Local Knowledge - Clifford Geertz

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Geertz writes that "life is translation and we are all lost in it," proposing that ethnographers should seek to see through glosses, not behind them (49).  He describes the process of gaining insider perspective or ownership, transformation, or construal of the imaginational as changing the immediacies of one form of life into the metaphors of another.    He calls this cross-cultural and cross-historical accessibility where "the deeply different can be deeply known without becoming any less different; the enormously distant enormously close without becoming any less far away" (48).  He calls for "continuous dialectical tacking" between the local and global simultaneously where the whole and parts and conceived through each other, which seems to be a nod towards a form of collaboration between ethnography and narrative research (69).  He refers to experience-near and experience-far concepts with the ethnographer needing to oscillate between the two (58).  The realistic and appropriate goal of the ethnographer is to be able to construe modes of expression or symbolic systems (70).  He draws attention to convergent data, showing how the anthropological focus on "groups of people engaged with one another in multiple ways, makes it possible to turn what looks like a mere collection of heterogeneous material into a mutually reinforcing network of social understandings" (156).  All these thoughts support a picture of what he calls interpretive ethnography, which acknowledges the role and perspective of the researcher in ethnographic work. It is not possible to present an objective form of understanding of a group of people, but neither is it useful to accept relativism as a paralysing force.  It is most important to recognize what the differences and similarities reveal or make possible to know about being human and how positionality and experience-distance offer new perspectives and forms of action.