Geertz's Influence on Intellectual Historians

40 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 Geertz's Influence on Intellectual Historians Martin J. Burke My response to the question of the influence of Clifford Geertz on historical inquiry comes from two perspectives: that of a former graduate student who witnessed die Methodenstreit between social and intellectual historians ; and that of a journal editor now encouraging research in cultural and intellectual history. As noted by fellow contributors to this roundtable, Geertz was the best-known anthropologist—and, in all probability, social scientist—in American academic circles in the last decades of the 20th century . Accounting for his extraordinary popularity and the extent of his influence is no simple task. Among Americanists, the first sustained engagements with Geertz's writings appeared in the early 1970s. Bernard Bailyn and others, in the course of explaining the centrality of Whig ideology to the coming of the Revolution and die pervasive power of "republicanism" in the politics of the new nation , turned to Geertz's 1964 essay, "Ideology as a Cultural System." In that piece, Geertz advocated a "non-evaluative" understanding of ideologies as "systems of interacting symbols," which made it possible to "formulate, think about, and react to political problems." Variants of this Geertzian approach would feature prominendy in a renewed interest in 1 8th- and 1 9th-century American political culture.1 "Ideology" was one of fifteen pieces collected in The Interpretation of Cultures in 1 973; also included were "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" and "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight."^ Far more than his earlier ethnographies, this volume made Geertz an oftcited authority outside the ranks of cultural anthropologists , and an academic celebrity to boot. His argument that human thought was a public, not a private activity, which could be studied and interpreted as a system of symbols, found a very receptive audience among American intellectual historians. The Interpretation of Cultures featured prominendy in many of the papers read at die 1977 Wingspread conference, which resulted in die volume New Directions in American Intellectual History. While Paul Conkin's remark that Geertz was "virtually the patron saint of the conference" might have been an overstatement, given the number of invocations of Thomas Kuhn, his preeminence in these circles was assured.1 An emerging cohort of modern European intellectual historians did not look to Geertz as often as their Americanist colleagues, however. The Interpretation of Cultures was cited but twice in the volume on Modem European Intellectual History diat developed from a 1980 conference on "The Future of European Intellectual History" at Cornell.4 This asymmetrical reception was less a matter of ignoring or rejecting Geertz than of incorporating his work into a wider hermeneutic approach to historical analysis.* He fared far better with historians of Renaissance and early modern Europe, where the metaphors and metiiods of interpretive anthropology helped to move intellectual history away from its origins in die history of philosophy and toward the analysis of a range of non-canonical sources In 1999, at the close of his Charles Homer Haskins lecture on "A Life ofLearning , " Geert% commented that he was growing "uncited. " and cultural practices.6 Geertz was also lionized in the arena of literary history by Stephen Greenblatt and other proponents of a "new historicism."' Although a second collection of pieces published in 1983 as Local Knowledge has also been referred to widely, much less attention has been paid to Geertz's later texts." Neither Works and Lives (1988), which analyzed the work of Lévi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, and Benedict, as well as commenting on controversies about doing edinography, nor Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (2000), which addressed such matters as the moral and epistemological consequences of relativism and the contributions of Kuhn, have, to date, drawn die attention of many intellectual historians.'' I find diis to be quite puzzling , given die importance of such issues in recent historiography. Perhaps it is indicative of a change in what Geertz half-playfully and half-seriously referred to as the Zeitgeist of this present, post-theory age. In 1999, at the close of his Charles Homer Haskins lecture on "A Life of Learning," Geertz commented diat he was growing "uncited...