Shweder on Geertz on Tiger

When Geertz passed away a while back, we linked to numerous obituaries and remembrances and (as I said in a previous entry), including “Lionel Tiger’s harsh assessment of Geertz in The Wall Street Journal”:http://henwood.blogspace.com/?p=4167. Richard Shweder has recently prepared a rebuttal to Tiger’s piece to be published in _Common Knowledge_ and has made a “preprint available on his website”:http://humdev.uchicago.edu/shwederGeertzMemorial.doc. It’s an interesting piece that attempts to locate Geertz intellectually (a difficult if not impossible task, as Shweder admits) and to rebut Tiger’s piece about him (quite easy). Along the way we get some thoughts on tendencies in anthropological thought in recent decades and the Geertz almost (but of course not quite) fits into them. It’s a nice read.

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org