After the Fact Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has spent over four decades researching in the field, based in two different provincial towns: Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco. In documenting his research, Geertz encountered the problem of how to say something about how the culture of the two towns has changed.;In looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is a personal history and a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. A summation of a career in anthropology, it is at the same time a statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers.;To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a book that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular view of what these sciences are, have been and should become.