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Two quick comments: One my take on Geertz has always been that he does a magnificent job of pointing to serious theoretical issues but evades the more critical challenge of how to address them. The Balinese Cockfight is, of course, a classic example. One of the reasons for my fondness for Turner is that, for better or worse, he provided a paradigm for me of how a “thick description” might actually be produced, noting that observations, native exegesis, and other information are all data—none sufficient to explain the others—and also noted that contradictions between observations and native exegesis are particularly important as pointers to the conflicts and contradictions inherent in all human activity (ideas he took from Marx and Freud).

Second, I do find it interesting that Rex prefers the early Turner, since this is precisely the period in which Vic was following the example of his Manchester School mentors and developing the solid foundation in social organization on which his later analyses of ritual were grounded.

P.S. The development and then displacement of African kinship models in Melanesia and elsewhere (China, my own original area, is a classic case in point), followed by the discovery that they don’t work quite as advertised in newer work in Africa strikes me, at least at first glance, as perfectly normal science: analogous to the displacement of Copernicus’ perfectly circular orbits with Kepler’s ovals, followed by the addition of Newton’s laws of motion. We still, however, await our Einstein, the genius who will come up with a new compelling synthesis that incorporates the new data. The flaws in old paradigms have been revealed; we are thrashing in search of successors.

P.P.S. I am reminded of a wonderful moment in McCulloch’s Embodiments of Mind when the father of automata theory remarks that every time he has tried to build a machine to simulate human behavior the machines have fallen short of his goals. Then, he says, there are always those who say, “See, no machine can do what humans do.” He goes off and builds a better machine, a better approximation to his ultimate goals.

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No, I do not. I did, but answered another question.
In regards of breaking concepts I do point to connectivity-theory.]

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Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft.
James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power Among the Uduk of Sudan.
Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone.
Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan.
Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer : Practices of Consciousness and Power (ok not an Africanist, but consistently challenging).

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In any case, this is a pretty good summary of the developments of the last few decades. I hadn’t really put all the dates together like this, so I hadn’t before considered the impact of that late-80s period.

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