Search Results

“... which its inhabitants were plunged at the end of the 19th century – the kind of disarray that Clifford Geertz had in mind in The Interpretation of Cultures, when he wrote of chaos breaking in on man ‘at the limits of his powers of endurance’. Impalahoek endured to the best of its abilities, tried to adapt, and then fell back into a dark ...”

“... For students of the human sciences, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is, with Clifford Geertz, one of the few Americans who has achieved the status of a name to conjure with alongside the French maîtres à penser, particularly when the conversation turns to the topics of ‘Big Men’ (power-brokers who aren’t chiefs, masters of the games of speech and generosity), or the socially embedded economy of premodern societies, ‘negative reciprocity’ (exchange characterised by hard bargaining, predation or theft), the cultural apperception of colour, or why Americans don’t eat dogs ...”

“... have to do it, know that this image of interpretation through identification is inadequate. As Clifford Geertz has put it, ‘to see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency,’ but it does not constitute a method. The whole problem is to deploy our concepts, some of which are nearer to theirs and some further away, ‘so as to ...”

“... as a succession of intellectual crushes (‘The great John Keane’ seems to be his latest pin-up; Clifford Geertz, fulsomely acknowledged in the preface to his 1993 Cultural Studies, a slightly earlier one). Inglis’s Radical Earnestness (1982), a truly dreadful book, is a kind of Boy’s Own guide to English social theory which resolves itself into a ...”

“... was Alice Dewey (John’s granddaughter), who had been part of the Harvard team that included Clifford Geertz in Indonesia during the 1950s. For her thesis project, Dunham investigated cottage industries as a subsistence alternative for peasant families in Java. In 1975, Ann left for fieldwork in Indonesia, taking Maya with her. Barry chose to stay ...”

“... lacked, a chance to cross disciplinary boundaries, to use the findings of anthropology (mostly Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’), politics, economics, and so forth. The assumption seems to be that hitherto all modern literary criticism has been ‘empty formalism’, blind to history and to these other subjects. Once more a revolutionary ...”

“... shadow looming over some of the classics which have been most influential among modern historians. Clifford Geertz’s treatment of the Balinese cockfight as a novel or a play, Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘self-fashioning’ or Foucault’s notion of the Greek Self as a ‘stylisation of freedom’, produced out of an ‘aesthetics of existence’. When ...”