An Inconstant Profession: The Anthropological Life in Interesting Times

Author(s): Clifford Geertz

Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 1-19
Published by: Annual Reviews
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 Annu. Rev. Anthropol.2002. 31:1-19
doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085449
Copyright? 2002 by AnnualReviews. All rights reserved

AN INCONSTANT
PROFESSION:
Lifein Interesting
TheAnthropological Times
CliffordGeertz
Institute
for AdvancedStudy,EinsteinDrive,Princeton,NewJersey08540;
email:geertz@ias.edu

Key Words social sciences,history,thirdworld,modernization,

ColdWar
M Abstract I give an overallview of anthropologyandof my careerwithinit over
the past fifty years,relatingthemto changesin the worldin generalduringthattime.
All lessons areimplicit,all moralsunstated,all conclusionsundrawn.

INTRODUCTION
I have arrived,it seems, at that point in my life and my careerwhen what people
most want to hear from me is not some new fact or idea, but how I got to this
point in my life and my career.This is a bit discouraging,not just because of
its momentomori overtones(when you are seventy-five,everythinghas memento
mori overtones), but because, having spent the whole of my adult life trying to
push thingsforwardin the humansciences, I am now being askedto considerwhat
that has entailed-why I think my directioncan be called forward,and what, if
that directionis to be sustained,the next necessary thing might be. As a result, I
have engaged in the past few years in at least two more or less organizedattempts
to describethe generalcurveof my life as a workinganthropologist,andthis essay
will be the third,and,I trust,the last. Talkingaboutone's self andone's experiences
in a homileticalmanner--"go thou and do likewise"-is a bit much the firsttime
around.Recycled, it loses charmaltogether.
The first of these essays in apologetical retrospection,originally given as a
Harvard-Jerusalem lecture in 1990, became the chapterentitled "Disciplines"in
my book After the Fact (Geertz 1995a). ThereI concentratedmostly on mattersof
researchand scholarship,most especially on my long-termfieldworkin Indonesia
and Morocco-a story of projects leading to outcomes leading to other projects
leading to other outcomes. The second, originallygiven as an AmericanCouncil
of LearnedSocieties "Life of Learning"lecturein 1999, became the firstchapter,
entitled"PassageandAccident,"of my most recentbook, AvailableLight (Geertz
2000). There I presenteda more personal,semi-introspectiveaccountof both my
life and my career;a sort of sociointellectualautobiographyand self-accounting.
This time-this last time-I want to do something else: namely, to trace the

0084-6570/02/1021-0001$14.00 1
.
2 GEERTZ

developmentof anthropologyas a field of study over the more thanhalf-century,

1950-2002, I have been involvedin it, and to trace,too, the relationshipsbetween
thatdevelopmentandthebroadermovementsof contemporaryhistory.Thoughthis
also, of necessity,producessomethingof a "thethingsI have been throughandthe
things I have done" sort of narrative,I am, for the most part,not concernedwith
either my work or my persona.I am concernedwith what has happenedaround
me, both in the profession in which I have been, however loosely and at times
uncomfortably,enclosed, and in what we arepleased to call "thewider world,"in
which thatprofessionhas been, howevermarginallyandinsecurely,enclosed. That
world is with us late andsoon:Thereis very little in anthropologythatis genuinely
autonomous;pretensionsto the contrary,howeverdressedin the borrowedclothes
of "science,"are self-serving.We are, like everybodyelse, creaturesof our time,
relics of our engagements.
Admittedly,this is a little vast for a shortessay, and I am obliged to pass over
some very large mattersvery quickly,ignoringdetail and suppressingnuance and
qualification.But my intentis not to presenta properhistory,aninclusivesummary,
or a systematicanalysis.It is, instead,
1) To outline the succession of phases, periods,eras, generations,or whatever,
both generally and in anthropologyas such, as I have lived throughit, and
them, in the last half of the last century,and,
2) To trace the interplaybetween (for the most part,Americanand European)
cultural,political, social, and intellectuallife overalland anthropologyas a
special and specializedprofession, a trade,a craft,a mitier.
Whethersuchbroad-stroke,impressionistic,the-view-from-heresketchingwill
yield much in the way of insight into how things are, and have been, heading in
our field remainsto be seen. But, absenta crystalball, I know of no otherway.
So far as phases, periods, eras, and the like are concerned,I shall, for my own
convenience, mark out four of them. None of them is internallyhomogeneous,
none of them is sharplybounded;but they can serve as useful place-markersin a
lurching,tangled,digressivehistory.The first,roughlybetween 1946 and 1960-
all dates are movable-was a period of after-the-warexuberance,when a wave of
optimism, ambition,and a sense of improvingpurposeswept throughthe human
sciences. The second, about 1960 to aboutthe mid-1970s, was dominated,on the
one hand,by the divisions of the universalizedcold war, and, on the other,by the
romances and disappointmentsof Third-Worldism.From 1975 or so to, shall we
say, in honorof the fall of The Wall, 1989, therewas, first, a proliferationof new,
or anyway newfangled, approachesto social and culturalanalysis, various sorts
of theoreticaland methodological"turns,"Kehre,tournuresd'esprit;and then, on
the heels of these, the rise of radicallycritical and dispersive"post-"movements,
broughton by increasinguncertainty,self-doubt,andself-examination,bothwithin
anthropologyand in Westernculturegenerally.Finally,from the 1990s until now,
interesthas begunto shift towardethnic conflict,violence, world-disorder,global-
ization,transnationalism,humanrights,andthe like, althoughwherethatis going,
 AN INCONSTANT
PROFESSION 3

especially afterSeptember11, is farfrom clear.These, again, arenot the only cuts

that could be made, nor even the best. They are but the reflections, diffuse and
refracted,in my own mind of the way of the world and the ways of anthropology
within the way of the world.

POSTWAREXUBERANCE

Duringthe second world war,Americananthropologistswere, like Americanso-

ciologists, historians,psychologists, and political scientists, drawn,almost to the
manor woman,into governmentservice.After it ended,in whatwas, in the United
Statesanyway,not thatlong a time, threeor fouryears,theyreturned,immediately,
again almost to the man or woman, to academiawith their conception of them-
selves and their profession radically altered.What had been an obscure, isolate,
even reclusive,lone-wolf sortof discipline,concernedmainlywith tribalethnogra-
phy, racialandlinguisticclassification,culturalevolution,andprehistory,changed
in the course of a decade into the very model of a modern,policy-conscious, cor-
porate social science. Having experienced working (mostly in connection with
propaganda,psychological warfare,or intelligence efforts) in large, intellectually
diverse groups,problem-focusedcollections of thrown-togetherspecialists, most
of whom they hadpreviouslyknownlittle aboutandhadless to do with, anthropol-
ogists came back to their universitiesin a distinctlyexperimentalframeof mind.
Multi- (or inter-,or cross-) disciplinarywork, teamprojects,and concernwith the
immediate problems of the contemporaryworld were combined with boldness,
inventiveness,and a sense, based mainly on the suddenavailabilityof large-scale
materialsupportboth from the governmentand from the new mega-foundations,
that things were, finally and certainly,on the move. It was a heady time.
I encounteredall this at what may have been its point of highest concentra-
tion, greatestreach, and wildest confusion: Harvardin the 1950s. An extraordi-
nary collection of persons and personalitieshad gatheredthere, and at the nearby
MassachusettsInstituteof Technology,launchingprogramsin all directions.There
was the Departmentof Social Relations,which-chaired by the systematicsociol-
ogist TalcottParsons,andanimated,ratherdiffusely,by his ratherdiffuse "General
Theory of Social Action "--combined sociology, anthropology,clinical psychol-
ogy, and social psychology into an at least terminologicallyintegratedwhole (Par-
sons & Shils 1951). Therewas the RussianResearchCenter,headedby the cultural
anthropologistClyde Kluckhohn(1951);the Psychological Clinic, headed by the
psychoanalystHenryMurray(1938); theLaboratoryof Social Relations,headedby
the social statisticianSamuelStouffer(Stouffer1949). JohnandBeatriceWhiting,
in fromYale,assembleda teamandbeganexploitingthe newly createdHumanRe-
lationsAreaFiles for comparativecorrelationstudiesof socialization(BB Whiting
& J Whiting 1975). And atMIT,therewas the CenterforInternationalStudiesdedi-
cated to stimulatingmodernization,democratization,andtakeoffin the new states
of Asia and Africa and the strandedones of EasternEurope and Latin America
(Millikan& Blackmer 1961). Just abouteverythingthatwas in any way in the air
4 GEERTZ

in the social or, as they soon came to be called as the pressurestowardunification

intensified,the behavioralsciences-from groupdynamics(Homans1950), learn-
ing theory (Tolman1958), and experimentalpsychology (Bruner& Krech 1950)
to structurallinguistics (Jakobson 1952), attitudemeasurement(Allport 1954),
content analysis (Inkeles 1950), andcybernetics(Wiener1962)-was represented
by one or anotherInstitute,one or anotherCenter,one or anotherProject,one or
anotherentrepreneur.Only Marxismwas missing, and a numberof the students
happily providedthat (for a generalcritiquefrom the left of all this, see Diamond
1992).
For me, as a would-beanthropologist-one who hadneverhad an anthropology
course and had no particularaim in mind except to render himself somehow
employable-the figureI hadmost to come to termswith in this swarmof talkative
authoritieswas Clyde Kluckhohn.A driven,imperious,ratherhauntedman, with
an enormousrangeof interests,a continuouslyrestless mind, andan impassioned,
somewhatsectariansense of vocation,he had readClassics at Oxfordas a Rhodes
Scholar.He had studiedthe Navajo and otherpeoples in the AmericanSouthwest
since having been sent there as a teenager for his health, and he knew his way
around the corridorsof power, both in Washington(where he had worked as
consultantto the Secretaryof Warand directedmorale surveysfor the Office of
WarInformation)and, an even greaterachievement(consideringhe had been born
obscure in Iowa) at Harvard.The authorof what was then the most widely read,
and best written,statementof what anthropologywas all about,Mirrorfor Man
(1949), a past presidentof the American AnthropologicalAssociation, a fierce
controversialist,a player of favorites,and a mastermoney-raiser,Kluckhohnwas
rathera presence.
Of the variouscollective enterprises(thinkingback, I count at least eight, and
there were probablymore) that Kluckhohnwas at that moment either directing,
planning, or otherwise animating,I myself became involved, in turn, in three,
which, takentogether,not only launchedmy careerbut also fixed its direction.
The first,andsmallest,was the compendiumof definitionsof cultureKluckhohn
was preparingin collaborationwith Alfred Kroeber,then in his late seventies
and concludinga sovereigncareerin detachedretirement(Kroeber& Kluckhohn
1952). I was given what, with the aid of other, more senior, graduatestudents,
they had assembled and what they had written in the way of commentary,and
I was asked to review it and offer suggestions. I had some suggestions, most of
them expository, a few of which were attendedto; but the most fateful result
of the experience for me was that I was inducted into the thought-waysof the
particularform of anthropologythen called, ratherawkwardly,patterntheory or
configurationalism.In this dispensation,stemmingfrom work before and during
the war by the comparativelinguist EdwardSapir at Yale and the culturalholist
Ruth Benedict at Columbia,it was the interrelationof elements, the gestalt they
formed,not theirparticular,atomisticcharacter,as in previousdiffusionandculture
area studies,thatwas takento be the heartof the matter.A phoneme,a practice,a
role, an attitude,a habit,a trait,an idea, a customwas, as the sloganhad it, "apoint
 AN INCONSTANT
PROFESSION 5

in a pattern";it was systems we were after,forms,structures,shapes,contexts-the

social geometryof sense (Kluckhohn1962, Sapir 1949, Benedict 1934).
A large numberof expressionsof this approachto things currentin anthropol-
ogy appearedat that time. Perhapsthe most visible and influential,though as it
turnedout not so long-lived, was the so-called cultureandpersonalitymovement,
in the service of which Kluckhohn,Murray,and a juniormemberof the Social Re-
lations Department,David Schneider,put togethera more or less definitivereader
(Kluckhohnet al. 1949). Stronglyinfluencedby psychoanalyticalideas andby pro-
jective testingmethods,it soughtto relatetheprocessesof individualpsychological
developmentto the culturalinstitutionsof varioussocieties. AbramKardinerand
Ralph Linton at Columbia,Cora DuBois, first at Berkeley then at Harvard,Erik
Erikson,also first at Berkeley and then at Harvard,and Kluckhohnhimself in his
Navajowork(Kardiner& Linton1939, Du Bois et al. 1944, Erikson1950,Leighton
& Kluckhohn 1947) were perhapsthe most prominentfigures in the movement,
and MargaretMead was its battle-fit,out-fronttribune;but it was very widespread
(Hallowell 1955, Piers & Singer 1953, Wallace 1970). Closely allied to culture
andpersonalitytherewere the so-called nationalcharacteror culture-at-a-distance
studies, such as Benedict's on Japan,and Mead's, RhodaM6traux'sand Geoffrey
Gorer'son Europe and America (Benedict 1949; Mead 1942; Mead & M6traux
1953; M6traux& Mead 1954; Mead & Rickman 1951; Gorer 1948, 1955; Gorer
& Rickman 1963), and, of course, those of the Russian Research Center,where
sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and anthropologistsattemptedto
assemble a collective portraitof "thenew Soviet man"out of the analysis of com-
munist writingsand refugee life-histories(Bauer 1959, Baueret al. 1956).
My interestin all this was limitedby what seemed to me its somewhatmechan-
ical, destiny-in-the-nurseryquality and the vastness of its explanatoryambitions.
So I driftedinsteadtowardanotherof Kluckhohn'slarge-scale,long-term,multi-
discipline,multi-inquirer,systematicalenterprisesin the interpretationof cultures,
the so-called ComparativeStudyof Valuesor Ramah(laterRimrock)Project.This
project,methodicaland well financed,was dedicatedto describingthe value sys-
tems (world-views,mentalattitudes,moral styles) of five geographicallyadjacent
butculturallydiscrete,small communitiesin northwesternNew Mexico-Navajo,
Zuni, Spanish American,Mormon,and Anglo (or Texan). Over a period that fi-
nally stretchedto twenty years or so, dozens of researchersfrom a wide varietyof
crossbredspecialties-moral philosophers,regionalhistorians,ruralsociologists,
American Indianists,child psychologists-were dispatchedto one or anotherof
these sites to describe one or anotheraspect of the life being lived there. Their
fieldnotes,hundredsuponhundredsof pages of them, were then typed up on cards
and filed in the HumanRelation Area Files mannerat the Peabody Museum of
Anthropology,where they could be commonly consultedand a long stringof spe-
cial studies, and finally a collective volume, written (Vogt & Albert 1966, Vogt
1955, Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck 1961, Smith & Roberts 1954, Ladd 1957). As
for me, I did not go to the Southwest but worked for some months in the files,
then already vast and varied, on a subject set by Kluckhohn-the differential
6 GEERTZ

responses of the five groups to problems set to them all by the common condi-
tions of their existence as small, rural,more or less encapsulatedcommunities:
drought,death, and alcohol. Mormontechnologicalrationalism,Zuni rain danc-
ing, Spanish-Americandramaticfatalism in the face of drought,Navajo fear of
ghosts, Mormon eschatological schemes, Anglo grief-avoidancein the face of
death, Zuni sobriety,Mormonpuritanism,and Navajo spree drinkingin the face
of alcohol-all were outlined,ratherschematically,and attributed,ratherspecu-
latively, to their differingvalue systems (Geertz,unpublishedobservations).But
whateverthe limitationsof the reportI produced(andit wasn't all thatbad as a first
pass at things),the experienceturnedout to be botha sortof dry-runfor the kind of
field research-comparative, collaborative,andaddressedto questionsof meaning
andsignificance-that I would spendtherestof my life pursuing;anda transitionto
the next phase or periodof the immersionof anthropologyin the movementof the
times:the age of modernization,nation-building,andthe all-envelopingCold War.

MODERNIZATIONAND THE COLDWAR

The Centerfor InternationalStudies at the MassachusettsInstituteof Technology,
which I mentionedearlieras partof the clusterof social science holding-companies
emergingin post-warCambridge,was set up in 1952 as a combinationintelligence
gatheringand policy planning organizationdedicatedto providing political and
economic advice both to the rapidlyexpandingU.S. foreign aid programand to
those it was ostensibly aiding-the "developing,""under-developed,"or, for the
less sanguine,"backward"countriesof Asia, Africa, and Latin America.At first,
the Center,somethingof ananomalyin anengineeringschoolnot muchgiven atthat
time to social studiesof any sort,was hardlymorethana secretary,a suiteof offices,
a name, a largeamountof money,anda nationalagenda.In aneffortsimply to get it
up andrunning,Kluckhohn,who, still moving in mysteriousways, had againbeen
somehow involved in its formation,proposedthat a team of doctoralcandidates
fromHarvardsocial science departmentsbe formedandsent to Indonesiaunderits
auspicesto carryout fieldresearchin cooperationwith studentsfromthatcountry's
new, European-styleuniversities.Five anthropologists,includingmyself and my
thenwife, Hildred,also a Social Relationsstudent;a sociologist who was a historian
of China;a social psychologist; and a clinical psychologist were given a year of
intensive work in the Indonesianlanguage and sent off for two years to the rice
fields of easternJava(not all of themgot there,butthat'sanotherstory)to carryout,
ensemble, parallel,interconnected,and, so it was hoped, cumulativeresearches:
the RamahProjectmodel updated,concentrated,and projectedabroad.
The ups and downs of this enterprise,which itself came to be called "The
ModjokutoProject"and the degree to which it achieved the ends proposedto it,
have been retailed elsewhere (Geertz 1995a). For the present "Marchof Time"
sort of story, its significance lies in the fact that it was, if not the first, surely
one of the earliest of what soon turnedinto a flood of efforts by anthropologists,
or teams of them, to adaptthemselves and their tribes-and-islandsdiscipline to
 AN INCONSTANT
PROFESSION 7

the study of large-scale societies with writtenhistories, establishedgovernments,

and composite cultures-nations,states, civilizations. (For anotherearly effort in
this direction, see Stewardet al. 1956.) In the years immediatelyfollowing, the
numberof suchcountry-focusedprojectsmultiplied(as did, of course,as a resultof
decolonization,the numberof countries),and a sortof super-disciplinecalled area
studies, eclectic, synoptical,reformative,and policy-conscious, came into being
to supportthem (Steward1950; Singer 1956; Redfield 1953, 1956).
When the Modjokutoteam left for SoutheastAsia, the Center,as I mentioned,
did not yet really exist as a going concern, so its connection with the work we
did there--essentially historicaland ethnographic,a refittedcommunitystudy-
was nominal at best. By the time we returnedto Cambridge,three years further
on, however, it had become a large, bureaucratizedorganizationwith dozens of
specialized researchers,most of them economists, demographers,agronomists,
or political scientists, engaged in developmentplanning of one sort or another
or serving as in-countrypolicy consultantsto particulargovernments,including
that of Indonesia. The work of our team seemed, both to the Center staff and
to ourselves, to be ratherto the side of the Center'smission, inconsonantwith its
"applied"emphasisandtoo concernedwith whatthe program-mindedtypestook to
be parochialmatters.We driftedaway into writingour separatetheses on religion,
kinship,village life, marketselling, andotherirrelevancies,andbeginning,finally,
our academic careers. I, however, was rathermore interestedin developmental
questions, and in state formation,than my colleagues, and I wished to returnas
soon as possible to Indonesiato take them up. So, after gaining my doctorate,I
rejoined the Centerand became more directly involved in its work and with the
masteridea that governedit: modernization.
This idea, or theory,ubiquitousin ThirdWorld studies duringthe 1960s and
early 1970s, and, of course, not all that dead yet, stemmed from a variety of
sources. Most particularly,it grew out of the writings of the Germansociologist
Max Weberand his Americanfollowers (of whom, TalcottParsonswas perhaps
the most prominent,and certainlythe most insistent) on the rise of capitalismin
the West (Weber1950a,b, 1947, 1965; Tawney 1947; Parsons1937; Bendix 1962;
Levy 1960; Eisenstadt 1966; Black 1976). Weber'sconception of the history of
the West since the Renaissance and the Reformationwas that it consisted of a
relentless process of economic, political, and culturalrationalization,the instru-
mental adjustmentof ends and means, and he saw everythingfrom bureaucracy,
science, individualism,and double-entrybookkeepingto the industrialorganiza-
tion of labor and the disciplinedmanagementof innerlife as expressionsof such
a process. The systematic orderingof the entirety of human existence in ratio-
nal terms, its imprisonmentin an "iron cage" of rule and method, was what, in
its essence, modernitywas. In particular,his famous, in some quartersinfamous,
ProtestantEthic thesis-that the harsh, predestinarianbeliefs of Calvinism and
relatedinner-worldlyascetic doctrinesof the sixteenthand seventeenthcenturies
providedthe moral legitimationand drivingforce for the tireless pursuitof profit
underbourgeoiscapitalism-spurred a whole host of studies designed to support
8 GEERTZ

and extend it, to find signs andportentsof such progress-producingvalue systems

in thatmost residualof residualcategories,the nonmodern,nonrational,noncapi-
talist non-West(Bellah 1957, 1965; Eisenstadt1968; Geertz 1956, 1963b).
As for me, my originalthesis proposal,put temporarilyaside to addressmyself
to describingJavanesereligion more generally for the purposes of the common
project,was to pursuethe possibilitythatreformist(ormodernist)Islammightplay
a role in Indonesiasimilarto thatwhich Weber'sCalvinismsupposedlyplayed in
the West. So, after writing a short book at the Centeron the history of Javanese
agriculture,which ascribed its failure to rationalizealong the capital-intensive,
labor-savinglines experiencedearlier in the West and, in a somewhat different
way, in Japan,to the colonial policies of the Dutch (Geertz 1963a), I headedback
to Indonesiahopingto addressthe Weberianthesis in a moredirectandsystematic,
hypothesis-testingway. I would, I thought, spend four or five months each in a
stronglyIslamic region in Sumatra,a stronglyCalvinistregion in Sulawesi, and a
Hindu region in Bali and try to ferretout the effects, if any, of differentvarieties
of religious belief on the modernizationof economic behavior.
But a funny thing happenedon the way to the field. The cold war, previously
fought out (the ratherspecial case of Korea perhapsexcepted) in the client and
satellite statesof Europe,shiftedits centerof gravityto the ThirdWorld,and most
especially to SoutheastAsia. All this-the Malaya emergency,the Vietnamwar,
the KhmerRouge, the Huk rebellion,the Indonesianmassacres-is much visited,
much disputed,history,and I will not rehearseit again here. Suffice it to say this
developmentalteredthe whole scene of action for those of us trying to carryout
field studiesin such suddenlyworld-criticalplaces. The inductionof the obsessions
and machinationsof the East-Westconfrontationinto entrenched,long-standing
divisions in religious, ethnic, and culturallife-another, less foreseen, form of
modernization-brought local, hand-to-handpolitics to a furious boil just about
everywhereit occurred,and it occurredjust abouteverywhere.
Fromthe end of the 1950s to the beginningof the 1970s, the charismatical,hero-
leadersof thenew states-Nehru, Nkrumah,Nasser,Ben Bellah,U Nu, AyubKhan,
Azikwe, Bandanaraike,Sihanouk, Ho, Magsaysay, Sukarno-bedeviled within
and without by these pressurestowardideological polarization,struggledto po-
sition their countriesin the ever-narrowing,unfilled space between the powers:
neutral,nonaligned,newly emerging,"tiersmonde."Indonesia,which soon found
itself with both the largestCommunistPartyoutside the Sino-Soviet bloc and an
American-trainedand-financedarmy,was in the very forefrontof this effort,espe-
cially after Sukarnoorganizedthe BandungConferenceof 29 Asian and African
nations, or would-be nations, in that west Javanese city in 1955 (Kahin 1956,
Wright 1995). Nehru, Chou, Nasser, and Sukarnohimself all addressedthe Con-
ference, which led on to the formalcreationof the nonalignedmovement.All this,
and the general unfolding of things, made of Indonesiaperhapsthe most critical
battlegroundafterVietnamin the Asian cold war.And in the mid-1960sit collapsed
underthe weight:failed coup, nearcivil-war,political breakdown,economic ruin,
and mass killings. Sukarno,his regime, and the dreamsof Bandung,never more
 AN INCONSTANT
PROFESSION 9

than dreams,or self-intoxications,were consumed,and the grimmer,less roman-

tic age of the kleptocrats,Suharto,Marcos, Mobutu,Amin, and Assad emerged.
Whateverwas happeningin the ThirdWorld,it did not seem to be the progressive
advance of rationality,however defined. Some sort of course correctionin our
procedures,our assumptions,and our styles of work, in our very conception of
what it was we were tryingto do, seemed, as they say, indicated.

AN EXPLOSIONOF PARADIGMS

By the time I got back to the United Statestowardthe beginningof the 1960s (my
neat little three-way project spoiled by the outbreakof anti-Sukarnorebellions
in Sumatraand Sulawesi, I had spent most of the year in Bali), the destabilizing
effects of the deepening of the greatpower confrontationin SoutheastAsia were
beginning to be felt with some force there as well. The profession itself was torn
apartby chargesand counterchargesconcerningthe activities,or supposedactivi-
ties, of anthropologistsworkingin Vietnam.Therewas civil rightsand "TheLetter
from BirminghamJail,"civil libertiesand the Chicago Seven. The universities-
Berkeley, Harvard,Columbia, Cornell, Kent State, Chicago--erupted, dividing
faculty,inflamingstudents,and alienatingthe generalpublic. Academic research
on "underdeveloped"countriesin general, and on "modernization"in particular,
was put undersomethingof a cloud as a species of neoimperialism,when it wasn't
being condemnedas liberal do-goodism. Questions multipliedrapidlyabout an-
thropology'scolonial past, its orientalistbiases, and the very possibility of disin-
terestednessor objectiveknowledgein the humansciences, or indeedwhetherthey
should be called sciences in the firstplace. If the discipline was not to retreatinto
its traditionalisolation,detachedfromthe immediaciesof contemporarylife-and
there were those who recommendedthat, as well as some who wished to turnit
into a social movement-new paradigms,to borrowThomasKuhn'sfamousterm,
first introducedaroundthis time (Kuhn 1962), were called for. And soon, and in
spades, they came.
For the next fifteen years or so, proposals for new directions in anthropo-
logical theory and method appearedalmost by the month, one more clamorous
than the next. Some, like French structuralism,had been aroundfor awhile but
took on greaterappeal as Claude L6vi-Strauss,its proprietor-founder, moved on
from kinship studies to distributionalanalyses of symbolic forms-myths, ritu-
als, categoricalsystems-and promisedus a general account of the foundations
of thought (Ldvi-Strauss1963a,b, 1966, 1964-1967; Boon 1972). Others, like
"sociobiology"(Chagnon& Irons 1979), "cognitiveanthropology"(Tyler 1969,
D'Andrade 1995), "the ethnographyof speaking" (Gumperz & Hymes 1964,
Tedlock 1983), or "culturalmaterialism,"(Harris 1979, Rappaport1968) were
stimulated,sometimes overstimulated,by advances in biology, informationthe-
ory,semiotics, or ecology. Therewas neo-Marxism(Wolf 1982), neo-evolutionism
(Service 1971, Steward1957), neo-functionalism(Gluckman1963, Turner1957),
and neo-Durkheimianism(Douglas 1989). Pierre Bourdieu gave us "practice
10 GEERTZ

theory"(1977), VictorTurner"theanthropologyof experience"(Turner& Bruner

1986), Louis Dumont "the social anthropologyof civilizations"(1970), Renajit
Guha, "subalternstudies" (1982). EdmundLeach talked of "cultureand com-
munication"(1974), Jack Goody of "the written and the oral" (1977), Rodney
Needham of "languageand experience"(1972), David Schneiderof "kinshipas a
culturalsystem"(1968), MarshallSahlins of "structureand conjuncture"(1981).
As for me, I contributedto the merrimentwith "interpretiveanthropology,"an ex-
tension, broadenedand redirectedby developmentsin literature,philosophy,and
the analysis of language, of my concern with the systems of meaning-beliefs,
values, world views, forms of feeling, styles of thought-in terms of which par-
ticular peoples constructtheir existence and live out their particularlives (1973,
1983). New or reconditionedsocial movements,feminism (Rosaldo & Lamphere
1974, Ortner& Whitehead 1981, McCormack& Strathern1980, Weiner 1976),
antiimperialism(Said 1978), indigenousrights (Deloria 1969), and gay liberation
(Newton 1979), addedto the mix, as did new departuresin neighboringfields-
the Annales movement in history (Le Roi Ladurie 1980), the "new historicism"
in literature(Greenblatt1980), science studies in sociology (Latour& Woolgar
1986, Traweek1988), hermeneuticsandphenomenologyin philosophy(Gadamer
1975, Ricoeur 1981, Habermas1972), and thatelusive and equivocalmovement,
known, elusively and equivocally,as "post-structuralism" (Foucault1970, Lacan
1977, Derrida 1976, Deleuze & Guattari1977). There were more than enough
perspectivesto go around.
What was lacking was any means of orderingthem within a broadlyaccepted
disciplinary frame or rationale,an encompassing paradigm.The sense that the
field was breakingup into smallerand smaller,incommensurablefragments,that
a primordialoneness was being lost in a swarmof fads and fashions, grew, pro-
ducing cries, angry,desperate,or merely puzzled, for some sort of reunification
(Lewis 1998). Types or varieties of anthropology,separatelyconceived and or-
ganized, appeared,one on top of the next: medical anthropology,psychological
anthropology,feminist anthropology,economic anthropology,symbolic anthro-
pology, visual anthropology;the anthropologyof work, of education,of law, of
consciousness;ethnohistory,ethnophilosophy,ethnolinguistics,ethnomusicology.
Whathadbeen, whenI stumbledintoit in the early 1950s, a groupof a few hundred,
argumentativebut similarlymindedethnologists,as they tendedthen to call them-
selves, most of whomknew one anotherpersonally,becameby the late 1970s a vast
crowdof scholarswhose sole commonalityoften seemedto be thatthey hadpassed
through one or anotherdoctoral programlabeled anthropology(there are more
than a hundredin the United Statesalone, andperhapsthatmanymore aroundthe
world).
Much of this was expectableandunavoidable,a reflexof the growthof the field
and the advanceof technical specialization,as well as, once again, the workings
of the WorldSpiritas it made its way towardthe conclusionof things. But change
nonetheless producedboth an intensificationof polemical combat and, in some
quartersanyway,angstandmalaise.Not only did thereappeara series of trumped-
up "wars"between imaginarycombatantsover artificialissues (materialistsvs.
 AN INCONSTANT
PROFESSION 11

idealists, universalistsvs. relativists,scientists vs. humanists,realists vs. subjec-

tivists), but a generalizedandoddly self-laceratingskepticismaboutthe anthropo-
logical enterpriseas such-about representingThe Otheror,worse yet, purporting
to speakfor him-settled in, hardened,andbeganto spread(Clifford1988, Fabian
1983).
In time, as the impulsesthatdrovethe optimismof the 1950s andthe turbulence
of the 1960s died away into the routinesand immobilities of Reagan's America,
this doubt, disillusion, and autocritiquegathereditself together under the broad
and indefinite,rathersuddenlypopularbannerof postmodernism(Lyotard1984,
Harvey 1989). Defined againstmodernismin reproofandrepudiation--"goodbye
to all that"-postmodernism was, and is, more a mood and an attitudethan a
connectedtheory:a rhetoricaltag appliedto a deepeningsense of moralandepis-
temological crisis, the supposedexhaustion,or, worse, corruptionof the received
modes of judgment and knowledge. Issues of ethnographicrepresentation,au-
thority,political positioning, and ethical justificationall came in for a thorough
going-over;the anthropologist'svery "rightto write"got put into question."Why
have ethnographicaccountsrecentlylost so much of theirauthority?"--thejacket
copy of James Clifford'sand George Marcus' WritingCulturecollection (1986),
somethingof a bellwetherin all of this, cried:
Why were they ever believable?Who has the rightto challenge an 'objective'
culturaldescription?... Are not all ethnographiesrhetoricalperformancesde-
terminedby the need to tell an effective story?Canthe claims of ideology and
desire ever be fully reconciledwith the needs of theory and observation?
Most of the work in this manner(not all of it so flat-outor so excited as this,
nor so densely populatedwith rhetoricalquestions)tendedto centeraroundone or
the otherof two concerns:eitherthe constructionof anthropologicaltexts, thatis,
ethnographicalwriting,or the moralstatusof anthropologicalwork,thatis, ethno-
graphicalpractice. The first led off into essentially literarymatters:authorship,
genre, style, narrative,metaphor,representation,discourse,fiction,figuration,per-
suasion (Geertz 1988, Boon 1982, Fernandez1986, Sapir & Crocker1977, Pratt
1992); the second, into essentially political matters:the social foundationsof an-
thropological authority,the modes of power inscribed in its practices, its ideo-
logical assumptions, its complicity with colonialism, racism, exploitation, and
exoticism, its dependencyon the masternarrativesof Westernself-understanding
(Hymes 1972, Asad 1973, Marcus& Fischer 1986, Rosaldo 1989). These inter-
linked critiquesof anthropology,the one inward-lookingand brooding,the other
outward-lookingand recriminatory,may not have producedthe "fully dialectical
ethnographyacting powerfully in the postmodernworld system," to quote that
WritingCultureblast again, nor did they exactly go unresisted(Gellner 1992, cf.
Geertz 1995b). But they did induce a certainself-awareness,and a certaincandor
also, into a discipline not withoutneed of them.
However thatmay be, I spent these years of assertionand denial, promise and
counterpromise,firstat the Universityof Chicago, from 1960 to 1970, then at the
Institutefor Advanced Study in Princeton,from 1970 on, mostly trying to keep
12 GEERTZ

my balance, to rememberwho I was, and to go on doing whateverit was I had,

before everythingcame loose, set out to do.
At Chicago,I was once againinvolvedin, andthis timeultimatelyas its director,
an interdisciplinaryprogramfocused on the prospectsof the by now quite stalled
andshredded-Biafra, Bangladesh,SouthernYemen-third world:the Committee
for the ComparativeStudy of New Nations. This committee, which remainedin
being for morethana decade,was not concernedas such with policy questionsnor
with constructinga generaltheoryof development,nor indeed with goal-directed
team researchof any sort. It consisted of a dozen or so faculty members at the
university-sociologists, political scientists, economists, and anthropologists-
working on or in one or anotherof the decolonized new states, plus a half-dozen
or so postdoctoralresearchfellows, mostly from elsewhere,similarlyengaged. Its
main collective activity was a long weekly seminarat which one of the members
led a discussion of his or her work, which in turnformed the basis for a smaller
core group of, if not precisely collaborators,for we all worked independently,
similarlyminded,experiencedfield workersdirectedtowarda relatedset of issues
in what was then called, ratherhopefully,consideringthe general state of things,
nation building (Geertz 1963b). Unable, for the moment, to returnto Indonesia,
by then fully in the grip of pervasiverage, I organizeda team of doctoralstudents
from the anthropologydepartment,of which I was also a member,to study a town
comparablein size, complexity, and general representativenessto Modjokuto,
but at the far other, Maghrebian,end of the Islamic world: Morocco (Geertz
et al. 1979).
The Chicago departmentof anthropology,presided over at that time by an
unusually open and supportivegroup of elders (Fred Eggan, Sol Tax, Norman
MacQuown,and RobertBraidwood;RobertRedfieldhaving only just died), pro-
vided an unusuallycongenial setting for this sort of free-style, thousand-flowers
approachto thingsanthropological.LloydFallers,VictorTurner,David Schneider,
McKim Marriott,RobertAdams, ManningNash, Melford Spiro, RobertLeVine,
Nur Yalman,JulianPitt-Rivers,Paul Friedrich,and Milton Singer were all there
cryingup, as I was also, one or anotherline of culturalanalysis,andthe interaction
among us was intense, productive,and surprisingly,given the range of tempera-
ments involved, generally amicable (Stocking n.d.). But when, in the late 1960s,
the Directorof the Institutefor AdvancedStudy in Princeton,the economist Carl
Kaysen, invitedme to come thereand startup a new school in the Social Sciences
to complementthe schools in Mathematics,NaturalScience, and HistoricalStud-
ies in existence since Einstein,Weyl, von Neumann,Panofsky,and otherworthies
had put the place in motion in the late 1930s and early 1940s, I, aftera couple of
years backing and filling, accepted.Howeverexposed and full of hazardit might
be, especially in a time of such division within the academyand the dubiousness
of the very idea of "the social sciences" in the eyes of many humanistsand "real
scientists,"the prospect of being given a blank and unmarkedpage upon which
to write was, for someone by now addictedto good fortune,simply too attractive
to resist.
 AN INCONSTANT
PROFESSION 13

CONCLUSION

It is always very difficultto determinejust when it was that"now"began.Virginia

Woolf thought it was "on or about December 1, 1910," for W.H. Auden it was
"September1, 1939," for many of us who worriedour way throughthe balance
of terror,it was 1989 and the Fall of the Wall. And now, having survivedall that,
there is September11, 2001.
My years, thirty-oneand counting, at the Institutefor Advanced Study have
proved, after some initial difficultieswith the residentmandarins,soon disposed
of (the difficulties,not the mandarins),to be an excellent vantage from which to
watchthe presentcome into being in the social sciences (Geertz2001). Settingup a
new enterprisein the field from a standingstart-the whole field from economics,
politics, philosophy,and law, to sociology, psychology, history,and anthropology,
with a few scholars from literature,art, and religion thrown in for leavening-
demandedmuch closer attentionto what was going on in these areas,not only in
the United States but abroadas well. And with more than five hundredscholars
from more thanthirtycountriesspendinga year as visiting fellows at one time or
another(nearlya fifth of them anthropologistsof variouskinds, origins, ages, and
degreesof celebrity),one had the extraordinaryexperienceof seeing "now"arrive,
live and in color.
All thatis well andgood, butas thepresentimmediateis, in thenatureof thecase,
entirelyin motion,confusedandunsettled,it does not yield so readilyto sortingout
as does, at least apparently,the perfected,distancedpast. It is easier to recognize
the new as new thanto say exactly whatit is thatis new aboutit, andto tryto discern
which way it is in generalmoving is but to be remindedagain of Hegel's Dictum:
the futurecan be an object of hope or of anxiety,of expectationor of misgiving,
but it cannot be an object of knowledge. I confine myself, then, in finishing up
this picaresquetale of questingadventure,to just a few brief and evasive remarks
abouthow things anthropologicalseem to have been going in the last decade or so.
At theworld-historylevel I havebeeninvokingthroughoutas activebackground,
the majordevelopmentsare, of course, the end of the cold war, the dissolutionof
the bipolarinternationalsystem, andthe emergenceof a system,if it can be called a
system, which comes more andmore each day to look like a strangelyparadoxical
combinationof global interdependence(capitalflow, multinationals,tradezones,
the Net) and ethnic, religious and other intensely parochialprovincialisms(The
Balkans, Sri Lanka, Ruanda-Burundi,Chechnya, NorthernIreland,the Basque
country).Whetherthis "Jihadvs. McWorld"(Barber1995), is genuinelya paradox,
or, as I tend to think, a single, deeply interconnectedphenomenon,it has clearly
begun to affect the anthropologicalagenda in ways that September 11 can only
accelerate.
Studies of ethnic discord (Daniel 1996), of transnationalidentities(Appadurai
1996), of collective violence (Das 2000), of migration (Foner 2000), refugees
(Malkki 1995), and intrusive minorities (Kelly 1991), of nationalism (Gellner
1983), of separatism(Tambiah1986), of citizenship, civic and cultural(Rosaldo
14 GEERTZ

1997), andof the operationof supra-nationalquasi-governmentalinstitutions[e.g.,

the World Bank, the InternationalMonetaryFund, UN bodies, etc. (Klitgaard
1990)]-studies which were not thoughtto be partof anthropology'spurvieweven
a few shortyears ago-are now appearingon all sides. Thereare works, andvery
good ones, on the advertisingbusinessin SriLanka(Kemper2001), on televisionin
India (Rajagopal2001), on legal conceptionsin Islam (Rosen 1989, 2000), on the
worldtradein sushi(Bestor2000), on thepoliticalimplicationsof witchcraftbeliefs
in the new South Africa (Ashforth2000). Insofaras I myself have been directly
involvedin all this, it has been in connectionwith the paradox,real or otherwise,of
the simultaneousincreasein cosmopolitanismand parochialismI just mentioned;
with whatI called in some lecturesI gave in Viennaa few yearsago (andhope soon
to expand)"TheWorldin Pieces" calling for an anthropologicalrethinkingof our
masterpolitical conceptions,nation,state, country,society, people (Geertz2000).
Things are thus not, or at least in my view they are not, coming progressively
togetheras the disciplinemoves raggedlyon. And this, too, reflectsthe direction,if
it can be called a direction,in which the widerworldis moving:towardfragmenta-
tion, dispersion,pluralism,disassembly,-multi,multi-,multi-.Anthropologistsare
going to have to workunderconditionseven less orderly,shapely,andpredictable,
and even less susceptibleof moral and ideological reductionand political quick
fixes, than those I have workedunder,which I hope I have shown were irregular
enough. A born fox (there is a gene for it, along with restlessness, elusiveness,
and a passionatedislike of hedgehogs), this seems to me the naturalhabitatof the
cultural... social ... symbolic ... interpretiveanthropologist.Interestingtimes, an
inconstantprofession:I envy those aboutto inheritthem.

The Annual Reviewof Anthropologyis online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org

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