Toward the end of his recent study of the ideas used by tribal peoples, La Pensee Sauvage, the French anthropologist Levi-Strauss remarks that scientific explanation does not consist, as we have been led to imagine, in the reduction of the complex to the simple. Rather, it consists, he says, in a substitution of a complexity more intelligible for one which is less. So far as the study of man is concerned, one may go even further, I think, and argue that explanation often consists of substituting complex pictures for simple ones while striving somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with the simple ones.

That challenge, how best to substitute complex pictures for simple ones “while striving somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with the simple ones” has haunted and guided me ever since I first encountered it.

Here’s the official press release. All of this via Savage Minds. I was doing so well with the meeting-my-heroes thing, and then Clifford Geertz went off and died. His most famous article–arguably one of the most famous pieces of……

“I heard from Karen Blu through Keith Basso last night that Cliff passed away at the Univ. of Penn hospital yesterday, after some months of struggle with a complicated heart condition. His contributions to anthropology and to those of us who strove to make sense of culture through the art of writing is immeasurable, of course. Some of my best memories of the year I spent as his across-the-hall colleague at IAS, however, involve the insights he brought to my understanding of Yankees’ baseball–and his wry embrace of my very young kids as webs of their own significance.”
–James

Let me echo James’s comments by mentioning that when I was at the Institute in 2001, Cliff and Karen were kind enough to invite me, my wife, and our then two-yr-old daughter to Thanksgiving dinner at their house. (Susan Rodgers, the other anthropologist in residence at the IAS that year, was invited too.) My wife and I had worried about bringing an active toddler to what was essentially a grown-up affair, but Cliff proved as indulgently avuncular as one could imagine, showing our daughter curious things from Indonesia and the like. The event was doubly memorable for me, because the last time I had been in his house was in 1972, when I worked as solo bartender for an Institute party, one of the many jobs I accepted to make ends meet as an undergraduate at Princeton on financial aid. To be there as a colleague–admittedly, not in Geertz’s league, but who is?–was a powerful lesson about the wheel of life.

One inevitably falls back on cliches in these situations, but there’s little doubt that anthropology has lost a giant figure.

Michael

Rex of Savage Minds shares with us sombering news that famous cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz has passed away. There was some skepticism that it maybe a bad joke, but unfortunately Dr. Geertz’s death has been officially anounced by Institute …