Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Clifford Geertz
2000
Wars of the paleos and the posties. Except when driven beyond
distraction, or lumbered with sins I ñack the wit to commit, I, myself,
am shy of polemic; I leave the rough staff to those who Lewis
Namier so fineky dismissed as persons more interested in
themselves than their work. But as the temperature rose and
rhetoric with it, I found myself in the middle of howling debates,
often enough the bemused focus of them (“did I say that?”), over
such excited questions as whether the real is truly real and the true
really true. Is knowledge possible? Is the good a matter of opinión?
Objectivity a sham? Disinterestedness bad faith? Description
domination? Is it power, pelf, and political agendas all the way
down? Between old debenture Holders, crying that the sky is falling
because relativists have taken factuality away, and advanced
personalities, cluttering the landscape with slogans, salvations, and
strange devices, as well as a great deal of unrequired writing, these
last years in the human sciences have been, tos ay the least, full of
production values. Whatever is happening to the American mind, it
certainly isn’t closing.