Works and Lives: The Anthropologist As Author

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Summary: Writing as a participant observer
Review: In this book Clifford Geertz focuses on the writing of anthropologists, specifically that of ethnographers. He uses the term anthropology to refer to sociocultural anthropology, the basis of ethnography. He argues that it is not the recounting of facts that makes the readers take fieldwork seriously, but the way the author recounts his experience in an animated life-like fashion. The ability to persuade readers that what they are reading is an authentic account written by someone who is personally familiar with the way of life that occurs in a certain place, in a certain time, within a certain group of people, constitutes the basis of ethnography. The anthropologist's source of power in convincing the reader that his accounts are authentic lies not in his giving scientific data but in his ability to recount his experiences among the people group he's working with.

Geertz offers ethnographers a conceptual framework that allows them freedom and control, a way to talk with confidence about their people group studied, a way to write new texts that might enlarge the sense of what everyday life is about. Geertz calls upon ethnographers not only to document their findings and data, but also to enliven their fieldwork by giving attention to their experiences.

The separation between the anthropological text and the reader, and also the one that separates the anthropologist and his people group sometimes becomes a rigid and artificially exaggerated boundary. Often this artificial boundary creates a false image in the reader's mind, making them see the people group as exotic and primitive. The only way to prevent this boundary from arising is for the anthropologist to incorporate into his writing the participatory aspect of his experiences with the people he has lived among.

Maintaining this ethnographic distance has resulted in the folklorization of the anthropological research about death. Geertz exemplifies this by saying that death is something universal, something that happens everywhere, among every kind of people, no matter which race, color or gender, whether adult or children; yet anthropologists have minimized this fact when describing death within their people group by focusing on the exotic, curious and sometimes violent rituals. This approach creates distance between the reader and the people because the reader's attention is brought to focus on the rituals. Instead of the reader identifying with the people's loss of a member of their family or society, he becomes caught up in the description of strong rituals practiced by a strange people group.

Geertz also analyzes the literary forms of several anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski and Ruth Benedict. He says that: Levi-Strauss' relationship with the cultural reality is distant. Rather than painting a picture of the people's daily lives, he focuses his writings on painting a literary impression of himself; Evans-Pritchard shows his adventures both ways: as an actor and as an observer, he captures his experiences in a very descriptive animated style; Malinowski not only shows that he has been there but also that he has been a participant observer and has become one of the people he was studying; and Ruth Benedict shows more the reflexive aspect of having been there, answering the following anthropological questions: Where are they? Where am I? The way it is written is always like an aesopic commentary about their own society.

It's clear that Geertz is analyzing these modern anthropologists through his own conception of how an anthropologist should recount his experiences.

This book is appropriate for all level readers, and I think that every anthropologist should read and have it in mind as a consultant book while writing their reports.(Reviewed by Gabriela Huichacura, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Gral Roca, Argentina)