The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age [1996, 2015] by John Horgan

Author:John Horgan [Horgan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books [ebook]
Published: 1996-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Antiprogress of Clifford Geertz

Practitioners of ironic science can be divided into two types: naïfs, who believe or at least hope they are discovering objective truths about nature (the superstring theorist Edward Witten is the archetypal example), and sophisticates, who realize that they are, in fact, practicing something more akin to art or literary criticism than to conventional science. There is no better example of a sophisticated ironic scientist than the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He is simultaneously a scientist and a philosopher of science; his work is one long comment on itself. If Stephen Jay Gould serves as the negative capability of evolutionary biology, Geertz does the same for social science. Geertz has helped to fulfill Gunther Stent’s prophecy in The Coming of the Golden Age that the social sciences “may long remain the ambiguous, impressionistic disciplines that they are at present.”18

I first encountered Geertz’s writings in college, when I took a class on literary criticism and the instructor assigned Geertz’s 1973 essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”19 The essay’s basic message was that an anthropologist cannot portray a culture by merely “recording the facts.” He or she must interpret phenomena, must try to guess what they mean. Consider the blink of an eye, Geertz wrote (crediting the example to the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle). The blink may represent an involuntary twitch stemming from a neurological disorder, or from fatigue, or from nervousness. Or it may be a wink, an intentional signal, with many possible meanings. A culture consists of a virtually infinite number of such messages, or signs, and the anthropologist’s task is to interpret them. Ideally, the anthropologist’s interpretation of a culture should be as complex and richly imagined as the culture itself. But just as literary critics never can hope to establish, once and for all, what Hamlet means, so anthropologists must eschew all hope of discovering absolute truths. “Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate,” Geertz wrote. “What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other.”20 The point of his brand of science, Geertz realized, is not to bring discourse to a close, but to perpetuate it in ever-more-interesting ways.

In later writings, Geertz likened anthropology not only to literary criticism but also to literature. Ethnography involves “telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms and deploying tropes,” Geertz wrote, just as literature does. He called anthropology “faction,” or “imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times.”21 (Of course, substituting art for literary criticism hardly represents a radical step for one such as Geertz, since to most postmodernists a text is a text is a text.)

Geertz displayed his own talents as a faction writer in “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” The first sentence of the 1972 essay established his anything-but-straightforward style: “Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study.

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