Tiger's review is oddly blinkered, though, because you'd think from reading it that Geertz invented the division between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften, whereas in fact, as my Germanisms indicate, this goes way back to at least the 19th century and arguably to Vico and Herder in the 18th. The notion that all the social science can offer is Verstehen, understanding (Weber's term, he did not agree) is certainly to be found in Hegel (see Alasdair MacIntyre's nice little piece on the wider implications of Hegel's critique of phrenology) and by the later 19th century, with Dilthey and Weber, is full blown, highly articulated issue in the emerging sub-discipline of philosophy of the human sciences.
Tiger also shoots merely polemical darts against the "fuzzy" thesis that never the twain (natural and social science, at least in method) shall meet without recognizing or even admitting that it has a lot of powerful support. And he false paints the "shiny" thesis (that human behavior can be studied by the sort of means used in the natural sciences_ as if it were an embattled minority position, which is absurd. Maybe in anthropology, I can't speak to that. But certainly the contrary view dominates in the social science in which I am trained, political science, in sociology, in economics, and in psychology, where quantitative approaches rule.
The sneer against Gould, who did believe in the scientific study of human behavior (though he was a fierce critic of Tiger's favored version of that, sociobiology), is peculiarly inapt.
The idea that Gould or Geertz promoted a "conventional" world view is merely rhetorical -- conventional how? That most people in the academy share their views? Hardly, since they diverged on so many points. Gould's moderate leftism may promote what Tiger calls "political correctness," that is, egalitarianism, but Geertz was a center of the road State Dept liberal. Maybe Tiger is so far right that people even that close together all look the same pink to him.
In sort, a disgraceful epitaph for a great scholar.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Wall Street Journal - November 7, 2006
>
> 'Fuzz. Fuzz . . . It Was Covered in Fuzz.'
> By LIONEL TIGER
>
> Anthropologist Clifford Geertz of the Institute of
> Advanced Studies
> at Princeton passed away last week. His name will be
> generally -- if
> often hazily -- familiar to literate people who
> will, however, be
> unlikely to appreciate the considerable impact he
> had on our
> intellectual world. Unhappily, in my opinion (and
> not only mine), his
> influence and impact were real but fundamentally
> unfortunate in the
> social sciences. He was a major contributor to the
> willfully fuzzy
> illogic which continues to plague the social
> sciences.
>
> From his exceptionally prominent and privileged
> position of
> patronage and influence at the Institute, Prof.
> Geertz sought to
> integrate anthropology with the humanities. This had
> the dolorous
> result of turning much of what well-meaning
> anthropologists do into a
> lame and confused form of literary scholarship. And
> worse, he widened
> the strange gap between the social and natural
> sciences. (What? Is
> social behavior not as natural as yogurt?) He
> abetted this pointless
> isolation just when, among other accomplishments,
> there were new
> results of breaking the DNA codes, new understanding
> of the inner
> complexity of the brain, and a decisively rich
> appreciation of the
> complex social lives of other animals and our
> evolutionary ancestors.
>
> Before he was appointed to the Institute in l970, I
> had a call from
> an assistant to its director asking my opinion about
> appointing
> Clifford Geertz the first major social scientist at
> that very special
> institution. At the time, Prof. Geertz was writing
> sensibly and
> intelligently about the connections between
> biological and social
> disciplines. I was enthusiastic about his future
> there and his
> broader influence, too, in reuniting the social with
> the biological
> sciences.
>
> I was wrong. So wrong.
>
> Once in his Institute catbird seat, he abandoned his
> earlier
> refreshing and synthetic perspective and focused on
> the links between
> writing and behavior. He sternly advocated that
> anthropologists turn
> to "thick description" (an unfortunately apt term)
> rather than the
> terse empirical accounts of ethnographers committed
> to facts rather
> than elegant rendition. Meanwhile, he continued to
> write imposing and
> influential works on the difficulty of bridging the
> gaps between the
> consciousness of individuals and between different
> societies. He
> emphasized words about acts rather than the acts
> themselves. His
> complex and assertive books and essays helped secure
> his broad
> reputation as perhaps the leading anthropological
> thinker of 20th
> Century Part Two, even if hardly anyone knew exactly
> why. More than
> that, he became one of the not-so-secret nominators
> for the MacArthur
> Foundation and, along with the annual appointments
> he could make to
> the Institute each year, this diligent academic capo
> rewarded his
> intellectual followers. He became the
> anthropological enforcer for
> the New York Review of Books and, like Steven Jay
> Gould in biology,
> intricately upheld a conventional world view which
> provided
> intimidating intellectual cover for politically
> correct thoughts and
> deeds.
>
> Prof. Geertz influenced the intellectual life of his
> time because he
> argued for the comforting and evasive simplification
> that there could
> be no facts about social life, only negotiable
> representations of
> singular private experiences and social positions.
> Fuzz. Fuzz. All
> was imprecise, arguable. There was no glisten to
> reality; it was
> covered in fuzz. In anthropology, the holy
> intellectual trinity of
> race/class/gender became the imperative explanatory
> tools to explain
> and understand anything; their use was oxygenated by
> political
> righteousness and the scientific result was
> near-paralysis of the
> American Anthropological Association. At the
> Institute in Princeton
> he fought losing battle after losing battle over
> future appointments
> with colleagues such as physicists, mathematicians,
> and economists.
> They evidently saw little crisp explanatory promise
> in the
> belligerent if elegant imprecision he insisted was
> the most one could
> expect from the intellectual life earnestly lived.
>
> Notwithstanding his honors and splendid jobs, he
> remained eager to be
> the writer he aspired to be as an undergraduate at
> Antioch College.
> Evidently an especially painful professional
> experience was a New
> York Times review by Stanford historian Paul
> Robinson of one of his
> books, which admired the effort but finally asserted
> that Geertzian
> prose was spangly flim-flam, with no real there
> there. His death,
> like any other, is mystifyingly sad. But it will be
> the beginning of
> an exploration of just what was it about his life
> and our times that
> sustained such a static gloomy icon.
>
> ---
>
> Mr. Tiger is the Charles Darwin Professor of
> Anthropology at Rutgers
> University.
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Sponsored Link
For just $24.99/mo., Vonage offers unlimited local and long- distance calling. Sign up now. http://www.vonage.com/startsavingnow/