Research Catalog

Title

Available light : anthropological reflections on philosophical topics / Clifford Geertz.

Author

Geertz, Clifford.

Publication

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©2000.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvi, 271 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

In this collection of essays, Clifford Geertz explores the nature of his anthropological work in relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World War II. Geertz, who once considered a career in philosophy, begins by explaining how he got swept into the revolutionary movement of symbolic anthropology. At that point, his work began to encompass not only the ethnography of groups in Southeast Asia and North Africa, but also the study of how meaning is made in all cultures--or, to use his phrase, to explore the "frames of meaning" in which people everywhere live out their lives. His philosophical orientation helped him to establish the role of anthropology within broader intellectual circles and led him to address the work of such leading thinkers as Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, William James, and Jerome Bruner. In this volume, Geertz comments on their work as he explores questions in political philosophy, psychology, and religion that have intrigued him throughout his career but that now hold particular relevance in light of postmodernist thinking and multiculturalism. Available Light offers discussions of concepts such as nation, identity, country, and self, with a reminder that like symbols in general, their meanings are not categorically fixed but grow and change through time and place.

Subjects

• Diversité culturelle
• Anthropologie > Philosophie
• Cultural pluralism
• Philosophy
• Ethnology
• Ethnologie > Philosophie
• Philosophie > Ethnologie
• Filosofie
• Culturele antropologie
• philosophy
• Cultural Diversity

Note

• Articles previously published chiefly 1983-1999.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Passage and accident: a life of learning -- Thinking as a moral act: ethical dimensions of anthropological fieldwork in the new states -- Anti anti-relativism -- The uses of diversity -- The state of the art -- The strange estrangement: Charles Taylor and the natural sciences -- The legacy of Thomas Kuhn: the right text at the right time -- The pinch of destiny: religion as experience, meaning, identity, power -- Imbalancing act: Jerome Bruner's cultural psychology -- Culture, mind, brain/brain, mind, culture -- The world in pieces: culture and politics at the end of the century.

ISBN

• 0691049742
• 9780691049748
• 0691089566
• 9780691089560
• 9781400823406 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

• 99054958
• 9780691049748

OCLC

• ocm42733690
• 42733690
• SCSB-965445

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library