Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author

by Clifford Geertz

The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories―this is magic, that is technology―has long since been exploded. What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy self-absorption―time wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary innocence is long enough.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Ethnography, History, Writing, Sociology, Social Science

157 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist and served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

Reviews

[Conor · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing mix of literary criticism and ethnological overview. I was worried that since I haven't read most of the source material, that I'd be a bit in the dark, but Geertz does an excellent job of making the writings in question (and even the work of Foucault and Barthes that he uses to look at them) accessible.

As an added bonus, for me at least, this appears to be the unmentioned source text for an ethnographic methods course I took a few years back. Whereas that was fairly ham-fisted and mostly featured graduate students who hadn’t read the course's books talking long and loud about them, Geertz proceeds with powerful and yet light writing and, clearly, a deep knowledge of everything he's working with.

In that course a few years back, some of those same grad students spent lots of hot air bashing Evans Prichard as an ethnocentrist, a colonialist, a white man, an englishman, and (dare I say it?) a man in general. Geertz, who for modern anthropologists is probably much more important than Evans Prichard, does not glorify the man, but he does add "let him who is free of his century's imaginings cast the first stone."

After reading so much in school that was damaging critique (especially Said), I only wish I had read this earlier. It's probably the only really constructive criticism of ethnography I've enountered.

[Alene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geertz is my favorite anthropologist and in this text talks about how anthropologists write--admittedly, he writes more aesthetically than most, and has been accused of being non-objective, but no anthropologist can report on a culture without the bias of his upbringing. He doesn't exaggerate, or fabricate, but relays things as he sees them--as beautiful, fascinating, sensual, etc. He's an artist really.

[Abby]

Essentially a lit crit style review of some major works from anthropology, drawing out some of (past) anthropology's primary literary qualities and concerns. Which is cool, I guess. I admit I was hoping for more--hoping he would use that analysis to tell us something broader and deeper. But apparently that's someone else's job.

[Lytle]

Meta-anthropologists are, at the end of their fieldwork, allowed to take on the name Clifford--signifying a special combination of observing from the cliff and participating as one fords the river of fieldwork.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ignoro qué tan conveniente es leer un libro acerca de la autoría de ciertas etnografías cuando aún no las he leído. Mínimamente me ha servido de fuente de sugerencias de lectura. Máximamente me pareció bastante esclaceredora la discusión que hace sobre cómo se manifiesta la relación entre autor(a) y sujeto descrito a través de la narrativa etnográfica y del papel de la misma en la conformación de la disciplina. Geertz describe el carácter co-occurrente, concurrente y mutuamente interferente de los textos de Lévi-Strauss, las representaciones visualizables de fenómenos culturales de Evans-Pritchard, la credibilidad de los descrito a través de la credibilidad de la propia persona de Malinowski y la presentación de lo extraño como familiar para cuestionar las certidumbres occidentales de Benedict. Ciertamente me predispuso a leer de una manera específica cada una de las obras que revisa. Por lo pronto, ya inicié con «Tristes trópicos».

[Louisa]

has geertz always written like this?? i’ve been missing out, really makes me wanna do my phd in the US where this stylistic tradition is stronger. book made me laugh in more than one place and it’s still so sharp, points well taken. been exploring diff tones for myself lately, this is def something i would aspire to

[Roby · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important resource for anthropologists.

[Mark Rance · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about many things, but maybe it is mostly about deepening the burden of authorship.

[Franditya · Rating 3 out of 5]

karya geertz ini seolah ingin melebur dikotomi antara pengarang dan penulis dalam sebuah narasi etnografis. Antropologi sebagai etnosains sejak 1920-an telah menghadapi kebingungan epistmologi dalam menentukan subjek kajian. karya-karya antropolog klasik yang ditelaah Geertz dalam buku ini mencerminkan peluang bagi etnosains menapaki lembaran baru etnografi, tantangan bagi Antropologi melihat manusia mengorganisasikan pengalaman-pengalaman dan gagasan dalam sejarah materialisme.

[aldo zirsov]

cuma 10rb di IBF 2011