This collection of essays and lectures by Clifford Geertz was assembled by Fred Inglis, as “a representative selection from a momentous oeuvre” (p. 7). It provides an opportunity to review that oeuvre as a whole, and of the career from which it was generated. Geertz was born in 1926 and served in the Navy from 1943 to 1945, placing him within the youngest generation to have fought in World War II. The GI Bill sent him to Antioch College in 1946, and in 1950 he joined the new department of Social Relations at Harvard with a generous ACLS scholarship. He was then recruited by the Modjokuto Project (1952–1959), originally designed by the anthropologist Douglas Oliver as a multidisciplinary investigation of Indonesia, one of the largest and most strategic of the new nations. The Project was funded by the Ford Foundation and administered by the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at MIT. The director of CENIS was Max Millikan, an economist who took the 1951–1952 year off to set up the CIA's Office of Research and Reports. CENIS received significant funding from the CIA.
The first two parts of the present volume consist of book reviews published primarily in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) between 1967 and 2005. Part III consists of five lectures Geertz delivered between 2001 and 2005 and constitute his last words on many subjects. He introduces one of these lectures, “An Inconstant Profession” (written in 2002), by stating that it is the third in a series of “essays in apologetical retrospection” (p. 185). The first was written in 1990 and appeared as “Disciplines” in After the Fact (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). The second was written in 1999 and appeared as “Passage and Accident” in Available Light (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Read together, these three essays provide many insights into why Geertz's interests “in developmental questions, and in state formation” (p. 191) between 1950 and 1967 were abandoned in favor of culture and symbolism.
In the first essay, Geertz remarks that in early 1950s, “The professoriate, many of whose members had spent the war in some sort of planning, intelligence, or propaganda work, was exhilarated by the prospect of pursuing its own agendas again” (1995: 99). Many of them were also happy to lend a hand in “containing the Soviet Union” and “setting the Third World on its developmental course” (1995: 99). Here he may have been thinking of the work of Clyde Kluckhohn as Director of Harvard's Russian Research Center.
In the second essay, Geertz characterizes the three institutions involved in the Modjokuto Project, (the Department of Social Relations, CENIS, and Gadjah Mada University in Java) as “a grand consortium of the visionary, the ominous, and the inchoate” (2000: 9). He refers to CENIS as “obscurely funded and even more obscurely intended” (2000: 9). This is as close as he comes to distancing himself from Millikan's agenda while never actually mentioning him by name.
In the third essay, Geertz writes that while most members of the team drifted away from the Modjokuto Project upon their return to Cambridge in 1954, he did not, explaining that he was the most interested of all of them in questions of development and state formation. He returned to Indonesia in 1957 intending to conduct a Weberian comparison of the capitalist ethic in Islamic Sumatra, Calvinist North Sulawesi and Hindu Bali. The outbreak of CIA-backed rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi confined him mostly to Bali, and the full study was never completed. Soon afterward, he noted that the front of the Cold War shifted from Europe to Southeast Asia, with Indonesia having “both the largest communist party outside the Sino-Soviet bloc and an American-trained and -financed army” (p. 193). The dreams of the non-aligned movement proclaimed in 1955 in Bandung collapsed in the mid-1960s into coups, civil wars and mass killings, which was followed by “the age of the kleptocrats” (p. 193).
During the 1960s, Geertz soldiered on at the University of Chicago working with an interdisciplinary team interested in nation building in the Third World. But as the post-war dream of harmonious national development imploded, he lost his enthusiasm for the project. He came to believe that a correction was required in “our very conception of what it was we were trying to do” (p. 193). By the time his first review was published in the NYRB in 1967, Geertz had moved on to less politically charged topics in his own research.
The reviews collected in Part I concern books by or about Bronislaw Malinowski, Mohandas Gandhi, Michel Foucault, Jean Genet and the Na ethnic group of southwestern China. They are full of characteristically sharp insights and equivocal judgments. Part II brings together a series of articles in which he reviews of a number of books and films about the Islamic world by Ernest Gellner, Gillo Pontecorvo (Battle of Algiers), Paul Henissart, Marshall Hodgson, Daniel Pipes, Stephen Schwartz, Paul Berman, Bernard Lewis and Karen Armstrong. In his review of the last two, he states that their arguments are too general; what is needed instead is “a descent into the swirl of particular incident, particular politics, particular voices, particular traditions, and particular arguments” (p. 144). In another review, he asserts that the job of the ethnographer is to be “the connoisseur of the human particular, the celebrant of the special” (p. 132). These remarks typify his later views on social theory and ethnography.
Reading through this collection, one is left with the distinct impression that Geertz's rejection of generalizing theories about politics and development and turn to aestheticism was partly the result of his inability to come to terms with the dark side of America's interventions in the post-colonial world. He described the tragedies that took place in the Third World during the 1960s as if they were natural disasters rather than the products of human actors. The members of the academic, political and military elites who designed and implemented the policies that contributed to these violent upheavals are never even named, much less called to account. He remained committed until the end to a version of liberalism forged during World War II and served as a Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations from 1970 on. But the Bush administration finally pushed beyond the limits of what he could accept. In October 2004, he was one of 851 “Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy” who circulated a public letter stating that, “the current American policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period” (http://www.realisticforeignpolicy.org/archives/2004/10/security_schola_2.php, accessed May 7, 2011).
