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March/April 2007 Historically Speaking 39 Clifford Geertz's Clarion Call Rhys Isaac Cultural anthropology engages with social meanings; history engages with social happenings . Anthropology has at its heart a search for understanding of some of the "systems" by which society operates; history has at its heart a need to know the world through particular narratives of its becoming. It has taken me most of my more than two-score years of researching the past to arrive at that clarification. During this time many historians have striven to be anthropologists to the past, while many anthropologists have moved to put into historical perspective an "ethnographic present" that formerly had no acknowledged past. For all their distinctiveness in objectives and discursive practices, history and anthropology have much to learn from each other, and in this Clifford Geertz's role has been crucial. No one has done more in recent decades to draw both pursuits together, along with all those who—to quote Geertz's still ringing words—"engage in the systematic study of meaningful forms." When I read those words I was already bent on learning from anthropology; Monica Hunter Wilson, the great ethnographer of southern and eastern Africa had been an undergraduate mentor, and Greg Dening was by then my colleague, friend, and guide. But I now heard a clarion call: I wrote to Geertz to announce that when those meaning-oriented saints went marching in, I wanted to be in that number! Like so many other historians answering this call, I received strong encouragement from the great man. Later, when he wrote an essay on "History and Anthropology ," making extensive reference to the work of those he called "the Melbourne Group" (Inga Clendinnen, Greg Dening, and myself), he signed the offprints he sent us: "Your man in Princeton."' Undoubtedly many historians were inspired by Geertz's example to enter into cultural history in a spirit very different from the old "intellectual history ," and yet the lessons diey learned varied and are hard to specify—apart from a zeal to treat ritual and the symbolic as matters of central importance for the understanding of past ages. My earliest encounters —first the cockfight and then Cohen, the 'ar, and "diick description"—came like a revelation: here was an operational clarification of culture as not mysteriously locked in the human mind but discoverable in public performances. It was the task of the ethnographer and ethnographic historian to search out the ways such performances were shaped by sets of shared meanings and conventions. The Balinese cockfight as "a story they tell themselves" came as a profound application and enrichment of the idea of culture as publicly performed social construction. Historians drawing on this inspiration were also taught to find diemselves more explicidy in a cornTwo cockfighters and a referee at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1893. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number.LCUSZ62 -103077]. entific traditions of Western culture.- Where the late, great anthropologist consistendy urged that the world needs more careful understanding across cultures , the counterblast polemic alleges that a moral endorsement is given to cruelties such as the blood sport of cockfighting and the ritual immolation of widows. Indeed in this account , such anthropology is even deemed complicit in atrocities committed by postcolonial dictators in countries whose traditional cultures were once the object of close ethnographic study. I celebrate Clifford Geertz's decades of leadership in the systematic study of the diverse forms of beliefs and practices in our world and in its past. Those who will read his writings as they were intended to be read will surely value the way judgment is suspended for the sake of inquiry into the meanings and motivations of participants . Such understanding is at die heart of the wisdom Geertz imparted to historians and others whose engagement in humanistic social science he inmon endeavor with aesthetically oriented humanities scholars. We learned that cultural performances under ethnographic review could usefully be "read" for meanings much as are literary texts. There was danger in the "text" model. The strongest attack on my own ethnographic account of the American Revolution in Virginia came from a critic of Geertz's role among historians...

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