Work · Sociology & Social Theory
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
Essays on interpretation across the disciplines: “Blurred Genres” describes how the social sciences turn to the analogies of game, drama and text; others treat common sense, art and law as cultural systems and ask what it means to grasp “the native’s point of view”.
Introduction
Local Knowledge (1983) collects essays written in the decade after The Interpretation of Cultures. Its title comes from the closing essay on law, which compares Islamic, Indic and Malay ideas of fact and law as forms of “local knowledge”. “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought” observes that social scientists increasingly borrow from the humanities and explain social life by analogy with games, drama and texts. “From the Native’s Point of View” asks how an anthropologist can understand how people in Java, Bali and Morocco conceive of the self without claiming to share their inner experience. Other essays treat common sense and art as cultural systems. The volume carried interpretive anthropology into law, history and literary studies.
Connections
Builds on
- The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays1973 · Clifford Geertz
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