Showing papers by "Clifford Geertz published in 1990"

"Popular Art" and the Javanese Tradition

Abstract: There is a long tradition in the West of distinguishing between "high" and "low" art. All of us who have been formed in that tradition first absorb this grand dichotomy as an obvious bit of common sense, and then when we go off to study aesthetical matters in an Asian society, we take one or another version of it with us. Sometimes it appears as a contrast between "sophisticated" and "folk"; sometimes as one between "elite" and "popular"; sometimes as one between "court" and "country." Sometimes it even takes on an air of scientific precision and objectivity: "Great vs. Little Tradition," "Civilization vs. Culture," "Art vs. Craft," "Literature vs. Lore."

History and Anthropology

Abstract: NE HEARS a fair amount these days, some of it hopeful, much of it skeptical, and almost all of it nervous, about the supposed impact of Anthropology, the Science, upon History, the Discipline. Papers in learned journals survey the problem with a certain useless judiciousness: on the one hand yes, on the other no; you should sup with the devil with a long spoon. Articles in the public press dramatize it as the latest news from the academic front: "hot" departments and "cold"; are dates out of date? Outraged traditionalists (there seems to be no other kind) write books saying it means the end of political history as we have known it, and thus of reason, freedom, footnotes, and civilization. Symposia are convened, classes taught, talks-like this one-given, to try to sort the matter out. There seems to be a quarrel going on. But a shouting in the street, it's rather hard to make out just what it is about. One of the things it may be about is Space and Time. There seem to be some historians, their anthropological educations having ended with Malinowski or begun with Levi-Strauss, who think that anthropologists, mindless of change or hostile to it, present static pictures of immobile societies scattered about in remote corners of the inhabited world, and some anthropologists, whose idea of history is roughly that of Barbara Tuchman, who think that what historians do is tell admonitory, and-then, and-then stories about one or another episode in Western civilization: "true novels" (in Paul Veyne's phrase) designed to get us to face-or outface-facts. Another thing the quarrel may be about is Big and Little. The penchant of historians for broad sweeps of thought and action, the Rise of Capitalism, The Decline of Rome, and of anthropologists for studies of small, well-bounded communities, the Tewa World (which?), The People of Alor (who?), leads to historians accusing anthropologists of nuancemanship, of wallowing in the details of the obscure and unimportant, and to anthropologists accusing historians of schematicism, of being out of touch with the immediacies