After the fact : two countries, four decades, one anthropologist /

Geertz has written a remarkable personal retrospective of an extraordinary career in anthropology. He combines an engaging mix of reports of his recent visits to sites of earlier fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco with reminiscences, both astute and bittersweet, of important post-WW II social science projects in which he participated and with an insider's reflections on the prestigious institutions where he worked. He ends with shaded evaluations of prospects for his discipline and of the traditional peoples that anthropology has made objects of its study. These reflections are refreshingly grounded throughout by Geertz's "signature" as a writer: precise ethnographic observation, be it of the Balinese or an academic institution, delivered in an approximation of a classic sort of American literary realism, yet one that does not take itself too seriously. Profound comparative insights are compressed into rich, jewel-like paragraphs, sentences, and even phrases. There are wonderful puns (as in the book's title). Geertz characteristically qualifies his judgments and assessments with hesitations and ambivalences so that the reader is forced to think about them rather than merely accept them. In sum, a major achievement that can be read with pleasure and fascination. All levels. G. E. Marcus; Rice University

Sefrou, a Moroccan town nestled at the foot of the Middle Atlas Mountains, was an enchanted oasis where Berbers, Arabs, Jews and French settlers coexisted, when cultural anthropologist Geertz first went there in 1963. But by 1986, the French and Jews had left, and the population, which had tripled, was deeply divided between old-timers and recent immigrants, mostly Berbers. The other focal point of this affecting scholarly memoir, Pare, Indonesia, a town in central Java where Geertz has done fieldwork since 1952, was wracked by internecine combat among Islamic, nationalist and Communist parties until the army imposed military rule in 1965. Today, status-ridden ideas of right and propriety dominate daily life as Pare's inhabitants attempt to reconcile group diversity with ideals of national unity. Using his fieldwork in these towns as a prism, Princeton anthropologist 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. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

An unabashedly honest ethnography that faces head-on the challenge of representing the ``other'' in the social sciences' ``post-postmodernist'' climate of uncertainty. As the founder of ``symbolic'' anthropology, which he refers to as the ``anthropology of meaning,'' Geertz (Social Sciences/Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) has 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 ethnography which recognizes the internal complexities and conflicts of anthropology can still be a viable and worthwhile enterprise. Geertz admits from the beginning that the reason for weaving his narrative between these two cultures is that this was the manner in which he came to ``find his feet'' in them; it is his own life, rather than any natural contrast between the two cultures, that gives form to the narrative. The task Geertz sets himself is nearly impossible: Not only have the two towns changed in virtually infinite ways, but Geertz himself and the discipline of anthropology have also undergone enormous transformations; in addition, local history and politics are nested within regional and international ones. Geertz accepts the challenge of describing this metamorphosis in all of its complexity without resorting to graphs, statistics, and models of patriarchal lineages. The ethnography that emerges is part history, part anecdote, part personal narrative, and part theory. The author likens the process to ``Richard Wilbur's Tom Swift, putting dirigibles together, in the quiet weather, out in the backyard.'' Whether he is describing Morocco, Indonesia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, or Princeton, Geertz respects the difficulty of relating a past that remains elusive despite exhaustive field notes. Ironically, this lends his voice a kind of ``ethnographic authority'' that he would probably wish to avoid. At times unwieldy, cumbersome, self-absorbed, detached, and graceless--in short, quite brilliant.