Interview with Clifford Geertz

An interview with the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. For full interview or interviews of many others, please see: http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/audiovisual.html
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Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Clifford
• Geertz
• anthropology
• Alan
• Macfarlane

[ayabaya]

There is now a full version of this interview (in two parts) up on Youtube.

[Elekias]

You need to understand Geertz's standpoint - he build many of his ideas on the body of "thick description" and "web of meanings". Imho he set up his anthropology as a sort of lit. crit. style...

[smoochie63]

I think Geertz's approach is hugely important, because as much as you might like to think, we cannot read social life directly from texts. It is always mediated, constructed and reproduced as lines on a page. So you need to be able to distinguish rhetorical strategies, from theory, and from indexes of social life

[strayjay]

@sham123123123 By understanding how a work was put together and the person who put it together, we can better understand how the author's mediation is affecting the work itself. The ethnography is important, sure, but my points of reference and cultural viewpoint are usually not the same as the author's. In order to truly understand what the author observed and critique their interpretations thereof, We need to see no just their conclusion, but their starting point as well.

[stephanieconn]

@janeblueheaven, what is 'the work"? it is bh its nature subjective and he's partly trying to get at that. there is no absolute 'work' in social sciences.

[Elekias]

@zmitregnistegra who cares.The fact you don't, or I do, doesn't mean anything.This guy was recognized by others as significant and also this doesn't necessarily mean anything.Still, this guy spent part of his life on extensive ethnographic research in Southeast Asia and North Africa, kept working on ethnic diversity at the time of his death as this had a meaning for him. Some youtube troll, a wannabe nihilist did a few lines to put himself above - such a fail is indeed worth a killing yourself;)

[zmitregnistegra]

@Elekias who cares? the kinds of things this guy is spending his time on ... you might as well kill yourself, life is too short. it's so pointless.

[traductor2010]

that's a really great video of one of the most famous anthropologist who died 4 years ago. Watch it.

[bummer2000]

what do you mean by scientific anthropology? ...

[Janeblueheaven7]

What an absurd windbag. Self-reflexive? Ah yes, the process is more important than the work.

Just what the world needs...more self-titillating navel-gazing.

[MrSteveSStevenson]

"Scientific anthropology," yeah, right.

[iloveanthropology]

"Understanding the form and pressure of,to use the dangerous word one more time,native's inner lives is more like grasping a proverb,catching an allusion,seeing a joke-or ,as i have suggested,reading a poem-than it is like achieving communion." To reponse the first floor,you are just sientism.