite.
Johns Hopkins, 459 pp., £16.50, April 1981, 0 8018 2342 0
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Public Life in Renaissance Florence 
by Richard Trexler.
Academic Press, 591 pp., £29.80, March 1981, 0 12 699550 8
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Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice 
by Edward Muir.
Princeton, 356 pp., £10.80, August 1981, 0 691 05325 1
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Venice: The Greatness and the Fall 
by John Julius Norwich.
Allen Lane, 400 pp., £12, September 1981, 0 7139 1409 2
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Ruskin and Venice 
edited by Jeanne Clegg.
Junction, 233 pp., £10.50, September 1981, 0 86245 019 5
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The Stones of Venice 
by John Ruskin and Jan Morris.
Faber, 239 pp., £12.50, September 1981, 0 571 11815 1
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... he has been inspired by the approach to ritual of such anthropologists as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, and in any case he knows Trexler’s work. He, too, is interested in the Kremlinologists’ questions: ‘How far out in the lagoon must the senators (and how many senators) go to greet an arriving guest? Should the doge take off his ...

The Impostor

Peter Burke, 19 April 1984

Le Retour de Martin Guerre 
by Natalie Davis, Jean-Claude Carrière and Daniel Vigne.
Robert Laffont, 269 pp.
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The Return of Martin Guerre 
by Natalie Davis.
Harvard, 162 pp., £12.75, October 1983, 0 674 76690 3
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... the crowd, studying small communities or even ordinary individuals, and practising what Professor Clifford Geertz – also of Princeton – has called the ‘thick description’ of everyday events, using them to reveal the values and structures of the society. This procedure, too, has its dangers and it is to be hoped that it will not be reduced to a ...

Homesick Everywhere

Lawrence Rosen: Misreading Muslim Extremism, 4 August 2005

Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah 
by Olivier Roy.
Hurst, 349 pp., £16.95, November 2004, 1 85065 598 7
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The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West 
by Gilles Kepel, translated by Pascale Ghazaleh.
Harvard, 327 pp., £15.95, September 2004, 0 674 01575 4
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... about their situation’. Indeed, the question of belief in a changing world is, as Clifford Geertz once put it, less about what to believe than how to believe it – what rituals or words, what emotional expressions or shared sentiments, what collective enterprises or personal acts will suffice to give people a sense of the orderliness of ...

The View from the Top

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Upland Anarchists, 2 December 2010

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-East Asia 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 442 pp., £16.99, January 2011, 978 0 300 16917 1
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... life there. Three quite different figures in the Western academy can claim the credit for this: Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott. Geertz, one of whose many talents was for the writing of superbly perfidious book reviews, was the master of the catchy phrase: he gave us ‘theatre ...

When Paris Sneezed

David Todd: The Cult of 1789, 4 January 2024

The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-89 
by Robert Darnton.
Allen Lane, 547 pp., £35, November, 978 0 7139 9656 2
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... bears, lightly but discernibly, the imprint of his collaboration with the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, with whom he taught a seminar on history and anthropology at Princeton. Darnton’s dialogue with anthropology enabled him to spearhead a broadening of cultural history, from an account of high culture to an ethnographic inquiry into ‘the ...

A Gentle Deconstruction

Mary Douglas, 4 May 1989

The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia 
by Marilyn Strathern.
California, 422 pp., $40, December 1988, 0 520 06423 2
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... commentary, and their letters and diaries. An interesting comment on the current vein by Clifford Geertz* demonstrates why writing whose first aim is to explore consciousness is unsuited for sending messages. Marilyn Strathern actually has got something she wishes to communicate, but she also wishes to write a Post-Modern book. This presents a ...

Albino Sea-Cucumber

Glen Newey: The Long March of Cornelius Castoriadis, 5 February 1998

The Imaginary Institution of Society 
by Cornelius Castoriadis.
Polity, 418 pp., £14.95, May 1997, 0 7456 1950 9
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Les Carrefours de Labyrinthe: Fait et a faire 
by Cornelius Castoriadis.
Seuil, 281 pp., frs 139, February 1997, 2 02 029909 7
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The Castoriadis Reader 
edited by David Ames Curtis.
Blackwell, 470 pp., £50, May 1997, 1 55786 703 8
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... in an arch, snowstorm-paperweight-collecting kind of way – if not downright völkisch. And, as Clifford Geertz has noted, the wogs start long before Calais. Castoriadis, it should be said, never succumbed to this infarctus. He used to insist: ‘quoi qu’il arrive, je resterai d’abord et avant tout un révolutionnaire.’ His writings display a ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... context of Java and Indonesia. Not long before there had been a heated debate in Encounter between Clifford Geertz and the Swiss journalist Herbert Lüthy. It took place between late 1965 and early 1966, when communists and their sympathisers were being massacred in Indonesia after the attempted coup of 1965. Lüthy had started it by writing an essay on ...

Thinking

Peter Campbell, 4 August 1988

Who got Einstein’s office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study 
by Ed Regis.
Simon and Schuster, 316 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 671 69923 7
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Chaos 
by James Gleick.
Heinemann, 354 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 9780434295548
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The School of Genius 
by Anthony Storr.
Deutsch, 216 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 0 233 98010 5
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... talk to Gödel about the incompleteness theorem and he talks to me about the religions of Java,’ Clifford Geertz told Regis. The Institute is also a place to study the nature of originality and what nurtures it. The old men of the Institute can look back thirty, forty and fifty years. To have got there they have to have done at least ‘two important ...

To kill a cat

Anthony Pagden, 21 February 1985

Settecento Riformatore. Vol. IV: La Caduta dell’Antico Regime 1776-1789. Part One: I Grandi Staii dell’Occidente 
by Franco Venturi.
Einaudi, 463 pp., lire 45,000, July 1984, 88 06 05695 6
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Settecento Riformatore. Vol. IV: La Caduta dell’Antico Regime 1776-1789. Part Two: II Patriotismo Repubblicano e gli Imperi dell’Est 
by Franco Venturi.
Einaudi, 1040 pp., lire 55,000, July 1984, 88 06 05696 4
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The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural History 
by Robert Darnton.
Viking, 284 pp., £14.95, July 1984, 0 7139 1728 8
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Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy 
by James Miller.
Yale, 272 pp., £25, July 1984, 0 300 03044 4
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... culture have borrowed freely, especially from Victor Turner and Darnton’s acknowledged mentor, Clifford Geertz, whose principal concern has been with culture as a system of meanings, as, in Geertz’s phrase, an ‘acted document’. But the historian faces problems the anthropologist does not. His material is ...

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