Volume 16, Number 7 · April 22, 1971
In Search of North Africa
By Clifford Geertz
Saints of the Atlas
by Ernest Gellner
Chicago, 317 pp., $9.50
Revolution and Political Leadership: Algeria 1954-1968
by William B. Quandt
MIT, 304 pp., $8.95
Wolves in the City: The Death of French Algeria
by Paul Henissart
Simon & Schuster, 508 pp., $8.95
The Battle of Algiers
directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
Change at Shebika: Report from a North African Village
by Jean Duvignaud
Pantheon, 303 pp., $6.95
Ramparts of Clay
written by Jean Duvignaud, directed by Jean-Louis Bertuccelli
Physicists, novelists, logicians, and art historians have recognized for some time that what we call our knowledge of reality consists of images of it that we ourselves have fashioned. In the social sciences this is just now coming to be understood, and then only imperfectly. The contribution of the investigator not only to the description and analysis of his object of study but to its very creation still tends to be obscured by the sort of mentality which regards the Human Relations Area Files, the Gallup Poll, and the US Census as repositories of recorded truths waiting merely to be discovered. In the arts, the unimplicated observer has been reduced to a minor convention; in the sciences to an unreachable limiting case. But in much of sociology, anthropology, and political science he lives on, masquerading as a real person performing a possible act.
Review, 4077 words
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