Volume 31, Number 4 · March 15, 1984
Interpreting the Interpreter
By Jonathan Lieberson
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
by Clifford Geertz
Basic Books, 244 pp., $18.50
According to Clifford Geertz, anthropology—'long one of the most homespun of disciplines, hostile to anything smacking of intellectual pretension and unnaturally proud of an outdoorsman image'—has, together with much else in social science, been changing in recent years. He says that its golden age, when there was widespread agreement on the general aim of the social sciences—'to find out the dynamics of collective life and alter them in desired directions'—is over. Today, he says, 'calls for 'a general theory' of just about anything social sound increasingly hollow, and claims to have one megalomaniac.' Social scientists no longer feel the need to mimic the methods of physicists and other natural scientists. Social thought is being 'refigured,' and the exploration of new metaphors for understanding social and cultural life drawn from the humanities has produced new and unfamiliar 'blurred genres'—scientific speculations resembling belles-lettres, histories resembling mathematics, and, as we shall see, anthropology resembling literary criticism.
Review, 9502 words
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