Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Synchrony to Transformation

Abstract

CLIFFORD GEERTZ IS SURELY THE MOST INFLUENTIAL American anthropologist of his generation. Although others-for example, Marshall Sahlins or Victor Turner-may rival his standing within anthropology, none approaches his influence on readers outside his home discipline. 'As Renato Rosaldo once remarked, Geertz has become the ambassador from anthropology. The ambassador's slot was already in existence when Geertz emerged as an anthropological superstar in the early 1970s. It had previously been occupied by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Mead, whose ambassadorial service overlapped Geertz's, had gained a huge popular following, writing a regular column in Redbook and dispensing advice in various media on topics as wide-ranging as the nuclear arms race, juvenile delinquency, world hunger, and sex education. Geertz's ambassadorial role has been much closer to that of Ruth Benedict, who, like Geertz, was more interested in the bearing of anthropology on issues of social and moral philosophy than on current social problems. Like Geertz, Benedict was a gifted literary stylist with a penchant for ethnographic contes philosophiques-her superb essays on the Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl in Patterns of Culture are surely among the classics of a genre that Geertz has subsequently made his own. But Geertz and Benedict have been ambassadors to somewhat different publics. Patterns of Culture, in particular, was intended for and read by the educated public at large. Geertz may well have been aiming for such a public, but his major impact has actually been on practitioners and students of other academic disciplinesthe social sciences, literary studies, philosophy, and beyond.3 Geertz's rise to ambassadorial dignity has given him an iconic status in the American academy. This has also made him vulnerable to iconoclasm, particularly in his home discipline of anthropology, where he is a favorite target of critique among anthropologists of the most varied intellectual provenances-he has been attacked by positivists, postmodernists, and materialists alike.4 The positivists criticize Geertz for abandoning the scientific values of predictability, replicability, verifiability, and law-generating capacity in favor of the more glamorous or alluring qualities of interpretive method.5 The postmodernists, by contrast, reproach him for not pushing his interpretive method far enough-in particular,

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