Local Knowledge
Metadata
- Author: Clifford Geertz
- ASIN: B01M061829
- ISBN: 0465041620
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M061829
- Kindle link
Highlights
In the social sciences, or at least in those that have abandoned a reductionist conception of what they are about, the analogies are coming more and more from the contrivances of cultural performance than from those of physical manipulation—from theater, painting, grammar, literature, law, play. What the lever did for physics, the chess move promises to do for sociology. — location: 376
Metaphor
And like all such changes in fashions of the mind, it is about as likely to lead to obscurity and illusion as it is to precision and truth. If the result is not to be elaborate chatter or the higher nonsense, a critical consciousness will have to be developed; and as so much more of the imagery, method, theory, and style is to be drawn from the humanities than previously, it will mostly have to come from humanists and their apologists rather than from natural scientists and theirs. That humanists, after years of regarding social scientists as technologists or interlopers, are ill equipped to do this is something of an understatement. — location: 386
If they are going to develop systems of analysis in which such conceptions as following a rule, constructing a representation, expressing an attitude, or forming an intention are going to play central roles—rather than such conceptions as isolating a cause, determining a variable, measuring a force, or defining a function—they are going to need all the help they can get from people who are more at home among such notions than they are. — location: 393
Keeping the reasoning wary, thus useful, thus true, is, as we say, the name of the game. — location: 402
(Goffman also employs the language of the stage quite extensively, but as his view of the theater is that it is an oddly mannered kind of interaction game—ping-pong in masks—his work is not, at base, really dramaturgical.) — location: 412
Ping pong in masks!
dramatic rhythms, the commanding forms of theater, are perceived in social processes of all sorts, shapes, and significances (though ritual theorists in fact do much better with the cyclical, restorative periodicities of comedy than the linear, consuming progressions of tragedy, whose ends tend to be seen as misfires rather than fulfillments). — location: 495
We can apprehend it well enough, — location: 781
to locate with some precision the instabilities of thought and sentiment it generates and set them in a social frame. — location: 800
Whatever else anthropology and jurisprudence may have in common—vagrant erudition and a fantastical air—they are alike absorbed with the artisan task of seeing broad principles in parochial facts. “Wisdom,” as an African proverb has it, “comes out of an ant heap.” — location: 2921
The place of fact in a world of judgment, — location: 2976
But most of all there is the general revolution of rising expectations as to the possibilities of fact determination and its power to settle intractable issues that the general culture of scientism has induced in us all; — location: 2991
The fear of fact that all this has stimulated in the law and its guardians is no less apparent. — location: 2994
Of course, the trial cannot go on wholly without the evidence or the simulacrum of such, and some intelligence, real or purported, from the world in which promises are made, injuries suffered, and villanies committed must seep through, however attenuated, even to appeal courts. — location: 3012
Put this way, the question of law and fact changes its form from one having to do with how to get them together to one having to do with how to tell them apart, and the Western view of the matter, that there are rules that sort right from wrong, a phenomenon called judgment, and there are methods that sort real from unreal, a phenomenon called proof, appears as only one mode of accomplishing this. — location: 3048
Michael Barkun’s view, which he claims to draw from M. G. Smith, that what we comparativists of legal systems must do is “draw pure structure from its culture-specific accretions” seems to me a proposal for a perverse sort of alchemy to turn gold into lead. — location: 3193
But aqq is something else again: a conception that anchors a theory of duty as a set of sheer assertions, so many statements of brute fact, in a vision of reality as being in its essence imperative, a structure not of objects but of wills. — location: 3283
The moral and ontological change places, at least from our point of view. It is the moral, where we see the “ought,” which is a thing of descriptions, the ontological, for us the home of the “is,” which is one of demands. — location: 3285
the if/then necessities of Anschauung coherence, — location: 3303
The Quran as the eternally existing words of God—the Inlibration of Divinity, as H. A. Wolfson has brilliantly called it in polemic contrast to the Incarnation conceptions of Christology—is — location: 3327
Jural analysis, though an intellectually complex and challenging activity, and often enough a politically risky one, is seen as a matter of stating public-square versions of divine-will truths—describing the Sacred House when it is out of sight, as Shafi’i, perhaps the greatest of the classical jurists, has it—not of balancing conflicting values. — location: 3333
“The personal word of an upright Muslim,” as Jeanette Wakin has written, “was deemed worthier than an abstract piece of paper or a piece of information subject to doubt and falsification.” — location: 3344
Today, when written evidence is accepted, however reluctantly, it still remains the case that its worth is largely derivative of the moral character of the individual or individuals who, personally involved in its creation, lend to it their authenticity. — location: 3346
But, in the mysterious East as in the pellucid West, constitutions, however detailed, are no better than the institutions they are written into. — location: 3533
rukun (“mutual adjustment”), gotong royong (“joint bearing of burdens”), tolong-menolong (“reciprocal assistance”)—governs — location: 3639
or to mistake convergence of vocabularies for convergence of views. — location: 3830
We need, to put the thing in a way that will seem excitingly avant-garde to some and to others merely fashionable (“trendy” is the trendy epithet), a novel system of discourse, a new way of talking if you will, not only to grasp what is going on, legal-wise, in the Ethiopias of the world, but, as this sort of thing is always reflexive, redescribing the describer as it redescribes the described, among ourselves. — location: 3850
(A leading anthropologist of law, Paul Bohannan, despairing, as well he might, of the long debate concerning whether African law ought to be analyzed in terms of African concepts or Western ones, once suggested, in apparent seriousness, that we all write about such things in FORTRAN.) — location: 3903
Newton and Einstein—is — location: 4049
Terrible example!