Geertz, biography, and… Geertz

It has been a long time since I enjoyed reading anything by Clifford Geertz, so I was gratified last night to discover “A Life In Learning”:http://www.acls.org/op45geer.htm, the biographical reminiscences that Geertz gave the American Council of Learned Socities for their 1999 Charles Homer Haskins lecture (I guess it also appears in _Available Light_ as well). It’s not the first autobiographical piece by him that I’ve read, but it is relatively more front-loaded than some of the other ones and I was able to find some pleasure in his prose that I just can’t locate in _Balinese Cockfight_ or _Thick Description_ any more. His description of the energy of Harvard’s Social Relations Department when it first got rolling — “stand back, the science is starting!” — is, for instance, very charming indeed.

Like many academic celebrities (I think here of the differently-fated Althusser) Geertz portrays his rise to hegemony as a series of accidents perpetuated on an man who just happened to stumble onto his vocation. When some people pull this trick it seems like a lousy attempt to cover up their blatant careerism, for others this sort of thing just reaffirms your faith that their work _is_ just smoke and mirrors, while for yet others is successfully reinforces their appearence of effortless domination of their field. In this essay I get the feeling that Geertz manages to do all three of these things at once.

But compare this to a very different biographical statement — Paul Rabinow’s “Steps Towards An Anthropological Laboratory”:http://www.anthropos-lab.net/publications/doc/Rabinow_Laboratory.pdf. It’s not that Rabinow’s spare, almost noir prose style — “just the -facts- biopower, ma’am” — doesn’t ramify out into clauses in the same way Geertz’s does, but it manages to do so in a compeltely different key. And most interestingly, Rabinow’s own take on Geertz is quite a bit different from that of Geertz himself.

Or is it? Rabinow is quite blunt in accusing Geertz of bowing out of the Interpretive Turn and retreating into feuilletonism, but I suspect Geertz would be surprised that anyone expected him to do otherwise. At any rate they’re two great — and greatly different — pieces to read and think about.