no?

oh i remember that feel. it blew me too when i found it. specially his essay on religion. and you could read his further essays, local knowledge. or you could try symbolic anthropology, such as victor turner or mary douglas.

his essay anti-antirelativism is a particularly good one, i dont remember if it is in LK or in available light.

also, anthropology is too much for lit so dont expect much answers.

ah and dont give up on levi strauss. he is worth the effort even if of course he is not good as a start. as a hint i can tell you that reading structural linguistics helps, cause he is basicalle doing the same but exchanging language for culture. jakobson, troubetzkoy and the prague cirlce in general. saussure and benvniste too if the others are too abstract.

how does anthro interact with hermeneutics?

i always assumed thick description was basically just the epistemic horizon of hermeneutics but for culture

>>8098255
I can't answer to this but Geertz in his thick description isn't citing phenomenology/hermeneutic passages. He's more on the Wittgenstein side.
>>8098239
>>8098252
Thanks for these, saved them :) I read Course in General Linguistics a while back but I'll read it again.
>Jakobson
I've bought his Lacan introduction book. What do you think of it?

>>8100059
>Lacan

well im not particularly fond of post-structuralists nor of psychoanalysis. jakobson's best work is in linguistics. i recall in particular his book le son et le sens.

i remember levi strauss was once asked about lacan's famous phrase 'the unconscious is structured as a language'. he commented: 'thats is one of those phrases that calls attention merely cause it says things backwards; of course language, being a product of the unconscious, is gonna have to bear its structure'.

As someone already said, you could read his article anti-antirelativism and also the uses of diversity (you should also read L-S' race and history and Rorty's postmodernist bourgeois liberalism to see the positions that Geertz criticizes, and then rortys response in On ethnocentrism)

If you can read in spanish my professor wrote an introduction to the translation of one of his books and it's a nice short general view on his works, you can download it here: http://roderic.uv.es/bitstream/handle/10550/32675/Los%20usos%20de%20la%20diversidad%20Introducci%c3%b3n.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

I haven't read any secondary sources on Geertz in english, sorry

If you're interested in his conception of anthropology and anthropological work you should also read local knowledge and works and lives: the anthropologist as author

If you wanna read any other anthropologist in particular I could recommend you some works too

Theres a book called interpreting Clifford Geertz. Its on libgen.

>>8100790
Yeah anthropological work is catching my interest. I'm coming from a medicine school backgroun and I want to become a psychiatrist so I'm trying to work my way around social sciences/humanities.
Not that it's obligatory, I just find it useful in seeing the big picture. What I like the most is his field experience followed by discourse on it.
Anything you can recommend I'm eager to check it out.
>>8100653
The whole anthropology field seems to me a lot more scientific method-oriented, at least compared to Lacan which was pretty obscure.
>>8100922
Thanks I'll dl it

I'll paste an interesting passage to avoid being a parasite: As a case in point, let me take a spectacularly theatrical cultural performance
from Bali -that in wh ich a terrible witch called Rangda engages
in a ritual combat with an endeari ng monster called Sarong. 42
Usually, but not inevitably presented on the occasion of a death temple
celebration, the drama consists of a masked dance in which the witch
-depicted as a wasted old widow, prostitute, and eater of infantscomes
to spread plague and death upon the land and is opposed by the
monster-depicted as a kind of cross between a clumsy bear, a silly
puppy, and a strutting Chinese dragon. Rangda, danced by a single
male, is a hideous figure. Her eyes bulge from her forehead like swollen
boils. Her teeth become tusks curving up over her cheeks and fangs
protruding down over her chin. Her yellowed hair falls down around
her in a matted tangle. Her breasts are dry and pendulous dugs edged
with hair, between which hang, like so many sausages, strings of colored
entrails. Her long red tongue is a stream of fire. And as she dances
she splays her dead-white hands, from wh ich protrude ten-inch clawlike
fingernails, out in front of her and utters unnerving shrieks of metallic
laughter. Sarong, danced by two men fore-and-aft in vaudeville
horse fashion, is another matter. His shaggy sheepdog coat is hung with
gold and m ica ornaments that glitter in the half-light. He is adorned
with flowers, sashes, feathers, m irrors, and a comical beard made from
human hai r. And though a demon too, his eyes also pop and he snaps
his fanged j aws with seemly fierceness when faced with Rangda or other
affronts to his dignity ; the cluster of tinkling bells which hang from his
absurdly arching tail somehow contrives to take most of the edge off his
fearfulness. If Rangda is a satanic image, Sarong is a farcical one, and
their clash is a clash (an i nconclusive one) between the malignant and
the ludicrous.

>>8100987
>psychiatrist
>trying to work my way around social sciences/humanities.

nice. i did the opposite. i started in social sciences, sociology and anthropology and at some point got to see that psychology and some psychiatry are a necessary passage.

in the path ive found a lot of things that have added to that, but i can mention two that touch explicitly the point: culturalist anthropology which, contrary to the received image, has great insights if one reads the texts directly, specifically edward sapir and ruth benedict speak of these issues directly (the problem of individual and society as a background and sociology/anthropology and psychology). The works of their contemporary continuators, labeled as psychological anthtropology, have truly insightful pages too.

and the other one is george devereux and his ethnopsychiatry. he might attract you more cause he is much more psychoanalytically and psychiatry oriented but is an anthropologist in the whole sense of the term. he touches the same points that the culturalists worked on but gives them different answers. he has great passages too in his work.

>>8097438

So what's the catch?

Is he another moral/cultural relativist?

Same as every other bourgeois bohemian on the planet right now then, if so.

>>8100987
This is only tangentially related, but if you haven't you should read von Wright's Explanation and Understanding, which reviews and comments on the historical development of what has constituted scientific knowledge (scientific in a broad sense of the word, including humanities). This also relates to the ways in which the social sciences and humanities have tried to justify their work as knowledge after the scientific revolution. If you're interested in hermeneutics this might help to understand its development, too.

now that youre mentioning hermeneutics i remember ricoeur has a very interesting lecture about geertz. imo, fully profitable only after having read a good deal of geertz.

chapter 15:
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-oRPzWEh3nXrYxehT

>>8101217
>>8101397
>Devereux
Started casually reading Dreams in Greek Tragedy and I'm loving it. It's an interesting intro to tragedies too.
>>8102518>>8101397
saved for future read

Let me give as an example of this fusion of the existential and the
normative a quotation from one of J ames Walker's Oglala (Sioux) informants,
which I find in Paul Radin's neglected classic, Primitive Man
as a Philosopher:
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
The Oglala believe t he circle to be sacred because the great spi rit caused
everything in nature to be round except stone. Stone is the implement of de
struction. The sun and the sky, the earth and the moon are round like a
shield, though the sky is deep like a bowl. Everything that breathes is round
like the stem of a plant . Since t he great spirit has caused everything to be
round mankind should look upon the c i rcle as sacred , for it is the symbol of
all thi ngs i n nature except stone. It is also the symbol of the ci rcle that
makes the edge of the world and therefore of the four w i nds that travel
there. Consequently it is also the sym bol of the year. The day, the night,
and the moon go i n a circle above the sky . Therefore the circle is a symbol
of these d i v isions of t i me and hence the symbol of all t i me.
For these reasons the Oglala make the i r tipis ci rcular, their camp-ci rcle
circular, and sit in a circle at all ceremonies. The circle is also the symbol
of the tipi and of shelter. If one makes a ci rcle for an ornament and it is not
divided in any way, it should be understood as the symbol of the world and
of t i me. 1
Here is a subtle formulation of the relation between good and evil,
and of their grounding in the very nature of reality. Circle and eccentric
form, sun and stone, shelter and war are segregated into pairs of disjunct
classes whose significance is aesthetic, moral, and ontological. The
reasoned articulateness of this statement is atypical : for most Oglala the
circle, whether found in nature, painted on a buffalo skin, or enacted in·
a sun dance, is but an unexamined luminous symbol whose meaning is
intuitively sensed, not consciously interpreted. But the power of the
symbol, analyzed or not, clearly rests on its comprehensiveness, on its
fruitfulness in ordering experience . Again and again the idea of a sacred
circle, a natural form with a moral import, yields, when applied to
the world within which the Oglala lives, new meanings; continually it·
connects together elements within their experience which would other-.
wise seem wholly disparate and, wholly disparate, incomprehensible

Interesting to see some interdisciplinary guys ITT. I'm a history dude studying interdisciplinarity in the social sciences, currently trying to learn the general historiography of the fields of sociology/anthropology/psychology and some others.

I actually applied to UMich's Anthro-History PhD program but was rejected.