Fred Inglis published Life Among the Anthros and Other Essays, a collection of articles and lectures by Clifford Geertz, in the same year he published his authored book, A Short History of Celebrity. There is virtually no overlap in content, of course, but as I read I couldn’t help but think that the title of the latter book could have been applied to the former, at least in the minds of the humanists and social scientists who undoubtedly make up the bulk of the readership for Life Among the Anthros and all of whom have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the scholarly behemoth that was Geertz. In Life Among the Anthros, Inglis has successfully curated a volume of essays that does not only remind us of the depth and breadth of material that Geertz covered in his prolific scholarly life, but it also illustrates the ways that good humor, open-mindedness, and unapologetic fascination regarding the behavior of the human animal can facilitate the presentation of scholarly discourse to more popular audiences. Young academics, who know Geertz as the author of countless foundational texts in contemporary performance studies and cultural anthropology (what prospective ethnographer can pass her doctoral qualifying exams without reading The Interpretation of Cultures?), have still more to learn from him regarding public intellectualism and how to speak to audiences outside, to use one of Geertz’s favored terms, our own niche. This volume should be the newest addition to the Clifford Geertz required reading list.
Life Among the Anthros is an eclectic collection of essays written between 1967 and Geertz’s death in 2006, most of which had previously appeared in the New York Review of Books, though some had been published elsewhere or previously delivered as lectures. As this fact suggests, about half of the book (measured by page-count) is comprised of Geertz’s reflections on texts published by other authors. As a whole, the collection provides a cross-section of Geertz's ideas that range from the dated to the timeless. “On Gandhi,” originally published in 1969, responds to Erik H. Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth, or, the Origins of Militant Nonviolence by engaging the syncretic nature of violent and nonviolent forms of resistance as effective motivators for social change. He references, of course, the timely figures of Malcolm X and Dean Rusk in this essay, but many of the underlying questions are equally relevant today, particularly with reference to, for example, the question of the effectiveness of outside military intervention in any of the many conflicts in the Middle East. “What Was the Third World Revolution,” which discusses the complex role of revolution in the simultaneous creation and fracturing of nations and national groups, inspires the reader to wish Geertz had lived to witness and comment upon the uprisings of the Arab Spring. In contrast, “On Feminism,” originally published in 1990, is interesting mostly for its archaeological value, as an exemplar of one of the many kinds of responses to come from stalwart members of academe (in the essay “Shifting Aims, Moving Targets,” also included in this volume, Geertz briefly outlines his own storied academic genealogy) that arose from the rapid growth of feminist scholarship in the 1980s. Its commentary is almost uncomfortably out of date now—for example, very few credible anthropological or sociological discourses nowadays question the idea that sex and gender are not reducible to one another, but Geertz seems uncomfortable with the idea—but this is enlightening in its own right, as an item of public intellectual history.
Most engrossing of all of the book’s various parts is the final section, a collection of lectures, several of which appear in print for the first time in this book. In each of these essays we see Geertz at his finest, addressing in various contexts and from various angles the ideas of pluralism and heterogeneity, and most importantly, the idea that meaning is dependent on perspective, or, as Inglis says, “we apprehend other lives not by trying to get behind the elaborate behaviors and ideas through which they dramatize their being, but by seeing through… the spectacles which constitute their meanings and their minds” (2). “The Near East In The Far East” challenges the idea that the growth and expansion of Islam in Indonesia has had a homogenizing effect on the nation in line with common critiques of globalization in general, and argues instead that it has inspired increased factionalism which he likens to the forces that inspired the drawing of rigid borders throughout Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. In “An Inconstant Profession,” Geertz lays the history of the discipline of anthropology over the social and political history of the world during the last fifty years. Geertz sets out to historicize the two concepts neutrally, a simple overlaying of timelines. But perhaps inadvertently, though nonetheless effectively, what results is an interesting exemplar of how such neutrality is impossible. Geertz’s political leanings, his conflicted relationship with theoretical epochs (the modern and the postmodern, in particular), and the awkward dynamic of acknowledging his disciplinary authority while simultaneously questioning the source of anthropological authority more broadly, all rise to the surface. One gets the sense, in reading, that Geertz is not unaware of this contradiction. Though he never draws explicit attention to it, there are persistent gestures in its direction, delivered with a wink and a nod: “I spent these years of assertion and denial, promise and counterpromise… mostly trying to keep my balance, to remember who I was, and to go on doing whatever it was I had, before everything came loose, set out to do,” he says (196).
That sense of comedy, of finding the ridiculous in that which is serious (and vice versa), echoes throughout this collection. Indeed, Inglis titles the introduction to this book “The Comic Vision of Clifford Geertz” and explains that Geertz, like Kenneth Burke before him, viewed comedy as the lens through which the tensions, contradictions, and unpleasant truths of human interaction can be seen without defensiveness, avoiding “the cynical brutality that comes when such sensitivity is outraged.” That hint of humor does not obscure the substance of the book (nor does it make it any simpler, stylistically: Geertz’s love of extremely long sentences containing layers upon layers of embedded clauses is evident here, as in all of his writing) but certainly makes the digestion more pleasurable. Folklorists, often more accustomed to finding the gravity in comedy than the comedy in that which is grave, are likely to latch onto the points wherein Geertz’s sense of humor brushes against the grain of the national and cultural power dynamics that he describes—and rightfully so. But the book leaves the impression that Geertz would invite that dialogue: if we can’t chuckle over our differences, then we have no business studying the differences of others.
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[Review length: 1133 words • Review posted on April 15, 2015]