Full interview with Clifford Geertz - part one

First part of the full interview of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, filmed in May 2004 in Cambridge. For a downloadable, higher quality, version with a summary, please see 'Interviews' on www.alanmacfarlane.com
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Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• clifford
• geertz
• anthropology
• bali
• morocco
• post
• modernism

[mandescending]

Great Post -- Just seeing Geertz makes me want to watch a Balinese cockfight.

[fluic]

Furthermore, to espouse that Geertz and other postmodernists "were justifying bullshit or manipulating for their own self interest." Seems excessive. What obvious gains did Geertz ascertain by his "manipulation"?

Geertz was simply trying to demonstrate the changing relationships between the observer and the observed, the text and its subject, etc. During his prominence it became a relevant point of inquiry, and he wanted to highlight aspects of semiotics that are often ambiguous.

[123theref]

I want him to cough so badly.....

[elcar98]

podrian subir una con subtitulos en español!!!???

[YunaBonbeurre]

@llvf1

good to know

something else ?

[YunaBonbeurre]

@mandescending

amen

[llvf1]

@mandescending why?

[llvf1]

I LOVE THIS INTERVIEW.

[llvf1]

Loving it!

[MrVitaactiva]

Geertz, and I know this for a fact ,was never happy about being called a "podermodernist," in fact he was strongly against it. Rather, he became a particularist later in his career, a much more apt term form someone who studies a group of people on their own terms without imposing anthropological categories on them, or at least not without explicitly defining those categories. Deciphering between a "twitch" and a "wink" isn't necessarily postmodern.

[human808]

cultures are toys that are manipulated daily.

[fluic]

... and he believed that anthropology's task is "sorting out the structures of signification in order to determine their social ground and import." He also says "what makes other cultures different is a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs", hardly the viewpoint of someone who "didn't even RESPECT other cultures as a life style"