After the Fact

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has spent over four decades researching in the field, based in two different provincial towns: Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco. In documenting his research, Geertz encountered the problem of how to say something about how the culture of the two towns has changed. In looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is a personal history and a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. A summation of a career in anthropology, it is at the same time a statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers. To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal.
The result is a book that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular view of what these sciences are, have been and should become.