Geertzian Humanism: Again and Again

Back in the mid-1990's, after several conversations regarding Wittgenstein, law, and religion, a friend of mine picked up a copy of Clifford Geertz's Local Knowledge. After he finished reading the book, he came to me excitedly and said, "So this is where you've been getting your ideas!" I had to confess that I had not read Geertz at that point, that he had been languishing on my "to read" list for some time, but that I fully intended to read him. "Oh, you must!" my friend insisted. "He's your kind of thinker!"

In a way, I wish I had never had that conversation, because it unduly prejudiced me against Geertz. At the time, I was actively working through my own approach to law and religion and it was disconcerting to be told that I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble by simply reading Geertz. When I did pick up Local Knowledge and, later, in graduate school, The Interpretation of Cultures, I am afraid that I was frequently predisposed to find where I disagreed with C.G. instead of celebrating the fact that he was an accomplished scholar who had thought deeply about the subjects that were integral to my own intellectual project and had reached many of the same conclusions that I would later reach (albeit independently).

Nowadays, I return to Geertz again and again, dipping into his writings for wisdom and insight. His importance to the history of humanism is, as Stephen Toulmin observed in Cosmopolis, comparable to that of Montaigne and Aristotle (see Toulmin, 43).

For someone like myself, an intellectual whose aspirational life has long been driven by a desire to come to terms with the different ways it is possible to be human, anthropology is an indispensable field of inquiry. When I first read Geertz, I was frequently disappointed by the relatively a-political nature of his writings. Not that the politics weren't there, but Geertz did not wear them on his sleeve (compared to someone like George Marcus, e.g.). Geertz's "aestheticism" made him appear less viable to me as a role model. These days, while I still value Marcus's contributions to anthropology, I turn to him less often than I do Geertz. My current view is that C.G.'s work has greater breadth and depth than Marcus's. Perhaps this is a sign of maturity on my part; perhaps it is evidence of surrender.

Some lessons we learn only the hard way.