Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Paperback)

Cultural anthropology, as practised by Geertz, is descended from literary criticism. As one of a generation of post-war Americans who benefited from the GI Bill which sent them to college, he started in English, hopeful of becoming a writer. His teacher Kenneth Burke, a kind of American Leavis, was a pioneer of the ‘new criticism’, a mixture of exposition and evaluation, of lofty aims with everyday life and cultural context. Another teacher, George Geiger, who had been Dewey’s last graduate student, introduced Geertz to the New England transcendentalist tradition, as well as to the philosophy of language newly-arrived from Oxford courtesy of Ryle, whose concept of ‘thick description’ Geertz was to adopt.

Anthropology thus consists of a detailed study of the culture through field-work (in Geertz’s case in Java, Bali and Morocco), recording not only what happens, but what it means to those to whom it happens. At the next level, the anthropologist tries to understand or interpret the symbolic significance of various happenings, in order to arrive at comparative judgements as to the merits or otherwise of any culture. This emphasis on understanding points up the gulf between Geertz’s methods and those of the structural / functional schools of Parsons and Levi-Strauss.

This comparative approach is of course relativist, but of an outward-looking type which sets different cultures alongside one another, as well as alerting us to the dangers of Western interference, whether well-intentioned, or simply for profit. Geertz has little time for the superficial, timid forms of anthropology which constitute relativism in its more doctrinaire forms. He is more concerned with anti-relativism, with those who try to play down the significance of other cultures, or (worse) make those from other cultures conform to Western forms of thought or belief, a category of Platonic Guardian into whom we might place Nick Tate or successive Secretaries of State for Education. To Geertz, these fears of the dilution, or even the extinction of Western culture are groundless.

Unlike his French counterpart Pierre Bourdieu, Geertz has no particular bone to pick with capitalism, nor does he see ideology as intrinsically bad. It is merely another component of the culture, a way in which people try to find meaning in their lives, for example by bridging the gap between belief and reality. The relationships which help people to gain a sense of identity (clan, religious affiliation, community, language) all pre-date the nation-state, and provide an insight into the origins of the violence which had irrupted in recent years in Bosnia and Serbia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Burma, East Timor and the rest.

This book, as befits the work of an erstwhile English major, is both stylish and fluent, and the presentation excellent. As a compendium of Geertz’s thinking at the dawn of a new century, it stands alongside Fred Inglis’ recent study from Polity, which in itself forms both a counterpart and an introduction to the work of a figure who is still less than well-known in this country. Throughout his half-century of work, Geertz has held fast to the importance of such guiding principles as the importance of the individual, of freedom and basic human rights. Most importantly, he exemplifies the hope that knowledge and understanding can help to bring about a better life for our fellow-human beings.