To engage in a meaningful dialogue with another discipline, and to reap the benefits of interdisciplinary work, it is essential to keep a firm grounding in the research tradition and scientific methods of one particular area of study. In Available Lights, Clifford Geertz often crosses boundaries and demonstrates an amazing command of other fields of research. His Anthropological Reflexions not only cover philosophical topics, but also address other disciplines such as psychology, political science, history, epistemology, and the natural sciences. But Clifford Geertz is a scholar who is quite secure about his disciplinary identity: "I am an ethnographer, and a writer about ethnography, from beginning to end; and I don't do systems."
Although the nature of anthropology is hard to pinpoint (it has to do with identity and difference, or with "how much difference difference makes"), Geertz is convinced that ethnographic fieldwork remains at the core of the discipline: field research is what anthropologists do that others don't. To discover who people think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, it is necessary to gain a working familiarity with the frames of meaning within which they enact their lives. Recent attempts to reinvent the discipline by discarding fieldwork as an outdated ideology are met with skepticism: "There is very little in what the partisans of an anthropology in which fieldwork plays a much reduced or transformed role (...) have so far done that would suggest they represent the wave of the future." Therefore "deep hanging out", James Clifford's disparaging expression for fieldwork, is to be preferred to "nonimmersive, hit-and-run ethnography".
By staying close to the field, the ethnographer avoids a common pitfall: the attempt to "do systems", what the author labels "the-buck-stops-there approaches to social theory " or the "'it all comes down to' cast of mind". As he notes, there are very few laws or general rules in anthropology that aren't either false or trivial. At best, generalities are useful as heuristic devices, indicating the direction in which to probe deeper. Claude Levi-Strauss is a well-known example of an anthropologist who attempted to draw universal laws and general structures from his observations in the field, but Geertz disagrees with him on many points, epistemological as well as ethical. For Geertz, the renunciation of the authority that comes from "views from nowhere" ('I've seen reality and it's real') is not a loss, it's a gain. Direct and open acknowledgment of limits--this observer, in this time, at that place--is one of the things that most recommends this whole style of doing research.
But fieldwork poses many problems. First, as the author wryly notes, "we may be faced with a world in which there simply aren't any more headhunters, matrilinealists, or people who predict the weather from the entrails of a pig. Difference will doubtless remain--the French will never eat salted butter. But the good old days of widow burning and cannibalism are gone forever." Second, negotiating access to the field and establishing a meaningful relationship with a group of informants are no easy tasks. The relationship between an anthropologist and an informant rests on a set of partial fictions only half seen-through. For Geertz, "one of the psychological fringe benefits of anthropological research--at least I think it's a benefit--is that it teaches you how it feels to be thought of as a fool and used as an object, and how to endure it." Moral dilemmas abound, not least about how to cope with "a division of humanity into those who know and decide and those who are known and are decided for". This makes anthropology a moral discipline, in which "the results of thought inevitably reflect the quality of the kind of human situation in which they were obtained".
For an intellectual who confesses to be "shy of polemic", Clifford Geertz demonstrates an acute spirit and a sharp wit in discussing the work of researchers with whom he apparently disagrees: James Clifford's "hit-and-run ethnography", Claude Levi-Strauss' metaphor of cultures as intersecting trains peeking briefly into one another, critics who see in relativism an attack on "reason, freedom, footnotes, and civilization", or evolutionary biology's pretension to hegemony. But he also gives generous credit to scholars with whom he agrees, and he is ready to call his own self into question. For a septuagenarian, he is remarkably aware of the new challenges facing the discipline: the multipolar world and the redefinition of national or cultural identities, the new varieties of religious experience in the islamic world, the interactions between culture, mind, and the brain in explaining human behavior.
Clifford Geertz's prose is a model of the genre. His vocabulary is rich and evocative, his tone witty and humorous, his culture spans literary genres and historical periods. His review of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions sets the standard for any aspiring book reviewer. As in his other essays, long list of poets make cursory appearances, from Robert Frost to Richard Wilbur, from Gerard Hopkins to Constantine Cavafy, but Clifford Geertz himself could be added to this list of literary masters.
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