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A Strange Romance: Anthropology and Literature

Author(s): Clifford Geertz


Source: Profession, (2003), pp. 28-36
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595754 .
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Profession.
http://www.jstor.org
A
Strange
Romance:
Anthropology
and Literature
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
Puzzled,
as I'm sure
my
fellow
panelists
were as
well,
when
Stephen
Greenblatt
conscripted
them to
this
peculiar,
somewhat whimsical enter
prise,
about
just
what the
topic
of discussion
was
supposed
to
be,
I
thought
to
begin,
in
good Empsonian style,
with
a
reflection
on
the
ambiguities
of
his title. Was this to be
my
own
engagement
with literature and the lan
guage
arts as
subjects
of
study?what
a
cultural
anthropologist
had to
say
about
modernism,
postmodernism,
structuralism,
poststructuralism,
cul
tural
studies,
the new
historicism, hermeneutics,
and the other
veerings
and
insurrections of recent
theory, having
lived
through
all of them? Or
was it
to be how
my engagement
with
anthropology
was itself
literary?what
role
my
involvement with
my literary
tradition,
rather intense for
a
social scien
tist,
played
in
my
half-century
effort
to
understand how
Javanese, Balinese,
and Moroccans went about
earning
a
living, governing
themselves,
and
making
sense of their existence? Should I be
professional ethnographer
as
amateur critic
or amateur critic
as
professional ethnographer?
The two are
connected,
of
course,
and both involve
a
certain
presump
tion and
some
fairly
serious
trespassing,
as
well
as
what the
psychoanalysts
would call
exaggerated
self-reference. But it is the second that
seems to me
the
more
relevant in
my
case. What I have to
say
about the
ups
and downs
of recent
literary scholarship
or
criticism is
not,
even to
me,
very
interest
The author is
Professor
Emeritus in the School
of
Social Science at the Institute
for
Advanced
Study
in
Princeton,
New
Jersey.
A version
of
this
paper
was
presented
at the 2002 MLA con
vention in New York.
Profession 2003
28
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
|||
29
ing.
I have the usual mixed
feelings?fascinating,
but where the hell is it all
going??and nothing
very helpful
to
add, except surtoutpas
de zele. The
role that
my
formation
(I
really
don't know what else to call
it,
Bildung
per
haps; English
is rather skittish about claims to cultural
refinement).
..
the
role that
my
formation,
which has been rather
more on
the humanities side
than
on
the sciences side
(an
undergraduate major
in literature and
philos
ophy,
I
originally
intended to
become
a
novelist),
has
played
in
my size-up
and-solve
anthropologizing
is,
I
think,
worthy
of some
reflection.
What is a
Flaubert
manque
or,
as someone
has less
kindly suggested,
a
faux
Henry
James
doing
in such
a
cold-fact
discipline? Except
that it is not
a
cold-fact
discipline,
and it should not
aspire
to become one.
Gaining
some sort of entree into various
peoples'
various
ways
of
being-in-the
world demands
not
only
that
you
have a
reasonably
distinct
sensibility
yourself
but also that
you
have some
idea of what that
sensibility
is. This
not a
job
for the disembodied
observer,
and the
methodologically
overpre
pared
need not
apply.
It is the encounter?sometimes the
collision,
occa
sionally
an
embrace,
often
a
confusion,
a
nonplus,
or a near
miss?between
your
sense of how matters
stand, how,
as we
say,
things
should
go,
and the
sense
of those whom
you
are
struggling
to
understand that
provides
the
basis for whatever account of their lives
you
are
able to
give.
The most im
portant
instruments of cultural
anthropologists
are not
tape
recorders
or
video
cameras?as
valuable
as
they
and other technical aids
(polls, experi
ments,
formal
models) may
be?but
in-wrought perceptions.
It is
on
their
ability
to
entangle
those
perceptions
somehow with the
equally
cultural,
equally in-wrought perceptions
of the
people they
are
studying
that their
analytic
reach,
their
power
of witness
depends.
This
is,
as
all sorts of
people
with rather
larger
ambitions for the social
sciences will be
quick
to tell
you,
dangerous
doctrine. It raises the threat of
subjectivism,
of
relativism,
of
particularism,
of
a
general
failure to
produce
robust and reliable real-world
knowledge.
It turns us
away
from that shib
boleth of
shibboleths,
the scientific
method,
toward an
unregulated
intu
itionism; away
from the
promise
of a
true,
systematic, view-from-nowhere,
prediction-making, program-producing
Science of Man. It substitutes
va
grant insights
and sheer
assertions,
produces
a
cacophony
of
opinions.
Rather like
literature,
actually.
It is
no
part
of
my argument
to
deny
that these
are
real
perils, though
both their
immediacy
and their
prevalence
are
commonly exaggerated by
the attack battalions of
aggressive
scientism. Instead of
attempting
to over
come
the
perils
or
hold them at
bay by appealing
to
inappropriate
ideals,
ideals drawn from
differently
directed
enterprises, operating
under differ
ently
formed
conditions,
and with different sorts of
resources,
we
should
30
III
A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE
confront them head-on
as an
ingredient
in the work
as
such. If it is
an entan
glement
of forms of life?the rub of various sensibilities
against
one an
other?that we're
dealing
with,
then
something
rather closer
to
grasping
a
point
than
abstracting
a
law would
seem to be involved. I
once
put this,
in
something
I
wrote,
in terms of the
anthropologist's reading
other
people's
texts over
their shoulders
{Interpretation
452).
It makes the whole
enterprise
sound
a
lot
more
surreptitious
than it
is,
and less
intrusive,
but that is about
the size of it. And to read
over
shoulders
effectively, conceptual, procedural,
even
substantive
borrowing
from
literary
studies would
seem
essential. The
dependence
on
images
and
figurations,
what
Coleridge
called
"speculative
instruments,"
from the natural sciences that has
marked,
and continues to
mark,
the social sciences needs
to be
supplemented by
the introduction of
ones
from humanistic research and
analysis?symbol, meaning, metaphor,
plot, story,
motif,
interpretation?if
we are
actually
to
engage
our
subject
rather than
merely
attack it. So I have for some time now
been
arguing.
But
this
perceiving
of other
people's perceivings,
this
reading
of other
people's
readings,
this
texting
of other
people's
texts turns
out,
as one
might expect,
to
have
complexities
and uncertainties?dare I
say
aporia??of
its
own.
Replac
ing
Natur- with Geistes- before
wissenschaft
doesn't in itself
get you
all that far.
To be less
gnomic,
I turn to some concrete
examples
of the troubles I've
seen. Some
years ago
I wrote a
small
piece
on
the Balinese
cockfight,
which
I made bold to
compare
in a
suggestive, allusory,
en
passant
sort of
way
to
some
classics of Western
literature,
most
notably
Macbeth and Lear
("Deep
Play").
It
was
my
notion that
some
themes of these
tragedies by Shakespeare
were
caught
up,
in their
own
way
and with their
own
inflections?that
is,
Balinese inflections?in the
cockfight.
I won't rehearse the
argument
here
or
try
to defend its
cogency. That,
it turns
out,
is
altogether
unnecessary,
be
cause what set off
a
fair
volley
of criticism was not whether what I said about
Bali
or
Shakespeare
had
any
merit
(the
Shakespeare
stuff
concerning
Mac
beth and Lear came from
Northrop Frye,
so how could it be
wrong?)
but the
sheer
effrontery
I
displayed
in
daring
to
speak
about them in the
same
breath. What
on
earth,
as one recent
enrage?the
author of
a
work deli
cately
called How
Literary
Critics and Social Theorists Are
Murdering
Our
Past?put
it,
could
possibly justify comparing
"a
cheap
low-life blood
sport
on
which foolish
young
men
wager
far
more
money
than
they
could sensi
bly
afford"
to such monumental
expressions
of the immense and universal
Western
spirit? Only,
he
thought,
a
settled nihilistic intent to undermine
morality, spread
relativism,
and "use the bizarre and exotic to destabilize
Western cultural
assumptions" (Windschuttle,
"Ethnocentrism"
7, 8).
This sort of moral
panic, authority
at
bay,
can
be left to take
care of it
self. But
a
similar reaction?that what I
am
trying
to do
by bringing
West
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
|||
31
ern
imaginative
creations into
proximity
with those of the South Seas
or
North Africa is to blur the line between barbarism and civilization
to
the
advantage
of barbarism?was stimulated
by
a
rather more
developed piece
I
did,
also awhile
back,
on
Balinese cremation ceremonies
("Found").
Here
the matter is more
complicated,
and
more
telling,
about
exactly
where it is
the
procedure pinches,
about
just
what it is that
brings
on
all the wrath and
accusation. So it is worth
perhaps
a
bit
more
discussion.
Shortly
before he died in
1973,
Lionel
Trilling,
whom I knew
slightly
and
much
admired,
wrote a
typically winding, ruminating piece
for the Times
Literary Supplement concerning
the difficulties he had
experienced
in teach
ing Jane
Austen to
today's college
students. The differences between their
sensibilities and
hers,
their times and
hers,
their
language
and hers were so
great
as to make the whole
enterprise perilous
at
best?"problematic."
Re
ferring
to some
work I had done
on
the Balinese
sense
of self
as
well
as to a
strange
Icelandic
saga
he had been
reading concerning
a
murderous
jealousy
among
chiefs
brought
on
by
a
misdirected
gift
of
bears,
he wondered
just
how far
large
cultural
gaps
could be
bridged by reading, by writing, by
the
free
play
of the moral
imagination
no matter how liberal. When
a
couple
of
years
further
on I was invited to
give
a
memorial lecture in his honor at Co
lumbia
University,
I
sought
to
address this issue
by
an
example
of
my
own,
of
a
gap
even
wider than that which
yawns
between
sophomores
and Austen?
the
gap
between the treatment of widows in our
society
and their immola
tion on
their husbands' funeral
pyres
in
nineteenth-century
Bali
("Found").
Borrowing
a
rhetorically
inverted
phrase,
"found in
translation,"
from
the title of
a
James
Merrill
poem,
a
phrase expressing
the remoteness to
him of his familial
past,
I
quoted
a
long
passage
from
a
Danish
sea
trader
describing
such
an
immolation
(which
as a
further
irony,
I
might
remark
now,
took
place just
where that terrorist bomb went off a
few months
ago).
The
description
was written around 1850. This
man,
alternately
charmed
and
appalled,
drawn in and
disarranged by
what he
saw,
recounted the
event at
great
length
and in
very
fine
detail,
as
though
to convince himself
that it
was
all
really happening.
The
enormous,
gaudy
funeral tower
"rising
on
crimson
pillars
to a
finely
carved coffin
shaped
like
a
lion." The
swarm
ing
crowd,
friendly
and
laughing?"They
looked little
enough
like
sav
ages."
The
great
mile-long procession, complete
with
music,
dancing,
and
elaborate
filigreed offerings
to the
gods.
The entranced and immobile
Veda-chanting priest.
The three women?mirror in
one
hand,
comb in the
other?plunging
"for affections' sake and in the
name
of
religion"?into
the flames. "It was a
sight
never to be
forgotten,"
he
concludes,
with
a
sud
den turn from fascination to
horror,
from the bewitchment of the drama
to
the
reality
of what it
was
enacting.
32
II
A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE
It
brought
to one's heart
a
strange feeling
of thankfulness that
one
belonged
to a
civilization
which,
for all its
faults,
is merciful and tends
more
and
more
to
emancipate
women
from
deception
and
cruelty.
To British rule is due
the fact that this foul
plague
is
extirpated
in
India,
and doubdess the Dutch
have,
ere
now,
done
as
much for Bali. Works like these
are the credentials
by
which the Western civilization makes
good
its
right
to
conquer
and hu
manize barbarous
races
and to
replace
ancient civilizations.
(Helms 66)
It
was for
this,
as I
put it,
moral
instability,
that wild and
nervous
swing
ing
between
"morning-of-the-world," "island-of-the-gods"
romanticism
and
self-congratulatory
colonial
paternalism
(what
Gayatri Spivak
once
de
scribed,
in another
context,
as
white men's
saving
brown
women
from
brown
men),
that I
quoted
this
passage,
as
well
as,
I
admit,
for its force
as
what I called
a moment
ago
"the
power
of witness." I enforced this
point
with other
examples:
Merrill's
uneasy,
counternostalgic
poem,
the
play
of
discordant
memory
in Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!,
Paul Fussell's
study
of
the Great War
poets
enclosing
trenches and shell holes in
pastoral
tropes.
I
wanted
to
demonstrate the
complexity,
the loss of
certitude,
and the
gain
of
dimension that
connecting disparate
sensibilities,
striking
them off
against
one
another,
brings
into
being.
The difficult
awareness
that is found in
translation,
the
ethnographer's
craft.
Now,
it would not be fair to
say
that this
argument
failed
to
register.
But
there has
again
been resistance in some
quarters,
most
especially
from the
imaginatively challenged,
to
seeing anything
but
savagery
and
primitivism
in the cremation and
anything
but
perversity
and subversive
purpose
in
taking
it
seriously
as a
disclosive
expression?a cry,
as Stevens
once so ex
actly
said of
poetry,
of its
own occasion. To
quote again
that moral scold
whom the
cockfight
so
upended, simply
because he can
be counted
on to
say
what I want him to
say:
"It is hard to understand what
they thought
they
were
doing."
(He
means
"he,"
that
is, me;
but he widens his
charge
to
anthropologists generally.)
How,
for
instance,
could
they
have
imagined they
were
assisting
those
they study by encouraging
some of their most
destructive
myths
and
practices?
How,
for
instance,
could it have
helped underdeveloped
coun
tries accumulate
capital
for social and industrial
development by portray
ing
the reckless
gambling
of
cockfighting
as the
symbolic equivalent
of some of the
great
classics of Western culture? How could it have
advanced that essential
part
of
modernization,
the
emancipation
of
women,
by glamorizing
barbaric
misogynist practices
like suttee? What
value could there have been in
methodology
more
concerned
to com
pare
itself to the
interpretation
of
poetry
than to make criticism of in
digenous illiteracy
and
superstition?
It is hard to
escape
the conclusion
[he concludes]
that cultural
anthropology,
relativism, multiculturalism,
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
|||
33
far from
being
vehicles of intercultural communication and
harmony,
are
instead demonstrations of the moral
vanity
and
self-indulgence
of their
Western authors.
(Windschuttle,
"Ethnocentrism"
12)
Well, you
can see
the
problem. Merely
in
presenting
untoward,
out-of
category
material,
material not
easily
bent to
proprietous shape,
one risks
being
branded
an
enemy
of
progress,
or worse.
But
despite
all the holler
ing,
the fear here is not
really
of
"indigenous illiteracy
and
superstition"
or
the
glamorization
of barbarism. The most vain and
self-indulgent
of multi
culturalized Western authors
(and
I am not the
worst),
smitten
by
exotic
customs
and dubious of some
of
our
own,
is not
going
to
try
to sell widow
burning
to
anyone.
And the Balinese
are
neither illiterate
nor,
as
these
things
go
in the
world,
particularly profligate, misogynous,
or
supersti
tious. The fear here is that in
entangling
our own sense
of life and its "clas
sic
representations"
with
ones more
than
a
little at
angles
to it and to
them,
we
will so
weaken
our
convictions
as to make
us
unable to sustain them and
impress
them with sufficient force
on
the world at
large.
It is the
very
destabilization,
the confusion of
impulses
that
my
honest
sea
captain
felt
that in
quoting
him I wanted
my
readers to feel too.
Why
do
we
teach
Jane
Austen,
or
Icelandic
sagas,
or
Hindu funerals?
Just
that:
to wound our
complacency,
to make
us a
little less confident in and satisfied with the im
mediate deliverances of
our
here-and-now
imperious
world. Such
teaching
is indeed a
subversive business. But what it subverts is not
morality.
What
it subverts is
bluster,
obduracy,
and
a
closure to
experience.
Pride,
one
could
say,
and
prejudice.
But
enough
of the
long
ago
and far
away.
We are
right
now,
in this
country
and at this time in the
process
of
trying
to
get,
as we
say,
some sort
of handle
on a cultural formation heretofore
removed, distant, strange,
and
ominous?namely,
Islam
(on
which I have also
worked).1
We
are con
structing,
live and in real time?rather
hurriedly,
as
though
we
had better
get
on
with it after
years
of
neglect?our image
of what Muslims
think,
be
lieve, do,
and desire. Until
recently,
we
barely possessed
such an
image
be
yond vague
and vacant notions about
stallions, harems, deserts,
and
dervishes and
some
schoolbook
legends
about the Crusades?an
ignorance
immortally
summed
up
by
the Peter Arno New Yorker cartoon of
a
half
century
or so
ago
showing
a
Stetson-hatted tourist
leaning
out of his road
ster to
ask
a
turbaned
man
prostrate
in
prayer
by
the side of the road:
"Hey,
Jack,
which
way
to
Mecca?"
The
reason
for all the rush and for the dimensions it is
taking
is,
of
course,
9/11. When it
suddenly
became
apparent
that the familiar threat
ening
other that
we
had lost with the unlooked-for
collapse
of the Soviet
34
I
A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE
Union
was about to be
replaced by something
even
less well defined in our
minds;
by something
even
further removed from the
political history
of
nineteenth- and
twentieth-century
America?Communism
had,
after
all,
a
Western
pedigree
at
least,
with roots in the
Enlightenment
and the French
Revolution;
by
in fact
a
creed of
Arabs, Turks, Persians, Africans,
South
Asians,
Mongols,
and
Malays,
rather off
our
spiritual
map,
a
suffusing
anxi
ety
settled in.
What
are we Americans to think about
an
ideological competitor
of
which most of
us
know
barely
more
than the
name
and
some
plots
and
atrocities
alleged
to flow from its
teachings?
The result has been
an
avalanche of books and articles
by
historians,
journalists, political
scientists,
sociologists, anthropologists,
and
variously inspired
amateurs
designed
to
give
us a
crash
course
in,
as
the
phrase
goes, understanding
Islam.
Jihad,
a
term Americans
encountered,
if
they
encountered it at
all,
only
in dime
novels,
has become a
prime subject
of
popular
discourse. There
are
works
designed
for that elusive
figure,
the
general
reader,
on
something
called,
confusingly,
reformism
or
modernism
or
fundamentalism?now
even
Wahhabism?in
contemporary
Islam;
on
the
teachings
of the
Koran;
on
Sufi
brotherhoods;
on Islamic
law,
Islamic
education;
on
the Sunni-Shi'i
split;
on
the
deep meaning
of the veil. And
so
forth and
so
on,
into some
extraordinary
corners indeed.
There
is,
of
course,
a
long
tradition?sometimes called
orientalism,
sometimes Middle Eastern studies?of Western
scholarship
on
Islam,
most
of it
European,
most of it arcane. But we are now at the start of
something
entirely
new: the formation of
public-square, society-wide
discussions?
half
apology,
half
debate,
and riddled with
grand
assertions?of how
we are
to think and feel about this sudden
apparition
on our
cultural and
political
horizon. We're
going
to be able
to watch
up
close and while it
happens
the
building
up
in our
minds of an
enduring image
or set of
images
of what
Islam and Muslims are all
about,
just
as we were
able
to
watch,
at a
certain
remove,
the
holding
of such
an
image
or set of
images
of Bali and the Bali
nese in the mind of
our
rapt
and troubled
sea
captain.
The difference is
that this time the exotic is
coming
to
us,
and
we are
less well
placed
to dis
cipline
its
expressions.
The evidence is all around
us: in heated discussions
of "the clash of
civilizations,"
of "what went
wrong"
with Islamic culture
(after
the
Renaissance,
why
no
Reformation,
let alone
an
Enlightenment?);
in cliche-ridden TV
biographies
of
Muhammed;
and in news
magazine
pieces
on the
pilgrimage,
the
fast, fatwas,
or
houris in
paradise.
Perhaps
one of the
most
striking
indications that this
image building
is
going
on,
that it is not
only
an extensive
process
but also
an
intensely
con
tested
and,
again, thoroughly destabilizing
one?that
is,
destabilizing
to
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
|||
35
us?is
provided by
a recent seriocomic
affaire
litteraire that involved
just
the sort of
entanglement
of
disparate
sensibilities,
cross-cutting ways
of
ap
proaching
a text and
reaching
into its
world,
that I have been
talking
about.
I mean
the storm?or
perhaps
it
was
only
a
cloudburst,
and
a
seeded
one at
that?over the
teaching
of the Koran at
the
University
of North
Carolina,
Chapel
Hill.
Well,
it wasn't
exactly teaching
the
Koran;
it
was
merely,
once
more,
ex
posing
it without
warning
labels and weather advisories
to
vulnerable
minds?that is to
say,
to
college
freshmen. In the summer of
2002,
driven
apparently by
a
rising
concern to
understand
Islam,
the
university assigned
a
translation of the
early,
so-called
Meccan,
verses
of the Koran?those
that
supposedly
initiated the
prophecy?to
its
incoming
class.
Criticism,
intense and
unbridled,
appeared
almost
immediately:
from Franklin Gra
ham,
the
son
of the Christian
evangelist;
from Bill
O'Reilly,
the resident
Mencken of the Fox network
(he
said it
was like
teaching
Mein
Kampf);
from,
inevitably,
William F.
Buckley,
Jr.; from,
just
about
as
inevitably,
the
Wall Street
Journal
and the
Philadelphia Daily
News and various other
news
papers, columnists,
and soi-disant
guardians
of the
public
conscience. The
ACLU made
nervous
separationist
noises. The
university
was
sued
by
a
fundamentalist Christian
group,
normally
concerned with anti-abortion
activities,
on
the
grounds
that it
was
unconstitutional for
a
public
univer
sity
to
require
students to
study
a
specific religion.
And the state
legislature
voted,
ex
post facto,
to
bar
funding
for the
project.
The suit was
eventually
thrown out
by
the
courts;
the
university
made the
assignment optional;
and
the
enterprise proceeded,
and
apparently
is
proceeding,
still
ringed by
de
bate and
protest (see Falwell; Park; Robinson).
Our interest in all this is not that the
controversy provides yet
another
example
of hard-shell
provincialism
and its
exploitation by sophisticated
reactionaries but that it
is,
again,
a
complex
and contentious
literary
en
gagement.
The main
complaint
was
that in
selecting
the
early, lyrical
"Meccan"
verses,
composed
when the
Prophet
was
just starting
out,
when
he was
powerless
and
isolated,
rather than the
later, fire-and-brimstone,
jihad-breathing
"Medinan"
ones
composed
when,
regrouping
in
exile,
he
was
organizing
an
armed
return,
the translator
was
presenting
an
overly
at
tractive,
even
seductive
image
of Islam.
John
Walker Lindh was men
tioned;
so was
the British shoe bomber. The
problem
was not so
much
with Islam in itself
as
with how it was
represented,
how it is to be
brought
into
contact,
like
cockfights,
immolations,
or
Jane Austen,
with
our own
understandings?"found
in translation."
I could continue this discussion with
a
consideration of the relations
among narration,
narrative
poetry,
and revelation in the
Koran;
of the
36
III
A STRANGE ROMANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE
nature of the Koran
as a text
among
texts and
as
spoken
word;
of the lin
guistic
resources
of the Arabic
language
and their
literary employment.
But
that's for the
future,
as our
encounter,
not so
much with "Islam"
as
with
Muslims,
develops,
however it
develops.
It is clear that
merely listening
to
other voices in other
rooms
saying
other
things
in other accents can
be
a
perilous
business,
liable to confuse
our
emotions,
derail
our
judgments,
and
leave
us
both rattled and
engrossed.
But that is what
listening
to the voices
of
our own
literary
tradition,
Macbeth
or
Merrill,
Lear
or
Faulkner,
brings
on as
well: the
sense
that there is
more to
things
than first
appears
and that
our
reactions
are
where
we
start,
not
where
we
end.
We
may
indeed end almost
anywhere.
NOTE
=
lA number of
sentences in the
following paragraphs
are more or less identical to ones
found in
my general
review of recent works on
Islam in The New York Review
of
Books,
"Which
Way
to Mecca?" That review
was
written after this talk
was
given,
at a time when
I did not
expect
that
it,
the
talk,
would be
published.
I
apologize
for the
self-plagiarism.
WORKS CITED
-
Arno,
Peter. Cartoon. New Yorker 9
Apr.
1938: 18.
Falwell,
Jerry. "University
of North Carolina
Requires
Islam Studies."
Jesus
and
Todays
Issues: Church and State. 2002. 13
Aug.
2003
<http://www.jesusjournal.com/articles/
publish/article_259.html>.
Geertz,
Clifford.
"Deep Play:
Notes
on the Balinese
Cockfight."
Geertz,
Interpretation
412-53.
-.
"Found in Translation." Local
Knowledge.
New York:
Basic,
1983. 36-54.
-.
The
Interpretation of
Cultures. New York:
Basic,
1973.
-.
"Which
Way
to Mecca?" New York Review
of
Books 13
June
2003: 27-29.
Helms,
L. V
Pioneering
in the Far East.
London,
1882.
Park,
Michael Y.
"University's
Quran
Reading
Stirs
Controversy."
6
July
2002. Au
darya Fellowship.
IndiaDivine Communications. 13
Aug.
2003
<http://www
.audarya-fellowship.eom/showflat/cat/WorldNews/25607/9/collapsed/5/o/l>.
Robinson,
B. A.
University Dispute
re
Islamic Book. Ontario Consultants
on
Religious
Tol
erance. 12
Aug.
2002. 13
Aug.
2003
<http://www.religioustolerance.org/isl_unc.htm>.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.
"Can the Subaltern
Speak? Speculations
on Widow Sacri
fice."
Wedge
7-8
(1985):
120-30.
Trilling,
Lionel.
"Why
We Read
Jane
Austen." Times
Literary Supplement
Mar. 1976:
250-52.
Windschuttle,
Keith. "The Ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz." New Criterion 21.2
(2002):
5-12.
-.
The
Killing of History:
How
Literary
Critics and Social Theorists Are
Murdering
Our
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Free,
1997.

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