`...you would thing from reading it that Geertz invented the division between cultural and physical(?) anthropology...'' Justin
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I looked up a quick bio of Geertz and Tiger. This is an interesting controversy, and part of what makes it interesting is that Tiger obviously doesn't understand or know about the German or Euro tradition of studying culture as a thematic or symbolic world.
You mentioned Vico and Herder, and so happens that I just finished Isaiah Berlin's Crooked Timber, which covers both and others like de Maistre as forming the counter-enlightenment. After I finished it, (still found no mention of Jacobi--my original reason for ordering this book as a guess that it would cover Jacobi...) I went back to finish J.Israel's massive Radical Enlightenment, somewhere in the 450p range dealing with Leibniz attempt to reconcile the new sciences with traditional religion.
All these historical moments and their desparate advesaries are thematically related to each other under the broad theme of a division between understanding human world through its universalist scientific view or through the particularisms of its multiple symbolic worlds.
I am work...more later..
CG