After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist

Geertz, Clifford; Clifford Geertz

ISBN 10: 0674008723 / ISBN 13: 9780674008724

Published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London, 1995

About this Item

198 pp. Solidly bound copy with minimal external wear, crisp pages and clean text. Ink stamp on first front end page.

Seller Inventory # 1FislDg0037

Bibliographic Details

• Title: After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674008723
• ISBN 13: 9780674008724
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Illustrator: Sachiko Furui (Cover Illustration)
• Edition: Copyright © 1995
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Memoirs, Literary Studies
  • Anthropology
  • Biography, Autobiography

About this title

Synopsis

"Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers.

To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become.

About the Author

Clifford Geertz was Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.