Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author

I bought this book for my Engish class. It's interesting, the author has a good sense of humor which makes the book easier to read than others in the genre, in my opinion. The book reviews works of other anthropologists/ethnographers while setting forth the author's own views. The only thing is--and this is just the way I feel, maybe others wont--it seems that most ethnographers are very long-winded. Geertz is better than most, but I feel he's also like that at times. All in all, a good critical book.

There are two requisites one must fulfill to become an anthropologist: to go through an extended period of fieldwork, preferably in a remote place, and to grapple with the great authors of the discipline, usually in the cosy atmosphere of the seminar room. The later is deemed necessary to make sense and to extract meaning from the experience accumulated in the former. But whereas the methodology of fieldwork is the object of many comments and prescriptions, how to read an author, and how to become one, is rarely reflected upon.No one is better equipped to guide us through the intricacies of authorship than Clifford Geertz. Himself the distinguished author of an oeuvre and an accomplished writer with a rare command of words (where else would you find mention of an "asseverational prose", or a "cassowary of a book"?), he applies tools from literary theory as well as a sharp critical mind to the works of four towering figures of modern anthropology: Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, and Benedict. Borrowing from Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Roman Jakobson, he is interested in the "text-building strategies", the display of the "theater of language", the exposing of the "author-function" in the text, the solutions to the "signature dilemma" and the intertextuality references to other genres and narratives that make these authors "founders of discursivity" as opposed to mere producers of texts. In other words, he is interested in how they write, what they do in writing anthropology books, and how we should read them.Clifford Geertz locates the tensions of authorship in the distance between the two scenes of anthropologists' works and lives: "being there" and "being here". As he writes in introduction, "the ability of anthropologists to get us to take what they say seriously has less to do with either a factual look or an air of conceptual elegance than it has with their capacity to convince us that what they say is a result of their having actually penetrated (or, if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of life, of having, one way or another, truly 'been there'."But the world that anthropologists inhabit is a world of "lecterns, libraries, blackboards, and seminars", not to mention culture wars, political upheavals, and fast internet access. This is the world that produces anthropologists, that licenses them to do the kind of work they do, and with which the kind of work they do must find a place if it is to count as worth attention. Anthropologists live a divided existence: "a few years, now and again, scuffling about with cattle herders or yam gardeners, a lifetime lecturing to classes and arguing with colleagues."Geertz's key insight is that the issue of negotiating the passage from "there" to "here", from what the anthropologist has been through "out there" to what he or she says "back here", is in essence literary. The literary character of anthropological texts should be recognized explicitly: as he notes, "this does not make us into novelists any more than constructing hypotheses or writing formulas make us, as some seem to think, into physicists". The central methodological issues involved in ethnographic description are as much linked to narratological issues (how the author manifests himself in the text, what style and tone he adopts, how is the reader involved) as they reflect the problematics of field work or the philosophy of knowledge.The chapters devoted to four remarkable anthropologists should therefore be read as literary critique, without however the jargon and pedantry now attached to the discipline. They are models of wit, insight, and clarity. A common theme running through them (besides the national typologizing; Levi-Strauss as the Parisian theorist, Evans-Pritchard as the Oxbridge gentleman, Malinowski as the wild-eyed Pole, Benedict as the rebellious American) is the reference to literary works which form the background against which these anthropologists' works should be read.Besides reflecting the French travel literature he was supposedly reacting against, Levi-Strauss is concerned to place himself and his Tristes Tropiques in the literary tradition established by Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Proust, as well as to reenact Rousseau's Social Contract among the Nambikwara in deepest Amazon. E-P's avowed model is colonial literature written with White-Man's-Burden certainty, Malinowski inaugurates diary-like author-saturated introspections, and Benedict is a modern Swift, complete with a rehabilitation of the satirist's Modest Proposal ("We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibalism").The fifth character depicted throughout this short book is, of course, Clifford Geertz himself, whose place among the pantheon of great anthropologists-authors is very well deserved.

In this book Clifford Geertz focuses on the writing of anthropologists, specifically that of ethnographers. He uses the term anthropology to refer to sociocultural anthropology, the basis of ethnography. He argues that it is not the recounting of facts that makes the readers take fieldwork seriously, but the way the author recounts his experience in an animated life-like fashion. The ability to persuade readers that what they are reading is an authentic account written by someone who is personally familiar with the way of life that occurs in a certain place, in a certain time, within a certain group of people, constitutes the basis of ethnography. The anthropologist's source of power in convincing the reader that his accounts are authentic lies not in his giving scientific data but in his ability to recount his experiences among the people group he's working with.Geertz offers ethnographers a conceptual framework that allows them freedom and control, a way to talk with confidence about their people group studied, a way to write new texts that might enlarge the sense of what everyday life is about. Geertz calls upon ethnographers not only to document their findings and data, but also to enliven their fieldwork by giving attention to their experiences.The separation between the anthropological text and the reader, and also the one that separates the anthropologist and his people group sometimes becomes a rigid and artificially exaggerated boundary. Often this artificial boundary creates a false image in the reader's mind, making them see the people group as exotic and primitive. The only way to prevent this boundary from arising is for the anthropologist to incorporate into his writing the participatory aspect of his experiences with the people he has lived among.Maintaining this ethnographic distance has resulted in the folklorization of the anthropological research about death. Geertz exemplifies this by saying that death is something universal, something that happens everywhere, among every kind of people, no matter which race, color or gender, whether adult or children; yet anthropologists have minimized this fact when describing death within their people group by focusing on the exotic, curious and sometimes violent rituals. This approach creates distance between the reader and the people because the reader's attention is brought to focus on the rituals. Instead of the reader identifying with the people's loss of a member of their family or society, he becomes caught up in the description of strong rituals practiced by a strange people group.Geertz also analyzes the literary forms of several anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski and Ruth Benedict. He says that: Levi-Strauss' relationship with the cultural reality is distant. Rather than painting a picture of the people's daily lives, he focuses his writings on painting a literary impression of himself; Evans-Pritchard shows his adventures both ways: as an actor and as an observer, he captures his experiences in a very descriptive animated style; Malinowski not only shows that he has been there but also that he has been a participant observer and has become one of the people he was studying; and Ruth Benedict shows more the reflexive aspect of having been there, answering the following anthropological questions: Where are they? Where am I? The way it is written is always like an aesopic commentary about their own society.It's clear that Geertz is analyzing these modern anthropologists through his own conception of how an anthropologist should recount his experiences.This book is appropriate for all level readers, and I think that every anthropologist should read and have it in mind as a consultant book while writing their reports.(Reviewed by Gabriela Huichacura, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Gral Roca, Argentina)

There is no better way to approach some of the greats of anthropology (Malinowski, Evans Pritchard, Mead, etc) than via this series of lectures by one the greatest anthropologists of our time that mix biography with criticism. Geertz is a dream writer by turns witty and philosophical; one senses a master craftsman at work (more so these days as dullness seems to be the key characteristic of academic prose).

Clifford Geertz was one of those few social scientists - in his case anthropologist - who writes/speaks in ways that avid much 'socio-babble' and captures ideas in memorable ways.

I love it. I have read it before too. I wrote some shorts notes for my students about this book. We really love Clifford Geertz, he changed the way to do anthropology for his generation and for those to follow him. Fantastic! Great! Dont miss it!