Available Light
Metadata
- Author: Clifford Geertz
- ASIN: B006YG65J4
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B006YG65J4
- Kindle link
Highlights
However that may be, his attack upon the idea of a private language, which brought thought out of its grotto in the head into the public square where one could look at it, his notion of a language game, which provided a new way of looking at it once it arrived there—as a set of practices — location: 101
all?’—Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? — location: 122
dartmoor .
No wonder the sixties happened!) — location: 188
becoming someone upon whom nothing was lost was a far more urgent matter than laying plans and arranging ambitions. One might be lost or helpless, or racked with ontological anxiety; but one could try, at least, not to be obtuse. — location: 225
Two and a half years living with a railroad laborer’s family in Java’s volcano-ringed rice bowl, the Brantas River plain, while the country raced, via free elections, toward cold war convulsion and impassive killing fields. — location: 272
Return to Indonesia, this time to Bali and Sumatra and further political melodrama, culminating in revolt and civil war. — location: 275
The trouble is that no one is quite sure what culture is. Not only is it an essentially contested concept, like democracy, religion, simplicity, or social justice; it is a multiply defined one, multiply employed, ineradicably imprecise. It is fugitive, unsteady, encyclopedic, and normatively charged, and there are those, especially those for whom only the really real is really real, who think it vacuous altogether, or even dangerous, and would ban it from the serious discourse of serious persons. — location: 303
This does not involve feeling anyone else’s feelings, or thinking anyone else’s thoughts, simple impossibilities. Nor does it involve going native, an impractical idea, inevitably bogus. — location: 382
somaticization of emotion — location: 391
“sinnzusamenhang,” — location: 407
Between old debenture holders, crying that the sky is falling because relativists have taken factuality away, and advanced personalities, cluttering the landscape with slogans, salvations, and strange devices, as well as a great deal of unrequired writing, — location: 418
lol unrequired writing
The unity, the identity, and the agreement were never there in the first place, and the idea that they were is the kind of folk belief to which anthropologists, of all people, ought to be resistant. — location: 426
what I come up with is the succinct and chilling doctrine that thought is conduct and is to be morally judged as such. — location: 460
much more difficult to regard thinking as an abstention from action, theorizing as an alternative to commitment, and the intellectual life as a kind of secular monasticism, excused from accountability by its sensitivity to the Good. — location: 469
An assessment of the moral implications of the scientific study of human life which is going to consist of more than elegant sneers or mindless celebrations must begin with an inspection of social scientific research as a variety of moral experience. — location: 487
Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery. — location: 597
Literary irony rests on a momentary conspiracy of author and reader against the stupidities and self-deceptions of the everyday world; — location: 600
But for the great majority it can but change completely uneducated children into slightly educated ones. This is, in itself, no mean achievement. — location: 638
The so-called revolution of rising expectations shows a fair promise of culminating in a revolution of rising disappointments, a fact which the anthropologist, who will be after all going home to suburbia in a year or so, can permit himself to see rather more clearly than his all-too-engagé informants. — location: 644
The only thing one really has to give in order to avoid mendicancy (or—not to neglect the trinkets-and-beads approach—bribery) is oneself. — location: 656
and this is a transaction that contaminates the process of A
one believes in cross-cultural communion (one calls it “rapport”) as one’s subjects believe in tomorrow. — location: 660
and that leads to a belief u know more than u can.
and achieved when they are at best approximated. — location: 665
As for the informant, his or her interest is kept alive by a whole series of secondary gains: a sense of being an essential collaborator in an important, if but dimly understood, enterprise; a pride in one’s own culture and in the expertness of one’s knowledge of it; a chance to express private ideas and opinions (and retail gossip) to a neutral outsider; — location: 671
it. It is this fiction—fiction, not falsehood—that lies at the heart of successful anthropological field research; — location: 720
the samples must also be considered part the language
the whole enterprise is directed not toward the impossible task of controlling history but toward the only quixotic one of widening the role of reason in it. — location: 732
From the point of view of moral philosophy, the central question to ask about social science is not the one which would-be Platonic Guardians from either side are forever asking: Will it sink us or save us? It will, almost certainly, do neither. The central question to ask is, What does it tell us about the values by which we—all of us—in fact live? The need is to put social science not in the dock, which is where our culture belongs, but on the witness stand. — location: 736
and the promised rewards of escaping its clutches, mostly having to do with pasteurized knowledge, are illusory. — location: 793
To suggest that “hard rock” foundations for cognitive, esthetic, or moral judgments may not, in fact, be available, or anyway that those one is being offered are dubious, is to find oneself accused of disbelieving in the existence of the physical world, thinking pushpin as good as poetry, regarding Hitler as just a fellow with unstandard tastes, or even, as I myself have recently been—God save the mark—“[having] no politics at all.”4 The notion that someone who does not hold your views holds the reciprocal of them, or simply hasn’t got any, has, whatever its comforts for those afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it, not conduced to much in the way of clarity in the anti-relativist discussion, but merely to far too many people spending far too much time describing at length what it is they do not maintain than seems in any way profitable. — location: 818
anti-relativism has largely concocted the anxiety it lives from. — location: 871
nonfoundationalist moods — location: 930
Harrisonian “Everything That Rises Must Converge” materialism — location: 936
Popperian “Great Divide” evolutionism. (“We Have Science … or Literacy, or Intertheoretic Competition, or the Cartesian Conception of Knowledge … but They Have — location: 936
The fear of relativism, raised at every turn like some mesmeric obsession, has led to a position in which cultural diversity, across space and over time, amounts to a series of expressions, some salubrious, some not, of a settled, underlying reality, the essential nature of man, and anthropology amounts to an attempt to see through the haze of those expressions to the substance of that reality. A sweeping, schematic, and content-hungry concept, conformable to just about any shape that comes along, — location: 1081
common to truth seekers
For that history has indeed consisted of one field of thought after another having to discover how to live on without the certainties that launched it. — location: 1178
For materialism, see M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, New York: Crowell, 1968; for “science” and “The Big Ditch,” E. Gellner, Spectacles and Predicaments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; for “intertheoretic competition,” R. Horton, “Tradition and Modernity Revisited,” in M. Hollis and S. Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982, pp. 201–260; for “the Cartesian Conception of Knowledge,” S. Lukes, “Relativism in Its Place,” in Hollis and Lukes, eds., ibid., pp. 261–305, cf. B. Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978; for Popper, from whom all these blessings flow, K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, and K. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. — location: 1225
The wogs begin long before Calais. — location: 1397
lol
the idea that meaning is socially constructed. — location: 1400
mere unlikeness, — location: 1427
Like nostalgia, diversity is not what it used to be; and the sealing of lives into separate railway carriages to produce cultural renewal or the spacing of them out with contrast-effects to free up moral energies are romantical dreams, not undangerous. The general tendency — location: 1436
(If you want to see just how, at least so far as the Indians are concerned—I assume you know about doctors—you can read James Welch’s shaking novel, Winter in the Blood, where the contrast effects come out rather oddly.) — location: 1485
allow—is either the application of force to secure conformity to the values of those who possess the force; a vacuous tolerance that, engaging nothing, changes nothing; or, as here, where the force is unavailable and the tolerance unnecessary, a dribbling out to an ambiguous end. — location: 1495
a Beckett-world of colliding soliloquy. — location: 1530
Vietnamese fishermen along the Gulf Coast, Iranian physicians in the Midwest. — location: 1560
not sure about ths sudden flood of cultural miscegenation view, even for an american - thecarea of difficulty is in that of values.
- Danto, “Mind as Feeling,” p. 647. — location: 1607
but at least as often hypochondria has passed for self-examination, — location: 1728