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  • The Resolute Irresolution of Clifford Geertz
  • Richard A. Shweder (bio)

Clifford Geertz, arguably the best-known and most influential American anthropologist of the past several decades, died of a broken heart on October 30, 2006, at the age of eighty—the result of "complications" following heart surgery. All this, according to initial death notices.

Two days later, on November 1, the New York Times published an obituary.1 It was a friendly portrait—organized largely around brief characterizations and reviews of ten of his books—in which Geertz was depicted somewhat vapidly as "the eminent anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people's lives." The obituary then managed to freely associate his writings with an extraordinary jumble of views: that objective knowledge of the true meaning of things is not possible and that "ethnographic reality does not exist apart from anthropologists' written versions of it"; but that "cultures and peoples should speak for themselves"; and that, at the same time, anthropologists should be empirically rigorous and draw explanatory conclusions of their own about the meaning of a peoples' symbols by actually observing them [End Page 191] in use. It was this method, the Times said, that Geertz called "thick description." The Times concluded its memorial by suggesting that, at the end of his career, the eminent anthropologist felt disheartened by the inability of the social sciences to generalize or develop grand and sweeping theories of human behavior.

On November 7, things got even worse: the Wall Street Journal published its obituary.2 This one was a conspicuously hostile depiction (written in a genre of sarcastic tastelessness), in which the great man was described as "perhaps the leading anthropological thinker of Twentieth Century Part Two, even if hardly anyone knew exactly why." The obituary associated his writings with bits and pieces of skeptical postmodern doctrine ("he argued for the comforting and evasive simplification that there could be no facts about social life"; "he emphasized words about acts rather than the acts themselves"). Remarkably, the obituary even managed to associate Geertz with the moral agenda of identity politics ("the holy intellectual trinity of race/class/gender became the imperative explanatory tools to explain and understand anything"). The Journal concluded its memorial by portraying this complex scholar and personality as a "static gloomy icon," who had wasted his time pondering "the links between writing and behavior"; as a writer who insisted that "belligerent if elegant imprecision . . . was the most one could expect from the intellectual life earnestly lived"; and as the enforcer of "a conventional world view which provided intimidating intellectual cover for politically correct thoughts and deeds."

In other words, within a week or so of that painful day in late October, it had become apparent to Geertz's admirers (and I am one of them) that the maladies and perplexities—the complications—associated with his death extended far beyond his physical condition, and that some of us were going to have to rise to the challenge of more precisely saying why he was such a towering influence. Reading the Wall Street Journal's truly belligerent (and inaccurate) obituary, it occurred to me that some of the misunderstandings of Geertz's work, most of them predictable, were exemplary of a predicament in the social sciences that he had tried to expose.

So who was Clifford Geertz, and what was he up to? Part of the answer is temperamental and part is philosophical, and the two parts fit together almost perfectly. But before I say how, let me recapitulate some well-known facts about his career. His collection of essays Available Light opens with an autobiographical address, "Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning," delivered to the American Council of Learned Societies in 1999.3 The G.I. bill (which he refers to, with characteristic wit, as the "degreeing of America") launched him into academia [End Page 192] where, as he puts it, he just kept catching the right wave. He went from Antioch College ("the reigning attitude, Jewish, all irony, impatience and auto-critique"), to the Department of Social Relations at Harvard ("a gathering of fugitives from traditional departments"), to the University of...

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