Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues
Clifford Geertz's impact on his own discipline, celebrated in this volume, is not difficult to explain. What intrigues me is his impact on historians. A hermeneutic turn, though necessary in anthropology, was not required in historiography because interpretation was already central to the historian's task. The Interpretation of Cultures justified historical method and described it in language more sophisticated than historians had customarily used. On the other hand, it may be what Geertz shares with other anthropologists, rather than his originality, that has appealed most to historians: his early work coincided with the rise of the history of everyday life. Encounters between disciplines, in any case, seem to resemble encounters between cultures. Each side sees in the other patterns that in some sense match or complement their own.
Peter Burke's writings include The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, Varieties of Cultural History, The French Historical Revolution, History and Social Theory, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, and The Art of Conversation. He is professor of cultural history at the University of Cambridge, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College.
