Dreamtime: Clifford Geertz

[Achirri Ishmael]

He didn’t realize

After an isolated childhood,

When he started out

To see what might be going on

Elsewhere in the world,

 

That there would be

A final exam…

 

Clifford Geertz, 1999 Charles Haskins Lecture to the American Council of Learned Relations. 

 

Dreamtime II.

 

A moment of confusion

And uncertainty of direction,

 

And an unlooked-for opportunity

Dropped

At my feet.

 

A quickening flurry:

A change of place,

Task,

Self,

And intellectual ambience.

 

A charmed life,

A charmed time.

 

An errant career,

Mercurial,

Various,

Free,

Instructive,

 

And not all that badly paid.

 

Clifford Geertz , “Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning,” delivered to the American
Council of Learned Societies in 1999, Ohio; also Clifford Geertz (2000) Available Light. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p.27.

[M Izabel]

Thanks, Achirri.  You just gave me an idea.  Even before knowing that Rosaldo was a poet, I could sense snippets of poetry in his ethnography on Ilonggots.  What you have dug up in Geertz's lectures confirmed my observation that:

There are/were parts that are/were poetic in the ethnography and ethnographic in the poetry of anthropologists who are/were poets. 

[Keith Hart]

I'll drink to that! It would make a wonderful addition to OAC Press's new series "Art and anthropology".

[Huon Wardle]

Time to bring the wonderful poems about Levi Strauss , Bourdieu and others together in a single anthology.

[John McCreery]

Bravo! Bravissimo!