Notes to Introduction: The Comic Vision of Clifford Geertz
1. New York Times, 26 October 1988.
2. “Found in translation: on the social history of the moral imagination” in Local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 43.
3. Clifford Geertz, Available light: anthropological reflections on philosophical topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 137–8.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The gay science, W. Kaufmann trans. and ed. (New York: Random House, 1974).
5. Geertz (as he told me more than once) admired Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1979 essay “Social science methodology as ideology,” reprinted in The MacIntyre reader, K. Knight ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
6. R. G. Collingwood, The principles of art (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1938, p. 111.
7. Ibid., p. 118.
8. Robert Darnton, “On Clifford Geertz: field notes from the classroom,” New York Review of Books, 11 January 2007.
9. Kenneth Burke, On symbols and society, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 188, pp. 170–72.
10. Clifford Geertz, Works and lives: the anthropologist as author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. vi.
11. Clifford Geertz, Negara: the theatre-state in 19th century Bali, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 136.
12. R. G. Collingwood, An autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 115.
13. In the essay of that name in his Local Knowledge, pp. 19–35.
14. These remarks made at an informally welcoming party for the appointment of Joan Scott to the Institute in 1985.
Note to On Malinowski
1. Raymond Firth (ed.), Man and Culture, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.
Notes to On Foucault
1. This is about a hundred years too late by his more general schema as set forth in his central work, Les mots et les choses (translated in the United States as The Order of Things). But Foucault denies that historical periods are integrated by any sort of over-all Zeitgeist; and he rejects any pervasive “synchrony of breaks.” He concentrates instead on actually discovered archaeological connections and disconnections, which can be quite different from subject to subject. This failure of different sequences to correlate is not a contradiction to his approach but rather a problem arising within it that—aside from some vague references to “the dispersion of epistemic domains”—he has yet to face up to. In fact, the “strata” of the various “sites” he has so far “excavated”—insanity, medical perception, linguistics, biology, economics, punishment, and, just recently, sex—are, like those of “real” archaeology (where this issue emerges as the question of establishing “horizons” as opposed to “phases”), only approximately coordinated with one another in time.
2. The quotation is from “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now,’ “ one of Foucault’s political pieces (an après-68 discussion with several far-left lycée students) included in a useful collection of his essays, Language, Counter-memory, Practice, edited by D.F. Couchard and just published by Cornell University Press, which also contains a number of his more celebrated theoretical articles: “What is an Author?,” “Theatrum Philosophicum,” “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” etc.
3. “Theatrum Philosophicum,” ibid.
Notes to Ethnography in China
1. For the supposed impossibility of purely “consanguineous” (here, purely matrilineal) kinship systems, see G.P. Murdock, Social Structure (Free Press, 1996), pp. 41ff.; cf. D.M. Schneider and K. Gough, Matrilineal Kinship (University of California Press, 1961). Of course, “consanguineous” ties are not always phrased in terms of “blood,” as they are with us. Among the Na, the idiom is “bone”: matrilineally connected individuals are said to be “of one bone.”
2. Hua includes the Na vernacular for these various phrases in his text; I have removed them and repunctuated accordingly.
3. David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 196. Italics original.
4. The Communists of course came to power in 1949, but the Na area remained essentially Kuomintang country until 1956, when the Party installed its own local government, placing Han commissars in the region and effectively ending the traditional chiefship system.
Note to The Last Arab Jews
1. L. C. Briggs and H. L. Guede, No More Forever—A Saharan Jewish Town, (Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1964).
Notes to On Feminism
1. The first quotation is from Elizabeth Fee, “A Feminist Critique of Scientific Objectivity,” in Science for the People, Vol. 14 No. 4, p. 8, cited by Sue V. Rosser, in Tuana, p. 10; the second from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, cited in Sue Curry Jansen, “Is Science a Man? New Feminist Epistemologies and Reconstructions of Knowledge,” Theory and Society, Vol. 19 (1990), p. 235.
2. “Panel Discussion: Construction and Constraint,” in Ernan McMullin, ed., Construction and Constraint: The Shaping of Scientific Rationality (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 242. The whole volume is an excellent survey of the range of positions in the debate.
3. For a review of the intense, unstable debate over the meaning and value of the concept of gender in feminist writing generally, see Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in her Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 28–50.
4. The quotation is from W.V.O. Quine, cited, negatively, as “dogmatic metaphysics,” in Richard Rorty, “Is Natural Science a Natural Kind?” McMullin, p. 50.
5. Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (W.H. Freeman, 1983); reviewed in The New York Review, March 29, 1984.
Notes to Indonesia: Starting Over
1. Hal Hill, Indonesia—Industrial Transformation (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1997), p. 1, references removed; Steven Radelet, Indonesia’s Implosion (Harvard Institute for International Development, 1998), p. 1.
2. For the closest thing to a blow-by-blow account of what happened, see Jeremy Wagstaff, “Dark Before Dawn: How Elite Made a Deal Before Indonesia Woke Up,” The Wall Street Journal, November 2, 1999 (the event itself took place on October 20). For a brief description of the presidential election and its postscript outcome, see R. William Liddle, “Indonesia 1999: Democracy Restored,” Asian Survey, XL2, forthcoming (2000).
3. Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, is quoted from a video conference on “international financial architecture,” in The Calendar and Chronicle, Council on Foreign Relations, March 2000, p. 4:
I [have] spent my life worrying about [supervision, bank capital standards, disclosure, and risk management] and … none of it is going to prevent an international financial crisis.… Large and volatile capital flows are coming up against small, undeveloped … financial systems, which is a recipe for a train wreck under the current international structure.
As an investment banker, Volcker may be suspected of having a bias toward pessimism; but, in the same conference, the former head of Clinton’s upbeat Council of Economic Advisors, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, is only marginally more sanguine:
The goal is not to eliminate financial crises. The question is, can we reduce their intensity and number?… I think you can reduce vulnerability by having better regulatory environments, better accounting environments, and greater transparency.
Since there is no sign on the horizon of “better regulatory environments,” or indeed of any serious change in “the current international structure,” except perhaps to render it even more unstable by crippling the few institutions that seek to manage it, this is rather cold comfort.
Notes to On the Devastation of the Amazon
1. In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), pp. 17–18. Italics in original.
2. Darkness in El Dorado, p. 14.
3. In Claudia Andujar, Yanomami (Curitiba, Brazil, 2000), p. 100. This is a fine book of art photographs of the Yanomami, with a brief ethnographic description of them by the French anthropologist Bruce Albert and personal reflections by Andujar, the photographer, and Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a leading spokesman for the Yanomami people.
4. October 15, 2000.
5. Turner headed an earlier American Anthropological Association Special Commission to Investigate the Situation of the Brazilian Yanomami, in 1990–1991; Sponsel was chair of the Association’s Committee for Human Rights from 1992 to 1996. There are, as yet, no accepted conventions for the citation of Internet communications, which often have long and roundabout, not always recoverable, transmission routes, hyperlink upon hyperlink, before they arrive on one’s screen. (Precise source-referencing may be another elderly tradition on the way out.) I have not attempted to provide the relevant addresses for my on-line quotations: they tend to be long and cryptic, as well as, often enough, fugitive, disappearing like electronic wraiths when you look back for them. I have kept a list of them, which I can post on the Net (!) if there turns out to be a demand. An extensive, but given the volume of traffic necessarily incomplete, index of “over 300 links” (the true number is probably closer to a thousand or two by now) relevant to the debate can be found at www.anth.uconn.edu/gradstudents/dhume/index4.htm.
6. See Patrick Tierney, “The Fierce Anthropologist,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2000, pp. 50–61; John Tooby, “Jungle Fever,” Slate, October 24, 2000, 4:00 PM PT; “The New Yorker Replies,” Slate, October 27, 2000, 4:45 PM PT. In a separate release, “The Muddied Waters of Amazon Anthropology,” the New Yorker editors say that Chagnon originally agreed to be interviewed in connection with Tierney’s piece, and then backed out, threatening suit. For all this, see Inside Media, another on-line magazine, October 3, 2000, 6:54 PM.
7. And the beat goes on: Tierney, having perhaps caught his breath as well, has recently (December 3, 2000) issued, via his publishers, W.W. Norton, a response to the critiques of John Tooby and Bruce Alberts. Tooby, he says “is not a neutral observer,” but president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, of which Chagnon was president before him, and “co-director of the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Anthropology Department,” which has funded some of the Yanomami work. Tierney says that Tooby (“who has been trying to block the publication and fair reviewing of [my] book”) conflates his work with the Sponsel-Turner e-mail, where the accusations against Neel and Chagnon are different, and less careful, than his own, and he lists ten examples of “errors” and “misrepresentations” in Tooby’s piece for Slate.
Against Alberts (whose press release seems, in fact, to have been more a personal response than an officially deliberated Academy statement), he admits a few minor errors, but again denies that he accused Neel of purposefully starting the measles epidemic; he merely criticized his activities once the outbreak occurred. He also charges Alberts with distorting a number of his arguments, and remarks, “The prepublication assault [on Darkness in El Dorado] has been nothing short of extraordinary, but not surprising given the stakes in the controversy … [which] has been spun to make [the book] seem a book only about a measles vaccine and … epidemic in the Amazon … [when it is actually] a work with a broad and encompassing theme.”
The text of the American Anthropological Association’s Executive Board decision following the November meetings, which promises some sort of a decision in February, can now be found on the Association’s Web site, www.ameranthassn.org/press/eldorado.htm.
8. James V. Neel, Physician to the Gene Pool: Genetic Lessons and Other Stories (John Wiley, 1994), p. 302. This is a combination autobiography and homiletical treatise in “genetic medicine.” Neel goes on to say, “One of the major disappointments of our fieldwork was that, despite much brainstorming, we could never devise a field test of Yanomama ‘smarts’—and if we had devised one, the Yanomama would have no motivation to take it seriously.” To Tierney, he confessed, in a 1997 phone interview, that his failure to isolate the alleles for his “Index of Innate Ability,” and thus pin down his big man/big smarts/big reproducer theory directly, “was the greatest disappointment of my life.”
9. Neel, Physician to the Gene Pool, p. 134.
10. John J. Miller, “The Fierce People,” National Review Online, November 20, 2000.
11. Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yanamamö: The Last Days of Eden (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. xiii. Italics in original.
12. Chagnon, Yanamamö: The Last Days of Eden, p. xi.
Notes to Which Way to Mecca? PART I
1. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, translated by Michael Sells (White Cloud Press, 1999); Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, 2002).
2. Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam (Doubleday, 2002); Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (Norton, 2002); What the Koran Really Says, edited by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books, 2002); Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Graham E. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).
3. Vartan Gregorian, Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith (Brookings Institution Press, 2003); Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2003). And this is but the tip of a very large iceberg: I have read more than fifty recent works in preparing this commentary.
4. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996). The use of “Islam” to mean both the “religion” and the “civilization” it animates—the lack of a Christianity /Christendom-like distinction—has hampered the discussion here somewhat. The late Marshall Hodgson, whose The Venture of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974) is the (usually unacknowledged) founder of this world-historical approach to Islam—see my review in The New York Review, December 11, 1975—suggested “Islamicate” for the latter meaning, but it has not, unfortunately, much caught on.
5. Buddha (Viking, 2001), In the Beginning (Knopf, 1996), The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (London: Kyle Cathie, 1991), A History of God (London: Heinemann, 1993), The Battle for God (Knopf, 2000), Tongues of Fire (London: Viking, 1985), The Gospel According to Woman (London: Elm Tree Books, 1986), Through the Narrow Gate (St. Martin’s, 1995), Beginning the World (St. Martin’s, 1983).
Notes to Which Way to Mecca? PART II
1. See the discussions of the books by Bernard Lewis, Thomas W. Simons Jr., M.J. Akbar, and Karen Armstrong in the first part of this commentary, “Which Way to Mecca?” The New York Review, June 12, 2003. For other examples of this synoptic approach to things, see John L. Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam (Oxford University Press, 2002); Charles Lindholm, The Islamic Middle East: Tradition and Change (Blackwell, 2002); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization (Harper, San Francisco, 2003); Bassam Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics (Palgrave, 2001); F.E. Peters, Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians (Princeton University Press, 2003).
2. Originally published as Jihad: Expansion et décline de l’islamisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). I have slightly reordered the wording and altered the punctuation of the following paragraph, without benefit of indication, in an effort to restore at least some of the readability an unusually leaden translation has, here as throughout, destroyed.
3. See “Which Way to Mecca? Part I” As Kepel himself notes, his own work follows upon that of his mentor, Olivier Roy, whose The Failure of Political Islam (Harvard University Press, 1998; first published in Paris in 1992), “a book full of ideas that went against current opinion and forged the way for a new approach to the problem of Islamism,” first advanced the view that political Islam had entered into a period of more or less final decline. In his most recent work, L’Islam Mondialisé (Paris: Seuil, 2002), not yet translated into English, Roy reasserts and extends this notion, which rests, in the first instance, on a sharp distinction between “Islam as a Religion” and “the concrete practices of Muslims,” considered as an assemblage of social, not cultural, facts. The first may be left, along with the Koran, “to the theologians”; the second is “a world-wide phenomenon, which supports [subit] and accompanies globalization.” As “all explanations [of social and political matters] by religion are tautological … the Huntingtonian notion of a civilization founded on religion explains nothing.” The present tensions “associated today with Islam are symptoms of its distorted [mal vécu] Westernization and the cascading crises this has provoked,” not of some intrinsic “clash of cultures.” “It was not St. Peter’s in Rome that bin Laden attacked. It was not even the Wailing Wall. It was Wall Street.”
4. After completing his book (but before publishing it), Schwartz, by then Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Forward, went to work for the Voice of America, but was soon fired by its news director for attacking the Voice for airing interviews with Muslim militants in the interest of balance. A public controversy, initiated by a William Safire column in The New York Times and continued by a good part of the neoconservative press, then broke out, in which the firing was attributed to pressure from Colin Powell’s “dovish” State Department in its struggle against Vice President Richard Cheney and the Pentagon “hawks.” See William Safire, “State Out of Step,” The New York Times, July 1, 2002; Ronald Radosh, “State Department Outrage: The Firing of Stephen Schwartz,” Front Page Magazine, July 2, 2002; Timothy Noah, “The Weekly Standard’s House Muslim,” Slate, July 3, 2002; Justin Raimondo, “The VOA Follies—‘Voice of America’ Loses a Writer—and the War Party Gains a Martyr,” Antiwar.com, February 18, 2003.
5. For a clearer, shorter, more scholarly, and more nuanced (though hardly less hostile) account of Wahhab and Wahhabism, see Hamid Algar, Wahabbism: A Critical Essay (Islamic Publications International, 2002). Algar, who is a translator and admirer of both Qutb and Khomeini, is mainly concerned to question the conflation of Wahhabism with Islamism generally, a conflation upon which Schwartz’s book (which Algar doesn’t, at least directly, discuss) is founded.
6. Terror and Liberalism, which has pretensions to broad philosophical significance, has already been reviewed—and tellingly, in my view—by Ian Buruma in The New York Review, May 1, 2003. Here, I am concerned, and very much en passant, with its place in the “constructing Islam” literature.
Notes to On the State of the World
1. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Norton, 1997). Richard Posner, Aging and Old Age (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University Press, 2001); Sex and Reason (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Economics of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1981).
2. Under the general rubric of “the anthropology and sociology of science,” such a monographic literature about particular disasters has begun to appear. See, on the Ukraine case, Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002); on the Union Carbide tragedy in India, Kim Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (University of Chicago Press, 2001); on the commercial exploitation of Indonesia’s forests, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, 2005).
Notes to The Near East in the Far East
1. Geertz, C., The Religion of Java (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960).
2. See, inter alia, Geertz, C., Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
3. On the history of the Asian trade in the Indonesian archipelago, see van Leur, J.C., Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague and Bandung: W. Van Hoeve, 1955).
4. On such states, see Schrieke, B.J.O., “Ruler and Realm in Early Java,” in Indonesian Sociological Studies, vol. 2 (The Hague and Bandung: W. Van Hoeve, 1957); for a (late) example, see Geertz, C., Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). See also Pigeaud, Th., Java in the Fourteenth Century: A Study in Cultural History (The Hague and Bandung: M. Nijhoff, 1960–62).
5. On the bazaar states, see Schrieke, B.J.O., “The Shifts in Political and Economic Power in the Indonesian Archipelago in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century” (sic), in Indonesian Sociological Studies, vol. 1 (The Hague and Bandung: W. Van Hoeve, 1955).
6. For a general history of East Indies formation and development, see Vlekke, B., Nusantara: A History of the East Indian Archipelago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943).
7. Bali was, and still, being “Hindu,” is the exception to all this. The reason for its relative isolation from this development are complex, but the absence of good harbors on the Java Sea side of the island was surely of importance.
8. On the pesantren complex in Indonesia generally, see Abaza, M., “Madrasah,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For some concrete examples, see Geertz, C., The Religion of Java. Pesantren teaching, though mainly oral, was not entirely so: a written tradition of Malay and Javanese language commentaries in Arabic script, which at least some of the students could read, grew up. See van Bruinessen, M., Kitab Kuning: Pesantren dan Tarekat (Bandung, 1995).
9. Hurgronje, C. Snouck, Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1931). The estimate of the present number of pesantren is from Abaza, “Madrasah.”
10. Geertz, C., Religion of Java. See also Geertz, C., The Social History of an Indonesian Town (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
11. On the history of nationalism in Indonesia, see Kahin, G., Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952).
12. Lapidus, I., A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.568.
13. Geertz, C., Islam Observed.
14. On Muhammadiyah, see Peacock, J., Muslim Puritans: Reformist Psychology in Southeast Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Noer, D., The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 1900–1942 (Singapore and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
15. On Nahadatul Ulama, see Hefner, R., Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
16. Geertz, C., “The World in Pieces,” in Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
17. For a brief account of his ascent to the Presidency, see Geertz, C., “Indonesia: Starting Over,” New York Review of Books, May 11, 2000.
Note on What Is a State If It Is Not a Sovereign?
1. Headlines respectively from the Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 1999; Agence France Presse, February 28, 1999; the Toronto Star, March 14, 1999; the Singapore Straits Times, March 13, 1999; and the Far Eastern Economic Review, March 18, 1999.
Note on Shifting Aims, Moving Targets
1. The epithets are all taken from a particularly obtuse and interéssé critique, Asad (1983). For an excellent critique of the critique, see Canton (forthcoming); cf., along the same lines, but more briefly, Kipp & Rogers (1987: 29). For another general statement of my own which addresses some of these issues more directly, in connection with the work of William James, see Geertz (2000: 167–202).