After The Fact Two Countries Four Dec

"Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one aNorth African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in fortyyears more has changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of anthropology in thefield, Geertz has created a work that is characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. Anelegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers.

To viewhis two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia andAfrica. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the humansciences and thus a particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become.

Geertz's disarmingly casual [book is]...a history of his relationships with the towns in Indonesia and Morocco where he's done his most sustained fieldwork, cast in terms of a history of the ideas that have shapedthat work...Its deftly rendered anecdotes always serve as illustrations of concepts...Elegant.

This long-awaited professional memoir by...one of anthropology's most illustrious demigods plays on the ambiguity of method in a curious discipline that began in the early twentieth century as something of atreasure hunt after lives and cultures in exotic, faraway places...Worked in between Geertz's ethnographic tales, anecdotes, and reminiscences of fieldwork in Sefrou and Pare is the engrossing story of a few key moments in Americansocial science during the second half of the twentieth century as he participated in them.

After the Factis a retrospective on a remarkable career, and on the worlds that shaped its characteristic contours.

This memoir by the eminent cultural anthropologist functions at several levels. It is worth reading just for the well-chosen and narrated anecdotes from Geertz's fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco. This book is alsoan anthropological critique of the extensive political-economic changes in the Third World over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, Geertz has written a series of meditative reflections on the nature of anthropologicalknowledge...Geertz shows the value of building patterns and connections from multiple, nuanced, first-hand observations of an anthropologist.

A new book by Clifford Geertz is an event...[The] chapters on Java and Morocco...are marked by the impressive learning, the illuminating insights, the marvelous description of scene and event, the masterful summaryof complex social history, and the evocative characterization of cultural heritage, as well as the elegant style, the pithy phrase, and the illuminating trope, that we have come to expect from vintage Geertz...In sum, an intellectualfeast.

After the Factis Clifford Geertz's Jerusalem-Harvard lectures, jointly sponsored by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Harvard University. Appropriate to its venue, the booksaddresses major questions, making strong theoretical and empirical claims. For that reason, After the Factis a rather touching confession, even a testament.

An unabashedly honest ethnography that faces head-on the challenge of representing the 'other' in the social sciences' 'post-postmodernist' climate of uncertainty. As a founder of 'symbolic' anthropology...Geertzhas already made an impressive contribution to the field. This book--a series of reflections on his fieldwork over a period of some 40 years in two locations: Pare, Indonesia, and Sefrou, Morocco--vibrantly demonstrates that ethnographycan still be a viable and worthwhile enterprise...Brilliant.

'\'It is difficult to know what to do with the past,\' Geertz writes, but of his own past he has made an elegant, almost meditative volume of reflections. In prose that is sometimes liquid, sometimes faux-Jamesian,Geertz looks back over the sites of his anthropological labors: Sefrou, in Morocco; Pare, in Indonesia; the University of Chicago; the Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton...The reader is allowed to witness how fruitfully accidentand idea have mingled in the making of one anthropologist\'s career.'

This memoir by the eminent cultural anthropologist functions at several levels. It is worth reading just for the well-chosen and narrated anecdotes from Geertz's fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco. This book is alsoan anthropological critique of the extensive political-economic changes in the Third World over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, Geertz has written a series of meditative reflections on the nature of anthropologicalknowledge...Geertz shows the value of building patterns and connections from multiple, nuanced, first-hand observations of an anthropologist.

Clifford Geertzis Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, <>Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Towns

Countries

Cultures

Hegemonies

Disciplines

Modernities

Notes

Index