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› Find signed collectible books: 'After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics'
Whither the social sciences? It sometimes seems as if this diverse and fluid field is permanently at def com 3: defining and defending its borders, skirmishing with science, all while the tenured generals snipe at each other. These manoeuvres sometimes pass over possibly the most important question of all: what is at stake in the study of society and culture? This question is central to anthropology, characterized as it is by the self-reflexive intimacy between its philosophy and methodology. Clifford Geertz--one of the architects of the modern discipline at least since his influential 1973 book, The Interpretation of Cultures--thankfully offers a lucid, enlightening and wonderfully readable series of 11 essays, which consider the history, philosophy and future of not just anthropology but the social sciences, in a style sure to appeal to both academics and lay readers. As a title, Available Light is an apt and playful reflection on the position of the anthropologist, who can only experience what are always only partial truths in the light available at the moment of encounter. Its subtitle, Anthropological Reflections upon Philosophical Topics indicates the extent to which the vocations have moved closer not only as they share many of the same questions, but as philosophers have come to believe that the answers to those great questions of meaning--to the degree that there can be any--are to be found in the fine detail of lived life.
Geertz's own empirical pursuit of the role of ideas in behaviour has lead him through Javanese religion, Balinese states and Moroccan bazaars, modernisation, Islam, kinship, law, art and ethnicity--all drawn upon in these essays. He also ruminates upon the moral anxieties of fieldwork, in chapters such as "Thinking as a Moral Act", "Anti Anti-Relativism"--with its stinging punchline "if we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home"-- and "The Uses of Diversity", opening up issues pertinent to all intellectual pursuits. He goes on to establish the role of anthropology within broader intellectual and philosophical circles by addressing the work of Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, William James and Jerome Bruner. For anyone involved or interested in the social sciences, Geertz offers a powerful sense of the importance and value of such study: "the impact of the social sciences upon our lives will finally be determined more by what sort of moral experience they turn out to embody than by their merely technical effects or by how much money they are permitted to spend." --Christine Buttery [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Language and Art in the Navajo Universe'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural Analysis'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali'
Combining great learning, interpretative originality, analytical sensitivity, and a charismatic prose style, Clifford Geertz has produced a lasting body of work with influence throughout the humanities and social sciences, and remains the foremost anthropologist in America.
His 1980 book Negara analyzed the social organization of Bali before it was colonized by the Dutch in 1906. Here Geertz applied his widely influential method of cultural interpretation to the myths, ceremonies, rituals, and symbols of a precolonial state. He found that the nineteenth-century Balinese state defied easy conceptualization by the familiar models of political theory and the standard Western approaches to understanding politics.
Negara means "country" or "seat of political authority" in Indonesian. In Bali Geertz found negara to be a "theatre state," governed by rituals and symbols rather than by force. The Balinese state did not specialize in tyranny, conquest, or effective administration. Instead, it emphasized spectacle. The elaborate ceremonies and productions the state created were "not means to political ends: they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for.... Power served pomp, not pomp power." Geertz argued more forcefully in Negara than in any of his other books for the fundamental importance of the culture of politics to a society.
Much of Geertz's previous work--including his world-famous essay on the Balinese cockfight--can be seen as leading up to the full portrait of the "poetics of power" that Negara so vividly depicts.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Philosophy, Rhetoric, Literary Criticism'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Social History of an Indonesian Town'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Works and Lives : The Anthropologist As Author'
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. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dichte Beschreibung.'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Spurenlesen. Beck Kulturwissenschaft'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Welt in Stücken. Passagen Philosophie'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Conocimiento Local/ Local Knowledge: Ensayos Sobre La Interpretacion De Las Culturas/ Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Los Usos De La Diversidad'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Clifford Geertz--Lokalna Lektura'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Geertz a Antropologiczne Dyskusje Woko Religii'
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