For our first meeting of 2023, Matteo Bortolini from the Università di Padova, Italy will join us for discussion of his work-in-progress:
“'A Twenty-Four Hour Job': Hildred and Clifford Geertz’s First Foray into the Field and the Scholarly Persona of the Anthropologist”
With its rich funding, focus on post-colonial societies, teamwork and interdisciplinarity aimed at producing “dual” results, Cold War American anthropology represented a departure from both Boasian methodology and the Malinowskian palimpsest of the conditions for producing the “ethnographer’s magic.” This paper presents a historical reconstruction of the early days of Clifford and Hildred Geertz as members of the Modjokuto Project in order to reflexively tackle a number of problems regarding the history of social and cultural anthropology: How do social scientist come to understand their professional role and the specific scientific virtues attached to it? How are scholalrly personae and other regulative templates put to the test (and modified) during fieldwork? How does the lack of methodological reflection on the ways of the anthropologist impact on the completion of specific research projects? The article details how Hildred and Clifford Geertz embodied in their actions and decisions the Malinowskian image of the lonely ethnographer, thus creating a series of performative contradictions between their extremely individualistic understanding of the ethnographer and the needs of teamwork in the field.
We are happy to host Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) and Matt Watson (Mount Holyoak) as discussants.
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