EN
HOMMAGE À CLIFFORD GEERTZ
Clifford
Geertz est mort
à 80 ans le 30 octobre 2006
Sa
nécrologie sur le site de l'Institut for Advanced Study à
Princeton .
On lira plus bas le début d'un de ses articles, qui est
très
caractéristique de son approche du monde social, dans la
New York Review of
Books à laquelle il contribuait
régulièrement : les principes de "l'anthropologie
herméneutique" y sont posés.
Un des ouvrages dont il rend compte ici est d'Ernest Gellner (
Saints de l'Atlas, cet
ouvrage a été traduit en français) dont
l'interprétation de l'islam et la théorie de la
réalité sociale sont très différentes de
celles de Geertz, sur ce dernier point voir la critique de Geertz par
Gellner
dans
Post-modernism, Reason and
Religion, Routledge, 1992. Gellner y critique le texte de
Geertz : "Anti anti relativism" qu'on peut lire dans
Avalilable light.
On notera aussi que Geertz rend
compte de deux films. [Sur la théorie du lignage chez Gellner et
certains aspects des théories de Geertz : Colas,
Sociologie
politique, cf. l'index]
Liste des articles de Geertz sans la New York Review of Books :
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/116
Volume 16, Number 7 · April 22, 1971
Review
"In Search of North Africa"
By Clifford Geertz
Saints of the Atlas
by Ernest Gellner
Chicago, 317 pp., $9.50
Revolution and Political
Leadership: Algeria 1954-1968
by William B. Quandt
MIT, 304 pp., $8.95
Wolves in the City: The Death
of French Algeria
by Paul Henissart
Simon & Schuster, 508 pp., $8.95
The Battle of Algiers
directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
Change at Shebika: Report from a North African Village
by Jean Duvignaud
Pantheon, 303 pp., $6.95
Ramparts of Clay
written by Jean Duvignaud, directed by Jean-Louis Bertuccelli
Physicists, novelists, logicians, and art historians have recognized
for some time that what we call our knowledge of reality consists of
images of it that we ourselves have fashioned. In the social sciences
this is just now coming to be understood, and then only imperfectly.
The contribution of the investigator not only to the description and
analysis of his object of study but to its very creation still tends to
be obscured by the sort of mentality which regards the Human Relations
Area Files, the Gallup Poll, and the US Census as repositories of
recorded truths waiting merely to be discovered. In the arts, the
unimplicated observer has been reduced to a minor convention; in the
sciences to an unreachable limiting case. But in much of sociology,
anthropology, and political science he lives on, masquerading as a real
person performing a possible act.
Clifford
Geertz est mort
à 80 ans le 30 octobre 2006
Sa
nécrologie sur le site de l'Institut for Advanced Study à
Princeton .
On lira plus bas le début d'un de ses articles, qui est
très
caractéristique de son approche du monde social, dans la
New York Review of
Books à laquelle il contribuait
régulièrement : les principes de "l'anthropologie
herméneutique" y sont posés.
Un des ouvrages dont il rend compte ici est d'Ernest Gellner (
Saints de l'Atlas, cet
ouvrage a été traduit en français) dont
l'interprétation de l'islam et la théorie de la
réalité sociale sont très différentes de
celles de Geertz, sur ce dernier point voir la critique de Geertz par
Gellner
dans
Post-modernism, Reason and
Religion, Routledge, 1992. Gellner y critique le texte de
Geertz : "Anti anti relativism" qu'on peut lire dans
Avalilable light.
On notera aussi que Geertz rend
compte de deux films. [Sur la théorie du lignage chez Gellner et
certains aspects des théories de Geertz : Colas,
Sociologie
politique, cf. l'index]
Liste des articles de Geertz sans la New York Review of Books :
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/116
Volume 16, Number 7 · April 22, 1971
Review
"In Search of North Africa"
By Clifford Geertz
Saints of the Atlas
by Ernest Gellner
Chicago, 317 pp., $9.50
Revolution and Political
Leadership: Algeria 1954-1968
by William B. Quandt
MIT, 304 pp., $8.95
Wolves in the City: The Death
of French Algeria
by Paul Henissart
Simon & Schuster, 508 pp., $8.95
The Battle of Algiers
directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
Change at Shebika: Report from a North African Village
by Jean Duvignaud
Pantheon, 303 pp., $6.95
Ramparts of Clay
written by Jean Duvignaud, directed by Jean-Louis Bertuccelli
Physicists, novelists, logicians, and art historians have recognized
for some time that what we call our knowledge of reality consists of
images of it that we ourselves have fashioned. In the social sciences
this is just now coming to be understood, and then only imperfectly.
The contribution of the investigator not only to the description and
analysis of his object of study but to its very creation still tends to
be obscured by the sort of mentality which regards the Human Relations
Area Files, the Gallup Poll, and the US Census as repositories of
recorded truths waiting merely to be discovered. In the arts, the
unimplicated observer has been reduced to a minor convention; in the
sciences to an unreachable limiting case. But in much of sociology,
anthropology, and political science he lives on, masquerading as a real
person performing a possible act.
Bibliographie
sélective de Geertz
Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics
(2000) (lire un extrait du texte sur le site de la Library of Congress
:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/samples/prin031/99054958.html
After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (1995)
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist As Author (1988) (traduit en
français)
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983)
(traduit en français)
Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980)
Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural
Analysis (1979) (traduction partielle en français) (avec Hildred
Geertz, Lawrence Rosen, et un "photographic Essay" par Paul Hyman
The Religion of Java (1976)
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973)
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1971)
(traduit en français)
Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia
(1963)
Peddlers and Princes, 1963
Geertz et
l'esprit du temps (Zeitgest) (par lui-même)
There is, in any case,
apparently something to the idea of Zeitgeist,
or at least to that of
mental contagion. One thinks one is setting bravely off in an
unprecedented direction and then looks up to find all sorts of people
one has never even heard of headed the same way. The linguistic turn,
the hermeneutical turn, the cognitive revolution, the aftershocks of
the Wittgenstein and Heidegger earthquakes, the constructivism of
Thomas Kuhn and Nelson Goodman, Benjamin, Foucault, Goffman,
Lévi-Strauss, Suzanne Langer, Kenneth Burke, developments in
grammar, semantics, and the theory of narrative, and latterly in neural
mapping and the somaticization of emotion all suddenly made a concern
with meaning-making an acceptable preoccupation for a scholar to have.
These various departures and novelties did not, of course, altogether
comport, to put it mildly; nor have they proved of equal usefulness.
But they provided the ambience, and, again, the speculative
instruments, to make the existence of someone who saw human beings as,
quoting myself paraphrasing Max Weber, "suspended in webs of meaning
they themselves have spun" a good deal easier. For all my determination
to go my own way, and my conviction that I had, I was, all of a sudden,
an odd man in.
Extrait de Geertz,
Available
Light: Anthropological Reflections
on Philosophical Topics
(2000) qui se trouve sur le site de la Library of Congress :
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/samples/prin031/99054958.html
Clifford Geertz à Séfrou en mai 2001 lors d'une
conférence organisée autour de son oeuvre
The
event was organized by the Municipal Council of Sefrou and Princeton
University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary
Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, with the assistance of the
King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation of Casablanca.
Geertz conducted fieldwork for a decade in Sefrou, an enterprise that
produced Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (with H. Geertz and L.
Rosen, Cambridge University Press, 1979). The book examines almost
every aspect of society and culture in Sefrou; Geertz himself focused
on the bazaar economy.
Sefrou, says Geertz, is “a walled city at least 1000 years old,
surrounded by an oasis, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains.”
Sefrou presented “an anthropologist’s ideal case,” he says, “because of
its long and varied history and cultural complexity. The population
included urban and rural Arabs, urban and rural Berbers, Jews, and
French colonials.” In terms of land use, “There were colonial French
landholdings, small truck farms, expanses occupied by herding tribes,
and large markets.” Sefrou was “open and welcoming, very cosmopolitan,
because it was a caravan stop on the trading route from the major city
of Fez, across the Sahara to Mali.”
(
Extrait
de The Institute letter du Center for Advanced Study, winter 2001 )
L'ouvrage de Geertz sur Séfrou (
Meaning and Order in Moroccan
Society: Three Essays in Cultural
Analysis (1979) (avec Hildred Geertz, Lawrence Rosen, et
un "photographic Essay" par Paul Hyman a été
partiellement traduit en français sous le titre
Le Souk de Sefrou par D.
Cefaï, Bouchène, 2005
Cette page a été réalisée par
Dominique Colas avec Composer de Netscape
le 5 novembre 2006
Retour à la page
d'enrée du site
Professeur Dominique Colas, professeur des
universités à
l'Institut d' Etudes Politiques de
Paris
email : dominique.colas@sciences-po.fr
adresse postale : 27 rue
Saint Guillaume - 75337 Paris
Cedex 07
adresse du bureau : 199 Boulevard Saint -Germain ,
Paris,
76007
