Professing Performance

Local knowledges

In 1980, anthropologist and cultural critic Clifford Geertz published an essay in The American Scholar that projected for many the intellectual shifts that would pervade the humanities and social sciences over the course of the next decade. In “Blurred Genres,” Geertz wittily surveyed a range of “new” approaches in the analysis of culture and what he called “the refiguration of social thought.” By the end of the first paragraph, he had isolated three trends that, he said, were not only “true” but “true together.” First, echoing his title, he noted the “enormous amount of genre mixing in intellectual life.” Second, he noted that such mixed genres tended to focus less on the general and more on the particular, that scholars were not quite as interested in “the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums” as much as they were in that which “connects chrysanthemums and swords.” Finally, he identified an analogical impulse in cultural analysis, an incorporation of the central metaphors of the humanities into sociological understanding. The analogies on which he focused were “game,” “drama,” and “text”; all three were newer interpretive concepts for the study of human behavior.