Shifting Aims, Moving Targets: On the Anthropology of Religion
Author(s)
Geertz, Clifford
Abstract
The issue here, how we are to name and classify cultural formations in other societies that are at once broadly similar to ones in our own and oddly sui generis, strange and different, is quite general in anthropology: a recurrent crux. Whether it is ‘the family’, or ‘the market’, or ‘the state’, or ‘law’, or ‘art’, or ‘politics’, or ‘status’, deciding just what goes into the category, as we say, cross-culturally, and why it does so, is an essentially contested matter, a circular discussion that stirs polemic, never ends, and only marginally, and then rather diagonally, advances. The usual tack is to begin with our own, more or less unexamined, everyday sense of what ‘the family’, ‘the state’, or, in the case at hand, ‘religion’ comes to, what counts for us as kinship, or government, or faith, and what, family-resemblance style, looks … well … resemblant, amongst those whose life-ways we are trying to portray.
