Book information:

Clifford Geertz: After the fact. Two countries, four decades, one anthropologist (1995)
(= HyperGeertz-95Beng1).

Views

• front cover

Short description:

• Stanton, J.W.: see the following HyperGeertz-Abstract (1).

• Publishers text: "Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has changed than those two townsóthe anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book.
  source: www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GEEAFT.html

• From "Publishers Weekly": Sefrou, a Moroccan town nestled at the foot of the Middle Atlas Mountains, was an enchanted oasis where Berbers, Arabs, Jews and French settlers coexisted, when cultural anthropologist Geertz first went there in 1963. But by 1986, the French and Jews had left, and the population, which had tripled, was deeply divided between old-timers and recent immigrants, mostly Berbers. The other focal point of this affecting scholarly memoir, Pare, Indonesia, a town in central Java where Geertz has done fieldwork since 1952, was wracked by internecine combat among Islamic, nationalist and Communist parties until the army imposed military rule in 1965. Today, status-ridden ideas of right and propriety dominate daily life as Pare's inhabitants attempt to reconcile group diversity with ideals of national unity. Using his fieldwork in these towns as a prism, Princeton anthropologist Geertz charts the transformation of cultural anthropology from a study of "primitive'' people to a multidisciplinary investigation of a particular culture's symbolic systems, its interactions with the larger forces of history and modernization.
  source: http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674008723/ref=br_lf__0/028-1111250-6787731

Table of contents:

(1) "Towns", pp. 1-20
(2) "Countries", pp. 21-41
(3) "Cultures", pp. 42-63
(4) "Hegemonies", pp. 64-95
(5) "Disciplines", pp. 96-135
(6) "Modernities", pp. 136-170.

Reviews:

• Jacobs, Ken (online): see the HyperGeertz-Review1 (AfterFact).

• Reyna, Stephen P., in: Reviews in Anthropology, vol. 28 (1995), no. 3, pp. 173-187.

• Winkler, Karen J., in: The Chronicle of Higher Education, no. 5. 5. 1995, pp. ? (also online)

• Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, in: American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no. 3 (Aug 1995), pp. 622-623.

• Rabinow, Paul, in: American Anthropologist, vol. 98, no. 4 (Dec 1996), pp. 888-889.

• Spiro, Melford E., in: Society, vol. 34, no. 3 (March/April 1997), pp. 89-92;
  (full text via EBSCO; see the HyperGeertz-Review2 (AfterFact).

• Nader, Laura, in: ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society, vol. 90, no. 3 (Sept 1999), pp. 626-627;
  (full text via EBSCO; see the HyperGeertz-Review3 (AfterFact) (pdf)).