Relatively speaking. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

To the Editors:

Keith Windschuttle's contributions to your magazine have often proved edifying, but his denunciation of Clifford Geertz ("The ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz" October 2002) so egregiously misrepresents Geertz's work and sensibility that it cannot pass unchallenged.

In common with most cultural anthropologists, Geertz practices what is sometimes awkwardly called "cognitive relativism." This version of relativism holds that cultures can best be understood by assessing behaviors and beliefs within their total context. Thus, to take an outre example of the sort that Windschuttle favors, if one wants to comprehend human sacrifice as practiced by the Aztecs, one must study the internal framework of understanding within which such behavior was permissible or necessary.

To understand, of course, is not necessarily to pardon. Cognitive relativism does not lead inexorably to moral relativism, the view that any system of values is as good as any other. I'll take Windschuttle's word for it that moral relativists exist in anthropology, although I've never had occasion to meet one. If anything, moralizing comes all too easily to contemporary anthropologists.

Geertz himself has consistently argued against the fashionable claim that different cultures constitute "different worlds"--mutually unintelligible webs of action and meaning. Windschuttle gerrymanders his references to make Geertz seem responsible for every smirk and self-indulgence of postmodernism. More often than not, however, Geertz has been on the receiving end of post-modern critical bombast, indicted for his humanism and his firm belief that the Other is, despite the obstacles, ultimately knowable. True, Geertz has little time for the conventional pieties of parochial minds, but in this he differs little from other great Western thinkers. "If we wish to be able capaciously to judge, as of course we must" Geertz writes in one the essays that Windschuttle distorts so relentlessly, "we need to make ourselves able capaciously to see." I find it hard to believe that the educated readers of The New Criterion would find this assertion objectionable.

 
Michael F. Brown 
Lambert Professor of Anthropology 
Williams College 
Williamstown, MA 01267 

Keith Windschuttle replies