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Interpretative explanations focus on what institutions, actions, customs, and so on mean to the people involved. What emerges from studies of this kind are not laws of society, and certainly not statistical relationships, but rather interpretations, that is to say, understanding. Geertz taught for 10 years at the University of Chicago and has been the Harold F. Sefrou, a Moroccan town nestled at the foot of the Middle Atlas Mountains, was an enchanted oasis where Berbers, Arabs, Jews and French settlers coexisted, when cultural anthropologist Geertz first went there in But by , the French and Jews had left, and the population, which had tripled, was deeply divided between old-timers and recent immigrants, mostly Berbers.
The other focal point of this affecting scholarly memoir, Pare, Indonesia, a town in central Java where Geertz has done fieldwork since , was wracked by internecine combat among Islamic, nationalist and Communist parties until the army imposed military rule in Today, status-ridden ideas of right and propriety dominate daily life as Pare's inhabitants attempt to reconcile group diversity with ideals of national unity.
Geertz has written a remarkable personal retrospective of an extraordinary career in anthropology. He combines an engaging mix of reports of his recent visits to sites of earlier fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco with reminiscences, both astute and bittersweet, of important post-WW II social science projects in which he participated and with an insider's reflections on the prestigious institutions where he worked. He ends with shaded evaluations of prospects for his discipline and of the traditional peoples that anthropology has made objects of its study.
These reflections are refreshingly grounded throughout by Geertz's "signature" as a writer: Profound comparative insights are compressed into rich, jewel-like paragraphs, sentences, and even phrases. There are wonderful puns as in the book's title. Geertz characteristically qualifies his judgments and assessments with hesitations and ambivalences so that the reader is forced to think about them rather than merely accept them.
In sum, a major achievement that can be read with pleasure and fascination. Thank you for using the catalog. Anthropologists -- United States -- Biography. Both are stories about stories, views about views, with the power to conjure other accounts and to strengthen our hold on the real. Organized into thematic chapters, Clifford Geertz's After the Facts--half personal memories, half meditation about the discipline--is a brilliant account of what anthropology is all about.
The author starts with a tale of two cities revealing their inner core to the observer: Pare as a political battlefield on the brink of a bloodbath, leaving the author with a sense of having come too late and leaving too early "between a turbulence somehow got through and another one obscurely looming" ; Sefrou as a moral landscape ideally suited for the ethnographer "the place was not only suited for a monograph; it sorted itself into chapters".
After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (The Jerusalem -Harvard Lectures) [Clifford Geertz] on donnsboatshop.com *FREE* shipping on. After the Fact. Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist Short. pages. 6 x 9 inches. 1 table. The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures. World.
He then proceeds with comparing Indonesia and Morocco, going beyond the cliches a precipitate of the present, a relic from the past to find some truth in the opposition between what he labels a politics of sedq, of the radical personalism and patronage networks of Moroccan politics, and a politics of suku, which describes Indonesia's attempt to reconcile group diversity and national unity.
These categories-- political drama and moral landscape, sedq and suku-- are not absolutes and should only be valued for their capacity to "lead on to extended accounts which, intersecting other accounts of other matters, widen their implications and deepen their hold". They help the author understand "what all the shouting is about; what sort of quarrel is going on. This is partly due to the fact that Javanese has no inflection for gender but is grammatically stratified into minutely graded, hierarchical speech registers, while Moroccan Arabic has gender inflections for just about every part of speech, but no status form at all.
More fundamentally, languages have "disparate tendencies to notice some things about the world rather more than others and to make more fuss about them. Such is the case with Islam, a religion joining the two geographical extremes of Indonesia and Morocco. As Geertz notes, "everyone now seems to have a view about it". Although he himself offers no definitive interpretation, the titles of the books he devoted to the subject offer some indications on where he stands. Contrary to a younger generation of anthropologists, Clifford Geertz doesn't try to impose his political agenda upon the reader, nor does he discard anything Western as ethnocentric and imperialistic.
He is however well conscious of his own country's political and cultural hegemony: But he choses to treat the issue in a mildly ironic mode, through a succession of snapshots that describe his encounters with "sputniks, foreign bases, diplomatic adventures, international conferences, aid missions, and cultural exchanges". Finally, Clifford Geertz is a virtuoso of the English language. He writes in a style that is both highly accurate and richly evocative. He refrains from using the jargon that so often plagues the discipline, and he refers more often to literary works than to theoretical texts.
I had to check the names and works of Richard Wilbur and Theodore Roethke, who both received a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and whose quotations are woven in the text. If you want to get an idea of his prose, just access the first three pages of the book through the "Look Inside" function on Amazon.
They are absolutely stunning. A Professor of Social Science at Princeton for decades, Geertz gave a series of lectures at the University of Jerusalem and these were the result. The book serves as a memoir of his four decades in the field of anthropology and brings together two areas of the world where he has built his career. Noting the similarities and differences of working in Indonesia and Morocco, Geertz draws comparative aspects of these divergent cultures.
Known for his 'thick description' which was made Bible in the "interpretation of cultures" a must first-read for understanding his theories , Geertz uses it some, but doesn't overload the reader here. The uninformed reader can still enjoy the behind-the-scenes-look at one of the foremost anthropologists of the 20th century and not get lost along the way. For the Geertz fan, it is a must read, if nothing for his funny anecdotes. I developed a strong preference for Geertz and his methodology during my undergraduate studies.
In this book he does an outstanding job of amending structuralism with realtivism, anecdotally, and manages to keep the tone entertaining and personal. One person found this helpful. I have been influenced by the beauty of Geertz writing for decades, but After the Fact has left me disturbed and confused.
This summer I read an essay by Stephen Reyna claiming Geertz covered-up genocide in Indonesia, I didn't believe Reyna's claims until I read Geertz's account of these events in this book. Now I don't know what to think, and I am beginning to question Geertz's methods and I want to know why Geertz was not outspoken about the genocide he saw.
See all 4 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. Customers who bought this item also bought. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. The Anthropologist as Author.
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