ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND EDITORIAL DETAILS

Cordial thanks are due to the New York Review of Books for allowing me to plunder their pages in such a way as to provide two thirds of this book, and to do so without charging any fee. In this connection I would like particularly to thank their member of staff, Patrick Hederman, who was an unfailing source of help during compilation. In addition, thanks are due to the editors and publishers of the following journals for permission to republish, also without fees, essays from their pages: International Journal of Middle East Studies (with gratitude to Adam Hirschberg for his generosity), Annual Review of Anthropology (and thanks to Claire Tilman-McTigue), Current Anthropology (and thanks to Lisa McKamey and Emily Dendinger), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (with particular thanks to the editor, Simon Coleman), Dissent (and similar thanks to Maxine Phillips for her promptness and enthusiasm). My gratitude is also due to Amy Jackson, Clifford Geertz’s secretary at the Institute in Princeton for very many years, and for her help in retrieving and providing various originals for this collection. Karen Blu, Geertz’s widow, supported the venture all the way and I devoutly trust she approves the finished product. Finally and as ever, I am grateful to my old friend, Quentin Skinner, for his loyal support of the idea and actuality of this book. He was for almost forty years a close friend of Clifford Geertz, and shares my judgment that the more we have of Geertz’s work and thought to read, the better.

I should point out that I have made a few excisions in the text of the essays and last lectures provided here. In the case of two essays—“Toutes Directions” being the first—I have taken the liberty of removing the very heavy scholarly apparatus of notes which accompanied the original, making the assumption that the reader is more interested in the place of this essay in Geertz’s thought and oeuvre than in its significance within the subject of anthropology. So, too, with his autobiographical self-reckoning, “An Inconstant Profession,” where the prodigious range of references, obviously important to the special occasion at which the lecture was given, would have seriously impeded the satisfaction and comprehension of a reader in a less specialized context. In both cases, however, I should emphasise how the weight of these deleted references bore striking testimony to the way in which Geertz kept himself confidently abreast of an immense amount of contemporary scholarship in his own and adjacent subject areas, and did so right up to the end of his life.