Download or read book Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues written by Clifford Geertz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-03-15 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clifford Geertz is the most influential American anthropologist of the past four decades. His writings have defined and given character to the intellectual agenda of a meaning-centered, nonreductive interpretive social science and have provoked much excitement and debate about the nature of human understanding. As part of the American Anthropological Association's centennial celebration, the executive board sponsored a presidential session honoring Geertz. Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues compiles the twelve speeches given then by a distinguished panel of social scientists along with a concluding piece by Geertz in which he responds to each speaker and reflects on his own career. These edited speeches cover a broad range of topics, including Geertz's views on morality, cultural critique, interpretivism, time and change, Islam, and violence. A fitting tribute to one of the great thinkers of our age, this collection will be enjoyed by anthropologists as well as students of psychology, history, and philosophy.
Download or read book Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues written by Richard A. Shweder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-03-15 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clifford Geertz is the most influential American anthropologist of the past four decades. His writings have defined and given character to the intellectual agenda of a meaning-centered, nonreductive interpretive social science and have provoked much excitement and debate about the nature of human understanding. As part of the American Anthropological Association's centennial celebration, the executive board sponsored a presidential session honoring Geertz. Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues compiles the twelve speeches given then by a distinguished panel of social scientists along with a concluding piece by Geertz in which he responds to each speaker and reflects on his own career. These edited speeches cover a broad range of topics, including Geertz's views on morality, cultural critique, interpretivism, time and change, Islam, and violence. A fitting tribute to one of the great thinkers of our age, this collection will be enjoyed by anthropologists as well as students of psychology, history, and philosophy.
Download or read book The Interpretation Of Cultures written by Clifford Geertz and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint. Originally published: 1973. 2000 ed. includes new preface.
Download or read book Available Light written by Clifford Geertz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential thinkers of our time, here discusses some of the most urgent issues facing intellectuals today. In this collection of personal and revealing essays, he explores the nature of his anthropological work in relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World War II. His reflections are written in a style that both entertains and disconcerts, as they engage us in topics ranging from moral relativism to the relationship between cultural and psychological differences, from the diversity and tension among activist faiths to "ethnic conflict" in today's politics. Geertz, who once considered a career in philosophy, begins by explaining how he got swept into the revolutionary movement of symbolic anthropology. At that point, his work began to encompass not only the ethnography of groups in Southeast Asia and North Africa, but also the study of how meaning is made in all cultures--or, to use his phrase, to explore the "frames of meaning" in which people everywhere live out their lives. His philosophical orientation helped him to establish the role of anthropology within broader intellectual circles and led him to address the work of such leading thinkers as Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, William James, and Jerome Bruner. In this volume, Geertz comments on their work as he explores questions in political philosophy, psychology, and religion that have intrigued him throughout his career but that now hold particular relevance in light of postmodernist thinking and multiculturalism. Available Light offers insightful discussions of concepts such as nation, identity, country, and self, with a reminder that like symbols in general, their meanings are not categorically fixed but grow and change through time and place. This book treats the reader to an analysis of the American intellectual climate by someone who did much to shape it. One can read Available Light both for its revelation of public culture in its dynamic, evolving forms and for the story it tells about the remarkable adventures of an innovator during the "golden years" of American academia.
Download or read book An Analysis of Clifford Geertz s The Interpretation of Cultures written by Abena Dadze-Arthur and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clifford Geertz has been called ‘the most original anthropologist of his generation’ – and this reputation rests largely on the huge contributions to the methodology and approaches of anthropological interpretation that he outlined in The Interpretation of Cultures. The centrality of interpretative skills to anthropology is uncontested: in a subject that is all about understanding mankind, and which seeks to outline the differences and the common ground that exists between cultures, interpretation is the crucial skillset. For Geertz, however, standard interpretative approaches did not go deep enough, and his life’s work concentrated on deepening and perfecting his subject’s interpretative skills. Geertz is best known for his definition of ‘culture,’ and his theory of ‘thick description,’ an influential technique that depends on fresh interpretative approaches. For Geertz, ‘cultures’ are ‘webs of meaning’ in which everyone is suspended. Understanding culture, therefore, is not so much a matter of going in search of law, but of setting out an interpretative framework for meaning that focuses directly on attempts to define the real meaning of things within a given culture. The best way to do this, for Geertz, is via ‘thick description:’ a way of recording things that explores context and surroundings, and articulates meaning within the web of culture. Ambitious and bold, Geertz’s greatest creation is a method all critical thinkers can learn from.
Download or read book Clifford Geertz in Morocco written by Susan Slyomovics and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1963 and 1986, eminent American anthropologists Clifford and Hildred Geertz - together and alone - conducted ethnographic fieldwork for varying periods in Sefrou, a town situated in north-central Morocco, south of Fez. This book considers Geertz’s contributions to sociocultural theory and symbolic anthropology. Clifford Geertz made an immense impact on the American academy: his interpretative and symbolic approaches reoriented anthropology analytically away from classic social science presuppositions, while his publications profoundly influenced both North American and Maghribi researchers alike. After his death at the age of 80 on October 30, 2006, scholars from local, national, and international universities gathered at the University of California, Los Angeles, to analyze his contributions to sociocultural theory and symbolic anthropology in relation to Islam; ideas of the sacred; Morocco’s cityscapes (notably Sefrou’s bazaar or suq); colonialism and post-independence economic development; gender, and political structures at the household and village levels. This book looks back to a specific era of American anthropology beginning in the 1960s as it unfolded in Morocco; and at the same time, the contributions examine new lines of enquiry that opened up after key texts by Geertz were translated into French and introduced to generations of francophone Maghribi researchers who sustain lively and inventive meditations on his Morocco writings. This book was published as a special issue of Journal of North African Studies.
Download or read book Visions of Culture written by Jerry D. Moore and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic textbook, now in its fourth edition, offers anthropology students a succinct, clear, and balanced introduction to twenty-five major theorists and theoretical developments in the field.
Download or read book After the Fact written by Clifford Geertz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unabashedly honest ethnography . . . [from] a founder of ‘symbolic’ anthropology . . . reflections on his fieldwork over a period of . . . forty years. Brilliant.” (Kirkus Reviews) In looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is a personal history as well as a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant 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. Through the prism of his fieldwork over forty years in two towns, 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 and Africa. 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 human sciences and thus a particular—and particularly efficacious—view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become. “Geertz charts the transformation of cultural anthropology from a study of "primitive" people to a multidisciplinary investigation of a particular culture's symbolic systems, its interactions with the larger forces of history and modernization.” —Publishers Weekly “An elegant, almost meditative volume of reflections.” —The New Yorker “[An] engrossing story of a few key moments in American social science during the second half of the twentieth century as [Geetz] participated in them.” —New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Interpreting Clifford Geertz written by Jeffrey C. Alexander and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorist Clifford Geertz's influence extends far beyond Anthropology. This volume reflects the breadth of his influence, looking at Geertz as a theorist rather than as an anthropologist. To date there has been no impartial, comprehensive, and authoritative work published on this critical figure.
Download or read book Examining Practice Interrogating Theory Comparative Legal Studies in Asia written by Helen J. Nicholson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legal transplantation and reform in the name of globalisation is central to the transformation of Asian legal systems. The contributions to Examining Practice, Interrogating Theory: Comparative Legal Studies in Asia analyse particular legal changes in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The contributions also concurrently critically analyse the utility of scholarly developments in comparative legal studies, particularly discourse analysis; regulatory theory; legal pluralism; and socio-legal approaches, in the study of Asian legal systems. While these approaches are regularly invoked in the study of transforming European legal systems, the debate of their relevance and explanatory capacity beyond the European context is recent. By bringing together these diverse analytical tools and enabling a comparison of their insights through Asian empirical case studies, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the debates concerning legal change and the methods by which it is analysed globally, and within Asia.
Download or read book A Dictatorship of Relativism written by Jeffrey M. Perl and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last homily he gave before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described modern life as ruled by a "dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely" of satisfying "the desires of one's own ego." An eminent scholar familiar with the centuries-old debates over relativism, Ratzinger chose to oversimplify or even caricature a philosophical approach of great sophistication and antiquity. His homily depicts the relativist as someone blown about "by every wind of doctrine," whereas the relativist sticks firmly to one argument--that human knowledge is not absolute. Gathering prominent intellectuals from disciplines most relevant to the controversy--ethics, theology, political theory, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, epistemology, philosophy of science, and classics--this special double issue of Common Knowledge contests Ratzinger's denunciation of relativism. One essay relates the arguments of Ratzinger to those of two other German scholars--the conservative political theorist Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde and the liberal philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas--since all three men assume that social order depends on the existence of doctrinal authority (divine or otherwise). The contributors here argue for an intellectual and social life free of the desire for an "infantilizing" authority. One proposes that the Christian god is a relativist who prefers limitation and ambiguity; another, initially in agreement with Ratzinger about the danger relativism poses to faith and morals, then argues that this danger is what makes relativism valuable. The issue closes with the first English translation of an extract from a book on Catholic-Jewish relations by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, one of the Catholic Church's most progressive figures. Contributors. David Bloor, Daniel Boyarin, Mary Baine Campbell, Lorraine Daston, Arnold I. Davidson, John Forrester, Kenneth J. Gergen, Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Julia Kristeva, Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, Christopher Norris, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Richard Shusterman, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jeffrey Stout, Gianni Vattimo
Download or read book Works and Lives written by Clifford Geertz and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categoriesthis is magic, that is technologyhas long since been exploded. What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy self-absorptiontime wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary innocence is long enough.
Download or read book Working Knowledge written by Joel Isaac and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward "science" and "objectivity" but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the "Harvard complex" played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.
Download or read book Encounters with Islam written by Lawrence Rosen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an interdisciplinary anthropological study of the Islamic world - exploring art, law, and religion - to challenge existing stereotypes.
Download or read book In Search of Middle Indonesia written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The middle classes of Indonesia’s provincial towns are not particularly rich yet nationally influential. This book examines them ethnographically. Rather than a market-friendly, liberal middle class, it finds a conservative petty bourgeoisie just out of poverty and skilled at politics. Please note that Sylvia Tidey's article (pp. 89-110) will only be available in the print edition of this book (9789004263000).
Download or read book Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology written by R. Jon McGee and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 1053 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social and cultural anthropology and archaeology are rich subjects with deep connections in the social and physical sciences. Over the past 150 years, the subject matter and different theoretical perspectives have expanded so greatly that no single individual can command all of it. Consequently, both advanced students and professionals may be confronted with theoretical positions and names of theorists with whom they are only partially familiar, if they have heard of them at all. Students, in particular, are likely to turn to the web to find quick background information on theorists and theories. However, most web-based information is inaccurate and/or lacks depth. Students and professionals need a source to provide a quick overview of a particular theory and theorist with just the basics—the "who, what, where, how, and why". In response, SAGE Reference is publishing the two-volume Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Features & Benefits: Two volumes containing approximately 335 signed entries provide users with the most authoritative and thorough reference resource available on anthropology theory, both in terms of breadth and depth of coverage. To ease navigation between and among related entries, a Reader′s Guide groups entries thematically and each entry is followed by Cross-References. In the electronic version, the Reader′s Guide combines with the Cross-References and a detailed Index to provide robust search-and-browse capabilities. An appendix with a Chronology of Anthropology Theory allows students to easily chart directions and trends in thought and theory from early times to the present. Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of each entry and a Master Bibliography at the end guide readers to sources for more detailed research and discussion.
Download or read book Age of Fracture written by Daniel T. Rodgers and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-03 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.
