Life among the Anthros and Other Essays

"This stunning collection--drawn from his earliest reviews to his latest lectures--brings us Clifford Geertz's stilled voice, commenting on the great intellectual and political movements and figures of our time and his own adventures as an anthropologist. Humorous, frank, and wise, with easy access to events and learning all over the world, Geertz urges us to observe and compare difference rather than construct grand schemes. Life among the Anthros and Other Essays is a copious gift to us as we try to understand the uncertainties of the past and prepare for the surprises of the future."--Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds

"To read this collection is to be reminded how much we have learned from Clifford Geertz, this trailblazer in cultural anthropology and interpretive social science. Two of the great qualities that made him a mentor in this field shine forth in this book: his constant awareness of the near-impossibility of the task of understanding the other without distortion, and the wide and humane sympathies that made him so often succeed in this very task."--Charles Taylor, McGill University

"A much needed collection. Its core is an excellent, judicious selection of Geertz's essays in the New York Review of Books over more than three decades, plus other key articles that he published elsewhere. This is a remarkable retrospective on Geertz that is not available elsewhere and that captures his public intellectual role acutely and poignantly."--George Marcus, University of California, Irvine