On Clifford Geertz

when we were both students at Antioch College. He was a 1⁄2dgety, scratchy, given-to-mumbling sort of guy, in no way prepossessing although I knew on 1⁄2rst exchange that he was no ordinary student. Not that he was given over much to casual conversation, even in that high academic moment known as the Veteran Generation, when student discussions (or better, arguments), usually about politics, were pretty much the order of the day. Cliff tended not to get involved, but if drawn in he invariably delivered some uncommon insight, often in the form of a quick retort followed by silence–a silence that some of us took as a reproach or embarrassment, as if our commentary fell short in some way. I remember in particular one heated and very undergraduate discussion over whether values were objective or relative. Cliff put an end to the conversation by saying that the only way to af1⁄2rm a value is in terms of another value. It was the kind of oracular pronouncement that could put some people off. We had a number of common bonds– for one, a miserable childhood. I was a high school dropout. Cliff grew up effectively without family–farmed out to a family in Santa Rosa who treated him badly. He discovered how bright he was more or less by chance, when he took the Navy V-12 examinations during the war and knocked the top off them. A former high school teacher suggested Antioch. It was an inspired choice: there, a good deal of learning was by doing. And there, we both got married, to women who fully shared our professional and academic lives. At 1⁄2rst he intended to major in English. He did a stint as editor of The Antiochian, the student literary journal (which had the foresight to publish a piece by fellow student Rod Serling). He then shifted to philosophy, coming under the wing of George Geiger, a convincing Deweyite who proctored Cliff intellectually and helped persuade him to go to Harvard in Social Relations

Political science · Sociology · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Religious Education and Schools

• Clifford Geertz

  Open Access•Ben White•Development and Change•2007

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• Clifford Geertz

  Open Access•Ben White•Development and Change•2007

  Add to list