I think the immediate reason for this was personal exasperation. Hayden White’s ‘the historiography of anti-humanism’ almost manages the act of assassination, i.e. ‘characterizing the style of Foucault’s discourse.’

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Geertz loves subsuming frameworks, though he ultimately doesn’t use them: even someone like Sukarno is ultimately a part of a puzzle larger than himself, an Indonesian response to history. This is probably part of why Geertz seems above politics most of the time even though he wrote on it endlessly.
Geertz also had an axe to grind, about enlightenment humanism, which he called “a primitive faith whose moral beauty is still apparent but from which both relevance and credibility have long since departed.”

In contrast, for Said, every Orientalist, or every anti-Imperialist, has signed their name to what they have written and could have said something else, even though we know how the whole mess has come out. That’s the grounds of their historical responsibility. That’s why so many people find Said to be, in the last instance, an ‘anti-theoretical’ writer: in the last instance any attempt at generalizing about why history has come out the way it has is foiled by the caveat that there are many differences among individuals and everything could have come out differently from the way it has.

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To borrow an analogy from the history of science it is as if, persuaded by Copernicus that Ptolemy was wrong in positing a geocentric cosmology instead of a solar system, Kepler and Newton had lost their way and continued to debate the merits of Copernicus’ approach instead instead of seeking to improve it, which led Kepler to oval instead of circular orbits, and Newton to the calculus and gravity.

Or, shifting to the field where I’ve earned my living, it’s as if one tried to run an advertising agency composed of nothing but copywriters and art directors, the idea spinners, with no production people to ask, “How are we supposed to be able to do that?”– and figure out how: from location, casting and equipment to editing, recording and mixing and getting the tapes to the networks, within budget and on time.

Thus, returning to anthropology, Geertz convinced me of the value of thick description. But what should I do to produce one? His only answer was to write. His examples suggested the value of vivid details, which for me dovetailed nicely with Levi-Strauss’ injunction to see “the logic in tangible qualities.” So far, so good. But then?

Geertz never told us. His modus operandi was to set up an intellectual problem, trot out some ethnographic detail and say, in effect, “You see, don’t you.” If you didn’t, that was too bad. He was already off in another direction, reframing another problem.

Suppose, however, that we didn’t just take one of his essays, read it, admire it, and finally recognize the hollowness at its core. Suppose we asked ourselves how we would fill that hole. Things might get interesting.

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