Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics [Paperback]

Right from the Preface, this flight is "Go for orbit." While seemingly bidding farewell to us, and this "vast inelegance" (attributed by Geertz to Stevens), Geertz lifts one's thoughts to uncommon heights using broad, galloping strokes in particular detail, kept on track with parenthetical interjections, self-depricating personal and professional reminders, and living proofs that long sentences need not be incomprehensible.

Although it is hard to know whether Available Light would have had the same impact, had I not spent the last two years updating my 1960s cultural anthropology education, I believe it would have helped to read it first, rather than last, before reading Interpretation of Cultures, Local Knowledge, Works & Lives, and After the Fact, as well as many non-Geertz offerings.

Had Available Light come to hand before I read 3 interesting, helpful, but turgid, volumes on ethnographic field work and methodology, in preparation for a retirement project I'm planning, I would surely have struggled less with any of the three. With 3 fundamental field work questions in a single sentence, Geertz made it all clear, the remainder being mostly "techniques" which those 3 books richly supplied. Where were you, Clifford, when I needed you?

Even more, had Available Light come to hand earlier in my self-tutorial sojourn, I would surely have struggled less with such basic concepts as "culture," "religion," and "semiotics." We who lay no great claim to extraordinary intellectual prowess can use Geertz' succinct definitional descriptions to collect, organize and parse the cacophony of competing definitions, perspectives, and outright agendas surrounding each such key anthropological concept.

Finally, the writing! You will rarely find such clear, lucid writing. It is a trait, I find, not unique to Geertz, but Geertz does it better than most. It is not simple writing - on the contrary! - but clear; few short sentences, as precision so often requires modulating interjection. Available Light could find valuable use by English and journalism students just for study of writing clarity!

If I have a gripe, it's only shared by Geertz with so many Harvard-trained so-called scholars, a propensity for uncommon vocabulary - not big words, mind you, but such uncommon ones that I, schooled so many decades ago, still race for the dictionary (where, incidentally, many do not occur). My working vocabulary is enormous, so I suspect "airs" when I encounter too many unknown words, even when they turn out to be well-suited to their context, and particularly when there is an equally-suitable, better-known synonym available.

One rejoinder: Early in Available Light, Geertz notes, he has not actually taught in many years. On the contrary, Professor Geertz, on the contrary! (Rod Borlase)