Richard Shweder on Cliff Geertz

"He helped us imagine how it is possible for morally sensitive and intellectually reasonable members of divergent cultural lineages in the human family to live their lives guided by goals, values, and pictures of the world very different from our own...he suggested that

the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures [Geertz, "On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" (1975, p. 48)].

...So he offered up a challenge: Can anthropologists, political philosophers, and globalization theorists develop a version of liberalism with both the courage and the capacity to engage itself with 'a differentiated world'? And can they do so with regard to, and respect for, a multicultural world in which at least some of that diversity has its source in the primordial ties of individuals to kith and kin and particular ancestral histories, and not in some original autobiographical act of free choice or expressive liberty? Cliff Geertz died before he was able to fully spell out his own affirmative response to his own questions. Nevertheless, in some ways his most significant legacy is his invitation to those of us for whom his voice was resonant to rethink the implications of political liberalism" [Richard Shweder, Clifford James Geertz, 1926-2006: A Biographical Memoir, Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences (2010), pp. 12-14].

As American political and cultural empire expands across the globe, the persistent moral question that its subjects (I'm afraid I cannot use the word "citizens" as that term ought to be reserved for use with the inhabitants of a republic) must try to answer for themselves is this: how much difference can we abide? Our track record on the North American continent (i.e., with respect to the indigenous populations and imported slave populations) ought to give us pause. The drive to (white-bread Protestant) homogeneity is troubling, to say the least.

In light of this challenge, Clifford Geertz emerges from the disciplinary field of anthropology as one of the most important intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century; in the opening decades of the 21st century, he becomes, like Richard Rorty, indispensable.