Culture as text
Hazards and possibilities of Geertz's literary/literacy metaphor
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3979013 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Katherine E Hoffman, Katherine Hoffman (0000-0001-7754-6659, Northwestern University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 417-430 |
| Publication date | 2009-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of North African Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1362-9387 • E-ISSN: 1743-9345 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13629380902924075 |
| OpenAlex | W2027700915 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 28 |
This paper considers the conceptual, ethnographic, ethical, and methodological implications of Geertz's influential metaphors of culture as ‘text’ and of fieldwork as ‘reading.’ In Morocco, one of Geertz's two long-term field sites, large segments of the rural population, Berber-speaking even more than Arabic-speaking, are unschooled and nonliterate. Women's rich expressive culture, including religious culture, is oral. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among Tashelhit-speaking Berber women in southwestern Morocco, I consider the language ideologies that shape women's attitudes toward the production and dissemination of religious oral texts. These ideologies complicate the supposed transparency of Geertz's literary/literacy metaphor. The paper reconsiders the possibilities of this metaphor for the anthropology of language, and locates Geertz's contribution and critical responses to it within the history of ideas and ethics shaping ethnographic research
Ethnography · Ideology · Linguistics · Literacy · Metaphor · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Population · Reading (process · Sociology · Anthropology · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices
Voice of Vision
Mediatisasi kearifan lokal Sunda dalam film Ambu
Decolonizing Knowledge Devices
The Ethnographic Hunch
Ethnographic Drafts and Wild Archives
Questions, Experiments, and Movements of Ethnographies in the Making
The Concept of Man in Ahmad Asrori’s Anthropology of Tasawuf
Cultures of Expertise and Ethnographic Testimony
Indentured clinical labor? An indigenist standpoint view of ‘forced surrogacy’ and reproductive governance in India
Experimenting with Ethnography
Power and religion
Literacy, culture, and development
The Interpretation of Cultures
Anthropologies and histories
Literacy in Theory and Practice
Natural histories of discourse
Orality and Literacy
Sacred Language, Ordinary People
Knowledge and Power in Morocco
Gender on the Market
Knowledge and passion
We Share Walls
A Note on Geertz as a Cultural Essayist
Deep play
A Note on Geertz as a Cultural Essayist
Berber language ideologies, maintenance, and contraction
The Thick and the Thin
Anthropology as Interpretive Quest [and Comments and Reply]
Critiques of Anthropology
Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power
Performance and Imagination
Moving and Dwelling
Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life
Everyday metaphors of power
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,22 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2026 (10) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |