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Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics. Fred Inglis. Oxford: Polity, 2000. 207 pp.
This is one of a few dozen volumes in a series titled "Key Contemporary Thinkers." Clifford Geertz is the only anthropologist among such figures as Adorno, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Nozick, Popper, and Rawls?-although some of us might claim Erving Goffman, who also has a volume devoted to him. Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sheffield, Fred Inglis dedicates this book to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where, he tells us, he has spent "the happiest and most rewarding times of my academic life." Inglis admires the Institute for its contribution to "the critical, necessary resistance of thought" vis-à-vis "the brutal omnipotence of money values" (p. x), terms not so different from those he uses in his praise of Geertz.
Inglis's book is a sustained, intelligent reading of Geertz and of anthropology. It is neither biography nor history of anthropology. Even though it reviews Geertz's research stints and major written works in roughly chronological sequence, it is not quite an intellectual history. It is, above all, a literary and theoretical appreciation of Geertz, or, as Inglis puts it, a "reading" of "the biography of his thought" (p. 25). To my mind, Inglis gets it all about right, and what he says Geertz says about "the interpretation of cultures" captures what anthropology is, can be, and should be-no more but no less. In the end, it is not very complicated, but it is a noble endeavor...