To read Available Light is to appreciate the extent to which, as Geertz himself admits, his ‘interpretation of cultures’ is an elaboration of Wittgensteinian themes. Wittgenstein Geertz describes as ‘his master*’ (p. xi). He it was who put into words what Geertz only inchoately sensed: the need to critique the notion of language as private; to identify those forms of life by which people’s understandings of the world are framed, and to make thought public (a language game and a set of practices); to recognize matters of sameness and difference as conceptually blurred and polythetic.
[Nigel Rapport, review of Available Light, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2001]
------------------------- *I mistakenly wrote 'the master' earlier. Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
