Review of Clifford Geertz' Available Light (AL)
_______________________________________2000, 1st. ed, PUP, hard bound, 271 pages including index. -
1December2000 - 1November2001
By Doug Renselle

Reviewer penchants accoutrement:

We use wingdings and some rich text format (rtf) fonts in this review. You should be able to see this wingdings smiley face: J, and this rtf quantized 'o:' ¤.

Infrequently reader, in this review, when you see n¤, n¤r, and n¤t in our review below, we intend a quantum logic of subjective negation. Also, infrequently, you will see our use of words containing our quantized 'o,' e.g., 'n¤vel.' First, and sporadic other, occurrences of these Quantonics-unique language remediations shall be linked to their quantonic descriptions.

Our use of double quote marked words highlights uniquenesses and shows our respect. Our use of single quote marks of words and phrases depicts our locally declining respect for select classical concepts and disciplines. Too, we use single quote marks on formerly double quote-marked embedded or nested sentences included in larger quotations. We use italics on words and phrases which are out of language context, or terms which we wish you would consider their variant flavors, fullness, and potential notions as we have used them — a sort of Wittgensteinian emphasis.

We use bold, color, hyperlinks, ellipses (…), and brackets [] to abbreviate, alter, highlight, extend, or comment quoted text, and we state each quote's page number and emphasis use. Otherwise all intraquote parentheses, quotes, italics, emphases, underlines, etc. are Geertz'.

Links to related material:

Shweder Letter Quantonics Sharing his Biography
Shweder Review of Available Light, from 24Nov2000 issue of Science
Martin Ryder's page on Geertz See especially — Malhotra, Yogesh. (1994). Yogesh's page is simply excellent and covers at a higher level many issues addressed quantumesquely in greater detail in Quantonics.

We found a link to Professor David Adams' syllabus at Norfolk State University, but Adams appears no longer at this URL. Search for 'quantum' at that link. Also try searches for "Geertz quantum." Many connections here. Adams apparently shares our intuitions of quantum Geertz. If you know where we can contact him, please apprise.

Anthropology: A 'scientific' study of origins, behaviors, and varieties of physical, social, and cultural evolutions of human beings.

"We are in It and It is in us." Eugen Herrigel, paraphrased.¹
"We are in Quality and Quality is in us." Robert M. Pirsig, paraphrased.²
"Our minds are in the world and the world is in our minds." P. 205. Clifford Geertz, paraphrased.³
"Our language is in our context and our context is in our language." Ludwig Wittgenstein, paraphrased.⁴
"We are in cultures and cultures are in us." Clifford Geertz, liberally quantum interpreted and quantum paraphrased.⁵
"We are autonomously in quantum coherence and quantum coherence is in all our autonomies." Mae-wan Ho, paraphrased.⁶
"Samsara is in nirvana. Nirvana is in samsara." Madhyamaka Karika 25.19, paraphrased.²⁴

"We, both quantum autonomously while quantum co-here-ntly, are animate in reality and reality is animate in us."
Doug (borrowing from, extending, and quantum embellishing quotes above) - 4Oct2001.

Reviewer Caveats:

We are n¤t anthropologists. We are n¤t experts in anthropology, sociology, humanities, history, n¤r ethnology. Our interests arise from our local perspective of how Anthropology, as an infant "soft" science, appears so much more naturally quantum scientific than other "hard" sciences do. Could we, we would answer a question, "Why is Anthropology apparently more quantum intuitive in its cultural study and research modes than currently as-taught hard science is in its fundamental methods?"

N¤r are we clerics. We reviewed William James' last book, Some Problems of Philosophy, but we have not read thoroughly n¤r studied deeply his other works. We follow Geertz' references to specific areas of James' Varieties of Religious Experience (VoRE) in order to review Chapter VIII. We see James in a much Different Light than Geertz appears to. James, to us, is a quantum Neo sapiens precursor. Geertz appears unaware of James' radical conversion from monism to pluralism during latter years of his life, and countless semantic and hermeneutic affects of that conversion on James' works. Succinctly, in our view, readers may not peruse VoRE as classical fundamentalists would and expect to fully exploit James' intended, more quantum, perceptual memetics.

Though, in all of Available Light Geertz uses "quantum" only one time, in this important review, we promote our quantum heuristics confidently. While we adhere our own quantum sensibilities we must simultaneously acknowledge presence, in all our work, of real quantum uncertainty. Therefore it is crucial that we offer our review comments as qualitatively descriptive and n¤t classically normative. We use 'is,' n¤t as an inanimate, classically-latched, normative assignment mean, but as an evolving Planck rate quantum copulum. Infrequently, to emphatically distinguish our quantum, from classical 'is,' we may parley 'issi.' Our negatives, as we apprise above, are mostly subjective. We base our comments upon accepted, though sometimes still conjectural, physial percepts (Baggott, Bohm, Bohr, d'Espagnat, Ho, Howard, Josephson, et al.), and upon empirical, quantum instrumentalist (i.e., memes as "tools"), and relentlessly evolving outcomes from countless journal (Nature, Science, Physics Today and APS' Letters, et al.) documented quantum experiments.

Reviewer's Semantic: 'anthropology' —

Anthropo- is a multi-syllabic prefix signifying human beings — sapiens wise — of genus Homo. -ology is a multi-syllabic suffix whose classical scientific semantic is, "…objective, ordered study of…" So anthropology means classical study of human beings. Ostensibly all anthropology is 'scientific.' We infer then all anthropologists, ideally sharing the enlightenment's 'scientific' doctrine assume they must study humans classically, objectively. What does that mean?

It means, to us, that humans must be studied (observed) as objects, and that observation must proceed unilaterally, observer (anthropologist/investigator) watching observed (informants and target-culture) in a classically ideal, unilateral fashion. During observation, an anthropologist collects property-esque data about informants and cultures. An anthropologist collects said data on a know-ledge. To retain observational discipline, an anthropologist must keep a one-way semi-silvered, "I can sense you, but you cannot wholly sense me," mirror-wall between self and informants. As the investigator, s-he disjoins reason from passion, denigrating latter, while also disjoining theory from action, denigrating latter. We call this classical barrier, "SOM's wall." Experts call this particular 'scientific' method, "objective observation." Its anthropological father, as far as we know, is Franz Boas. Boas was 'enlightened.' Boas' protégés (Mead, et al.) portaged this 'method' through most of Earth's 20^th century. Go, for example, to any university bookstore and pick up a text on anthropology, and you will find this methodology pontificated.

Geertz shows much discomfort with this approach, in Available Light. And for good reason. How can one adeptly 'study' anything without partially becoming what one is studying, and vice versa? How can one remain ideally separate from one's informants and their local cultures and yet understand them well enough to say one has a modicum of expertise?

As Pirsig pointed out so cogently regarding 20^th century methods of psychiatry, paraphrased, "Modern psychiatric practice insists that one who assesses insanity may not know experientially what it is." Let's repeat that sentence substituting anthropology for psychiatry: "Modern [enlightened] anthropologic practice insists that one who assesses a culture may not know experientially what it is." And, indeed that is what Boas' methods impose. Geertz coalesces a similar assessment, "Anthropology, one of whose vocations, at least, is to locate…demarcations, to discriminate…breaks and describe…continuities, has fumbled with [charting demarcations] from the beginning, and fumbles with it still." Chapter XI, p. 248. (Our ellipses, brackets.)

Left there, we might only assess Geertz as a classicist, fundamentally admitting an apparent global anthropological truth. Rather, he makes a quantum end run with anthropology's fumble, "Whatever we might wish, or regard as enlightenment, the severalty of culture abides and proliferates, even amidst, indeed in response to, the powerfully connecting forces of modern manufacture, finance, travel, and trade. The more things come together, the more they remain apart: the uniform world is not much closer than the classless society." Chapter XI, p. 248. We interpret Geertz' words in Quantum Light. We intuit his telling us, "SOM utopia is an inappropriate goal, and quantum reality will prevent us from ever achieving it. Why? Classical, 'enlightened' utopia 'is' exclusive monolithic state-icity, and quantum reality "issi" inclusive, absolute, relentless, unending heterolithic-heterophasic change."

But what really appears to be happening in anthropology? Geertz uses his own showing and telling rhetoric and prose to describe what he thinks is happening: irony, fiction, ambiguity, uncertainty, plurality, multiply-centered, etc. In our view, Geertz' use of these terms uncovers his own intuitions and instincts that anthropology cannot be practiced as a dogmatic, factitious, provincial, classical, parochial, objective discipline.

Indeed, with that adjectivally-refreshed mindset one may ask fecund questions: "Is a psychiatrist who has not experienced, vis-à-vis observed, personal insanity qualified to assess another's sanity?" (Pirsig asked that one. Bravo!) Analogously, "Is an anthropologist who has not experienced, vis-à-vis observed, a culture qualified to describe it?" And to not-so-subtly uncloak implicit specification of subjects' ineptnesses in those two prior questions, "If a Morgue and Staley stockbroker knows how to make money trading stock, why would he ever be brokering it?" We offer these queries as hallmarks of a kind of sophist paralogical irony which (we think) Geertz proffers, "Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery." Chapter II, p. 29.

Why is Geertz experiencing so much discomfort with current as-practiced anthropology? Why is he using those odd words and phrases to describe his own experiences as an anthropologist? Our answer is simple: SOM! SOM's classical thing-king methods.

Geertz appears to us as a n¤vel anthropologist who — akin philosophers Henri Louis Bergson, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, possibly Alfred North Whitehead, and more than 100 years earlier Johann Georg Hamann — mid/late of life found themselves in SOM's logical detention center, felt discomfited, and commenced their own self-architected extractions, quantum leaps if you will, out of it.

Why is Geertz using, as Pirsig says, "…a most sparkling rhetoric⁷…" to describe his "ironic, fictional, ambiguous, imbalanced, disequilibriated, indistinct, noisily introspective, multiply-defined, hazy, suffused, turbulent, unclear, open, closure unattainable, discomposed, uncertain, erratic, uncertainty principled, disparate, conflicting⁸, uncertain surety, double-edged, acausal, ineradicably imprecise, deprovincialized, unsystematic, touching-faith, panoptical, morally asymmetric⁸, quixotic, incorrigible, partially truthed⁸, complicit, et al.," quantum memes which are entirely and extensibly complementary classical mythos' more enclosed methods of thought? We think Geertz may be one of 20^th century's and Millennium III's first intuitive quantum anthropologists! We think he is an exemplar precursor for Millennium III's imminent n¤vel discipline which we call "quantum anthropology!" We choose to say with great confidence, "Geertz has already commenced touching quantum faith, with pinches of individual and evolving intellectual, social, biological, and inorganic autonomies all in multiversal quantum (vis-à-vis purely social) cohesion."

Given all that, you, reader, may understand how our review of Geertz' Available Light avalanched to a better part of a year's work and 85 soul wrought pages!

Available Light HotMemes™ -

Classical Anti Anti-Relativism Abdicates Semantic Value
Classical Causation Drives Out Awareness and Thought
Evolution Imputes Natural Action and Change
What does di versity mean?
The Glass Bead Game
A Bit CRude as Binaries
Whatings inexactly are we meanings?
Cultural Interrelationship Noncommutativity
There is No Everything to Know
Scientism is Mostly Just Bluff
One May Not Bootstrap Limited Knowledge to Complete Knowledge
One Where
Better Wins!
Kuhn is a Threat!
He Had Prayed for Rain and Got a Flood
Tear Down Their Walls
Society Is Incapable of Making Individuals Free
In a Coherent Society Such Conflicts Do Not Exist?
Culture Is Nondesignable! Why? Culture Evolves!
Emotion is Crux!
Differences Comprise Similarity

Summary of our review:

Geertz tells and shows us that current, start of Millennium III, anthropology embroils itself in several major riddles:

• whether, when viewed either classically or relativistically, anthropology's glass is either half-full or half-empty, assuming quantitatively anthropologists can know precisely where half full is,
• whether a recent troublesome merger twixt both anthropologists and historians is problematic,
• whether we need new anthropological ways of thinking,
• whether we need new cultural-political ways of thinking, (e.g., apropos 911 and our current dilemmas)
• whether current linguistics and language theories are impediments to better thinking,
• whether we need new linguistics and new language,
• whether nation is perimeter,
• whether perimeter demarcates classical bipolarity or Gestalt figure ground,
• whether perimeter "means" what we classically 'always' assumed that it means,
• whether nation is state,
• whether state is nation,
• whether culture is nation,
• whether nation is culture,
• whether culture is consensus,
• whether consensus is culture,
• and so on…

His insights are potent! His first riddle illuminates modern anthropology's greatest threat: continued application of 'the enlightenment's' objective classical thinking in anthropological studies. His second riddle uncloaks a provocative solution to his first riddle, which Geertz (only partially) and some of his peers appear to fail to perceive: anthropological reality may not be adequately studied quantitatively as classical property-esque either/or excluded-middle schisms, rather anthropology is better qualitatively studied using complementary both/and included-middle Value interrelationships.

Readers should also consider Geertz' second puzzle in light of one particular analogue for science. Especially consider Thomas Kuhn's notorious book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which poses a scientific analogue of Geertz' second puzzle and offers a glimmer of what such a merger can do for a family of "hard" scientific disciplines formerly trapped in puzzle one's analytic embrace.

Our review:

For those of you who want to understand modern anthropology and its young but vast underpinnings, Geertz' Available Light should become one of your dog-eared favorites in years to come.

Until we read Chapter XI of Available Light, we thought this book was very important for Millennium III people to ponder and savor. Having read Chapter XI, and juxtaposing its essence with Earth-events of September 11, 2001, we can say to you, now, near our end of this review (late October, 2001), that we think Available Light is one of Millennium III's most important and anticipative works!

"The European (and American) exceptionalism that seemed, at least to Europeans (and Americans) so plausible before 1989 — we have nation-state, and they have not — has become increasingly implausible since." Chapter XI, p. 256.

We urge our Quantonics community to ingest and acculturate Geertz' quantum anthropological epiphanies.

Geertz covers anthropology's spectrum well and he honestly and sincerely assesses its trials and tribulations, its challenges and opportunities. Geertz senses one of anthropology's major tribulations is a combination of both classical thinking/logic/reason and classical language. Geertz and some of his peers are keenly aware of classical thought's anthropologically applied limitations. Yet his peers appear to not yet tumble potential exoduses from their classical conundrums, except perhaps by persistence with more of same and some minor toe wettings in plural-parallel objective relativism — with often dyslexic rhetorical and dialectical acrobatics — embellished status quo appears anthropology's end-of-millennium-II's way to go. We see Geertz' own intuitions discounting and interrogating anthropology's unfortunate classical, hard-science-derived foundations.

To our delight, Geertz mentions Feynman, Gödel, Einstein, et al. Actually he mentions at least 195 prominent and less well-known but no less important folk. Among those we found several whom we believe offer fecund resonance with our own quantum-philosophical "modeling of nature" predilections:

• Isaiah Berlin, via his The Magus of the North⁹, a book about Johann Georg Hamann, an obscure 18^th century philosopher, who recently is becoming much less obscure.
  
  
• William James, via his life's last work, posthumously published, Some Problems of Philosophy (SPoP). James originally, until about 1870, adhered a self-admitted fundamental monism. His subsequent exposure to Charles Renouvier's works — especially Renouvier's six volume Essais de Critique Générale — converted him massively to a much more quantumesque pluralism.
  
  Geertz speaks much about James' Varieties of Religious Experience (VoRE) in Chapter VIII. It was published eight years before SPoP. Until we started our Available Light review, we knew of this text only via hearsay. James does not disappoint. Glimmers of his own quantum intuitions abound in VoRE.
  
  
• Thomas Kuhn, via his uncovering of his hesitant emergence into a prequantum realm in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SoSR) which we review nearby, and therein decipher Kuhn's several quantumesque memes. See, especially, Kuhn's Quantum Avatars.
  
  
• Alfred North Whitehead, originally a consummate mathematician, whose later philosophical development — expressed amply in his Process and Reality — came to closely align our own.
  
  
• Ludwig Wittgenstein whose later Philosophical Investigations uncovers his quasi-quantum intuitions.

Those few scholarly gentlemen, unanthro-apologetic as they are, offer n¤vel, more qualitative, pluralistic, quantum omni- and para-logical memes which can help solve Geertz' anthropological riddles. Their n¤vel memes jibe and at least partially alleviate Geertz' and his peers' classical paralogical conundrums. We attempt to demonstrate that for you, subsequently.

Could we, we would add a few favored names of our own to Geertz' extensive list.

Why would we add our own list to Geertz' Available Light list of folk who he thinks are important to anthropology? In our view various subsets of people listed above¹⁰ hold keys to nouveaux Quantum Think-king Modes (QTMs) which will bring anthropology forward as a genuine and n¤vel science and discipline, a Millennium III Phoenix arisen from ashes of antiquated Classical Thing-king Methods (CTMs). Once adopted, their memes allow anthropologists to set an example — for other "soft" disciplines — how important incipient quantum memetic upgrades are to "soft" sciences' future exegetic and exoteric successes, both political and anthropological.

As do most 'scientists,' Geertz excepted, anthropologists appear to, intra-paradigm, avoid questioning their own discipline's proto-core assumptions. Those assumptions find their antecedents in classical and passé customs of thought. For some anthropologists, cultural relativism is a new and advanced technique whose insights initiate partial mitigation of anthropology's classical ills. They appear not to understand that relativism is but a child of classicism, bearing almost all its parent's genes, except those whose spawn are plural, 'diverse,' and incommensurable, contrafactual-definite views. Using his own rhetoric, Geertz relentlessly reminds us that relativities among studied cultures remain classical (and maleficent) as long as they inure excluded-middles and their logically discrete "ethnocentric" separability. In Quantonics, we know that quantum reality is, due Heisenberg, "comtrafactual uncertain/indefinite."

Geertz' book is a collection of his papers which he presented at various times between 1968 and 1999, all but one newer than 1983. If that sounds like just another set of symposia notes, do not be fooled! Geertz' papers form neat, concise, well aligned and correlative topics and chapters in this book. Had he not forewarned us these were papers, we would just have accepted all as a good book which those of us interested in human culture and anthropology should read.

Initially, we were caught off guard by Geertz' formidable eloquence. One almost suspects him of practicing some kind of artificial intellectual Bobbi Streisand. Happily though, we quickly become aware of a fabulous rhetorician's vast vocabulary appropriately applied to his own art and its problematics^7a. Warning: Keep your quantum stages coherent and your dictionary handy!

Geertz' Available Light offers his audience a preface and 11 chapters.

His preface prepares us for a fascinating anthropological journey which essentially abhors antiquated classical anthropological techniques: their dichotomies, their 'versus' mindsets, their naïve contradictions. He speaks of one and many as monism and pluralism and tantalizes us with hints of Jamesian "compenetration." He speaks of meaning as Wittgensteinian "use."

Yet, we think, throughout his chapters he scatters classical 'meaning as defined and static' coprolitic legacies. Geertz appears to somewhat defensively keep his monism and pluralism too provincial with classicism's subject-object wall strangely, almost chaotically, somewhat sporadically present. (Were he not to do this, his more classical peers might judge him poorly?) Geertz modulates among classical, classical-relativistic, and intuitive quantum semantic "uses." Viewed naïvely, he appears to be a man for all ethnographic seasons, yet subtly, genetically, he lets you know he favors, ultimately, very quantumesque views of many cultures.

Use these intrapage links to access Geertz' Available Light chapters:

Chapter I - Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning (< 1 review page)
Chapter II - Thinking as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of Anthropological Fieldwork in the New States (4 review pages)
Chapter III - Anti Anti-Relativism (4 review pages)
Chapter IV - The Uses of Diversity (5 review pages)
Chapter V - The State of the Art, Waddling In (17 review pages)
Chapter VI - The Strange Estrangement: Charles Taylor and the Natural Sciences (2 review pages)
Chapter VII - The Legacy of Thomas Kuhn: The Right Text at the Right Time (5 review pages)
Chapter VIII - The Pinch of Destiny: Religion as Experience, Meaning, Identity, Power (16 review pages)
Chapter IX - Imbalancing Act: Jerome Bruner's Cultural Psychology (5 review pages)
Chapter X - Culture, Mind, Brain / Brain, Mind, Culture (8 review pages)
Chapter XI - The World in Pieces: Culture and Politics at the End of the Century (12 review pages)

Chapter I - pages 3-20 - Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning — A brief autobiographical sketch in which we learn Geertz' anthropological entrée was wholly serendipitous.

Geertz' academic emergence is pure quantum — stochastic ensemble preconditions affecting both his and his wife's lives. Quantum uncertainty hilted to increasingly better sequential and heterogeneous outcomes.

Chapter Index

Chapter II - Pages 21-41 - Thinking as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of Anthropological Fieldwork in the New States —

Geertz attempts to show how anthropology, especially its fieldwork, is highly misunderstood and why, especially what he refers as its "moral tension." Geertz describes, brilliantly, moral tension in fieldwork via an informant whom he allows to borrow his typewriter. Imagine Geertz' typewriter as analogous that coke bottle which a pilot threw from his plane over Africa in that yummy cult movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy. As that coke bottle became a jealously savored omni-utile "tool" in a primitive tribe, Geertz' typewriter achieves that level of import with one of his Ibsenesque informants. Ultimately, just as in the movie, a culture clash over access and use of cherished "tool" arises and causes moral tension twixt Geertz and his informant. We laughed when we imagined Geertz' advisor arriving and carrying off his typewriter to some distant abyss, and throwing that devilish thing into hell, while simultaneously getting both lost and irretrievably life-altered — seldom to see UChic, Columbia, or Princeton again.

"Moral tension" in this case occurs when we view Geertz' (a US academic) and his informant's (a Javanese, ~A Doll's House) distinct islands of culture objectively bump into one another. Geertz sees this as inevitable. Why? Geertz and any other anthropologist studying in a foreign culture pretend to be in that culture while, both they and their informants know — that pretense is only fictional role playing — unless said anthropologists extensively immerse themselves in their informants' culture. Aroused, we have, "moral tension."

We tend to see Geertz' basic anthropological example as an exemplar of lack of mutual cross-acculturation, a lack of cultural coobsfection. That view of anthropological informants and cultures is impermissible in Boas' 'enlightened scientific' method's mandated arms length unilateral social observation. Not to say anthropologists are ignorant about mutual cross-acculturation. We, rather, hint that, to classical anthropologists, it appears both temporally and objectively inefficient. And perhaps, due their biases, few classical anthropologists appear to understand that cross acculturation may be needed. And certainly even fewer, as objectivists, yet know how to do cross acculturation. Why?

Franz Boas and his protégés are grossly responsible for currently predominant objective anthropological theory, in our opinion. His denial of any subjective Value in anthropological research precludes study and understanding of mostly predominant subjective Value in cross acculturation interrelationships. He says (we infer), "It (subjective Value) does not 'exist' scientifically, therefore do not study it." Yet, now we know that subjective, i.e., quantum c¤mplementary, Value is what is most important in anthropology — it is what is most highly evolved and most highly current, pragmatic, and animate in any cross cultural interrelationships — and more generally, in any interrelationships.

Geertz chooses John Dewey as an exemplar of classical issues of thought and thinking as ethical and moral acts. He shows how Dewey's views of thinking are much akin Boas' views of culture. Both view reality as classically objective, thus both see issues as objective. Indeed, Dewey does.

"When I try to sum up what, above all else, I have learned from grappling with the sprawling prolixities of John Dewey's work, what I come up with is the succinct and chilling doctrine that thought is conduct and is to be morally judged as such. It is not the notion that thinking is a serious matter that seems to be distinctive of this last of the New England philosophers; all intellectuals regard mental productions with some esteem. It is the argument that the reason thinking is serious is that it is a social act, and that one is therefore responsible for it as for any other social act. Perhaps even more so, for, in the long run, it is the most consequential of social acts…In short, Dewey brings thinking out into the public world where ethical judgment can get at it." P. 21.

This is what one may expect when one views reality objectively. To view thoughts, directly as objects, in your reviewer's opinion is extreme classicism. It appears to us as direct application of formal mechanism to mind.

Furthermore, we know by experience that, we have thoughts which never devolve into "social acts." Many of our thoughts are incapable of actualization as "social acts." Most of our thoughts are gedanken experiments assessing what ifs, juxtaposing tentative behaviors with social mores. Of course, we admit that sociopaths ignore some outcomes of these what ifs, or do not even attempt them.

Perhaps Geertz sees intellect as Plato and Aristotle did: subservient to objective, substantial reality. But were he to do so, would he not have to see society subservient too? Or perhaps Geertz is only describing Dewey's perspectives of thought as classically objective.

And, for sure, Geertz goes on to show his disgust at such 'objectification' of thinking.

"Since Dewey it has been much more difficult to regard thinking as an abstention from action, theorizing as an alternative to commitment, and the intellectual life as a kind of secular monasticism, excused from accountability by its sensitivity to the Good." P. 22.

Why is Geertz even broaching Thinking As a Moral Act? "It is to contribute toward putting the debate over the moral status of social science on firmer ground, and not to propose my own experiences or my own line of work as canonical, that the following scattered and necessarily somewhat personal reflections are directed." Pp. 23-24. Geertz goes on for several pages making some complex nexuses to Indonesian cultures, from which arise some very desperate and bleak problems.

"The imbalance between an ability to find out what the trouble is, or at least something of what the trouble is, and an ability to find out what might be done to alleviate it is not confined…it is pervasive." P. 28.

Geertz does not say so at this juncture, but we sense he intuits that this is where Thinking As a Moral Act becomes crucial, especially as it applies to social science, and social scientists' abilities to conjure Good solutions to these difficult conundrums. And he demurs, "However ineffective a scientific approach to social problems may be, it is more effective than the available alternatives: cultivating one's garden, thrashing about wildly in the dark, or lighting candles to the Madonna." And we agree. Science is Good because science seeks 'better' for everyone. But we see major problems here, due science's own fundamentalism. Our position may be stated simply in several classically formatted questions. What is moral? Who decides? What is ethical? Who decides? Are morals global? Or are morals diverse? Are ethics global? Or are ethics diverse? Who decides? Can Christians decide what is moral for sunni Muslims? Can sunni Muslims decide what is moral for Christians?

In our view, Thinking As a Moral Act must answer those questions before social scientists can choose 'better' solutions for poverty stricken cultures.

What do we see in those questions? Quantum irony. "Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery." P. 29. Geertz understands.

"But the sort of irony which appears in anthropological fieldwork, though no less effective in puncturing illusion, is not quite like any of these [previously exemplified ironies; see partial lists in several sequential paragraphs at top of page]. It is not dramatic, because it is double-edged: the actor sees through the audience as clearly as the audience through the actor. It is not historical, because it is acausal: it is not that one's actions produce, through the internal logic of events, results the reverse of what was intended by them (though this sometimes happens too), but that one's predictions of what other people will do, one's social expectations, are constantly surprised by what, independently of one's own behavior, they actually do. It is not literary, because not only are the parties not in league, but they are in different moral universes. And it is not Socratic, because it is not intellectual pretension which is parodied, but the mere communication of thought — and not by intellectual dissembling, but by an all-too-earnest, almost grim, effort at understanding." P. 30. (Our bold. Our brackets.) From an anthropological perspective, here, Geertz describes essences of quantum reality. Lovely! Double-edged: complementary. Sees-through: compenetration. Acausal: stochastic uncertainty. Surprised: indeterminism. Different moral universes: quantum multiversal islandicity. Communication of thought: quantum included-middle, better, moral and ethical thinking! Wow! Bravo Professor Geertz!

(What if your reviewer had not read that November, 24, 2000 issue of Science which has Richard Shweder's review of Available Light? We shudder to think…we would have missed this incredible man and his incredible work. Prior, we did not know of Clifford Geertz!)

We close our review of Chapter II with a quote of its last paragraph, "The call for the application of 'the scientific method' to the investigation of human affairs is a call for a direct confrontation of that divorce between sense and sensibility which has been rightly diagnosed to be the malady of our age and to the ending of which John Dewey's lifework, imperfect like any other, was unconditionally dedicated." P. 41.

Chapter Index

Chapter III - Pages 42-67 - Anti Anti-Relativism — "A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear." Chapter III, p. 42.

Geertz tells us his purpose in this chapter is not to defend relativism but to attack anti-relativism. He says those who wish to escape relativism's 'evil' grasp do so mostly with a yearn for olden, classical, "pasteurized knowledge." We agree. However, he offers only one way out and his technique is backward — to Victorian Boole. There is another way out of relativism! Forward — via evolutionary ascension.

Geertz calls any attempt to return to past Victorian Boole an "antique mistake." Again, we agree. We need to cast out these demons of antique thought! Yes, bravo!

AL HotMeme™: Geertz propounds an anti anti-relativism approach, a double negative approach which he avers "logical." If one is anti anti-abortion, he noodles, one is not necessarily pro-abortion. Geertz' solution, if he assumes negation is objective, is classical logic, and as we know in Quantonics, it simply does n¤t apply to general quantum reality. But what if he assumes negation is subjective? Then we can agree with his conclusion that "anti-anti" is not classically "pro." As Steppenwolf might exclaim, "Without denying abortion, deny abortion, and Without denying relativism, deny relativism!" If Geertz does assume our latter position, then he renders Aristotle's syllogisms invalid. He then agrees with us that reality is quantum-subjective and n¤t Aristotelian/Newtonian substantial/objective.

Why? Simply, quantum reality is quantum c¤mplementary. Quantum reality's middles are included — cohorts call it variously, "interpenetration (Capra), compenetration (James), co-here-nce (quantum science), co-inside-nce (quantonics), intersolution/fusion (Bergson), Gestalt (Kuhn, et al.), etc." Included-middle logic (quantum logic; see Quantonics' innovative coquecigrues) imposes subjectivity on classical negation. That is why we have little alternative than to reject Geertz' anti anti-relativism solution if it assumes a classically logical position which abdicates any real semantic value in quantum reality. AL HotMemes™

Also if he were to say his solution is a quantum both pro-classical-thing-king and pro-relativistic-thing-king, while removing their 'anti-' dichotomy simultaneously, we could better understand and commiserate his position. When we read Geertz, that is closer to what we hear, i.e., BOTHAND(polylogical-CR,unilogical-SOM) vis-à-vis EITHEROR(anti-anti-relativism, SOM). We think Geertz subtly intuits classical negation's subjectivity, but he invokes its classical legacy essence in his anti anti-relativism position. However, this third inferred approach loses a significant amount of quantum essence which quantum subjective negation offers.

Again, Geertz shows us that he understands, somewhat dyslexically, our complaint. "In this double frame, the double negative simply doesn't work in the usual way; and therein lies its rhetorical attractions. It enables one to reject something without thereby committing oneself to what it rejects. And this is precisely what I want to do with anti-relativism." P. 43. We think simple acceptance of reality's subjective nature, and concomitant intrinsic quantum subjective negation, eliminates Geertz' need for double negation.

AL HotMeme™: Pirsig too has shown us that if we want to do what Geertz suggests we probably should consider a more quantum approach. Allow us to reuse Pirsig's example here. On classical cause-effect, Pirsig shows how we can be anti-cause-effect by being pro something extraordinarily similar. Instead of saying "A causes B," we can say, paraphrased, "outcomes Bs Value preconditions As." Our point about Geertz' anti anti-relativism is that we can do something very similar to what Pirsig did, and in our opinion, arrive at a much better outcome than an ambiguous (i.e., classical vis-à-vis quantum) double negative.

Note in our example, how a classical idea of causation objectively drives out any primal awareness and thought (recall Chapter II's title), where our paraphrased Pirsigean version demands them. How? "Outcomes Bs Value preconditions As" tells us that Bs have to be aware of and Value As to make choices about whats happens nexts¹¹. That last quantum adept sentence is a perfect rhetorical description of what quantum scientists call "measurement." "A causes B" is a classical deterministic semantic where "outcomes Bs Value preconditions As" elicits plural quantum c¤mplementary and stochastic quantum valuation memes. In general, reality is more stochastic than causal, and ideal causality is usually an apparition, even though classicists insist it is scientific 'fact.' AL HotMemes™

Continuing on his anti-anti-relativism vector, Geertz says, "It has not been anthropological theory, such as it is, that has made our field seem to be a massive argument against absolutism in thought, morals, and esthetic judgment; it has been anthropological data; customs, crania, living floors, and lexicons." P. 44. We agree. Objective 20^th century anthropological theory is essentially:

• "one" conventional 'scientific' view of
• "one" closed reality/universe in
• "one" (pre)existing substantial context.

But look at Geertz' last clause above. See his plurals? Modern anthropological studies found plurals! Not classical singulars and monads. Rather they found plurals and omniads. All this is clear and present evidence of classical science's absolute truth's demise. We must be very careful here, and recent history shows that most (relativists and anti-relativists) have not.

Anthropological data hints at parallel pluralism of "customs, crania, living floors, and lexicons," and from that many have leapt to an altered, yet still classically objective, plural-relativistic theory like this:

• "many" relative, parallel, incommensurable 'scientific' views of
• "one" closed reality/universe containing
• "many" (pre)existing substantial contexts.

Now, won't you agree that instead of absolutist "OOO" (one, one, one) most intend relativistic "MOM" (many, one, many) when distinguishing absolutist anthropological theory from its relativistic successor?

Now here, reader, is real opportunity for an epiphany. Consider how MOM depends upon many relative, yet still objective, parallel views to assert its doctrine of relative truth. Think about that… Now re-read our query. What is our most pragmatic (pragma means action) clause there? It is our clause "…when distinguishing absolutist anthropological theory from its relativistic successor?"

What is our most pragmatic phrase in that clause? It is "…relativistic successor." Why? Think about it… What did relativism do to absolutism? It succeeded it! How did relativism succeed absolutism? Did it pre-exist, only to be discovered? If one retains a classical state-ic, immutable view of an objective one-time alpha-created reality, one must conclude that relativism was discovered.

AL HotMeme™: But what if reality is not static, what if reality is animate. Further, what if reality is capable of evolution? Then can't we say that relativism evolved from absolutism? And in so doing, retained some of absolutism's errant DNA? Those are our views, your reviewers' views.

Now, you ask, where is any epiphany in all that? It is simply that classical absolutism and classical relativism both deny reality is pragmatic and animate. Yet evolution from absolutism to relativism imputes natural action and absolute change. Indeed pragma was reverse-engineered and thus corrupted in recent centuries to extract its historical implications of absolute flux in reality, and to make it a classically causal-effective concept. William James' absolute flux version of pragmatism, Henri Louis Bergson's absolute flux version of duration, Pirsig's absolute flux version of Dynamic Quality, quantum science's absolute Planck rate flux, and Quantonics "flux is crux," re-introduce pragmatic reality as absolute flux — and re-introduce flux's agency in emergent evolutionary change as real. As a result we see quantum absolute flux pragmatism/paralogism/sophism, i.e.:

• "many" open, animate quantum islands of reality in
• "many" animate quantum multiverses with
• "many" emerging quantum comtexts (quantum for classical 'contexts'). AL HotMemes™

Anthropologically each culture is a quantum island with acculturated quantum-islandic individuals in it. Anthropologically, Earth is a quantum multiverse of many cultures. And all of that, driven by nature's absolute flux, is evolving continuously!

Our meme which we illustrate here is that a classical double negative is merely another classical deign of feign. It keeps practitioners and theoreticians in SOM's box, SOM's detention center of thought and reason. Being against anything is a classical act. Being for and with a quantum commingling, emerging, ascending reality is a 'class' act.

"What the relativists, so-called, want us to worry about is provincialism — the danger that our perceptions will be dulled, our intellects constricted, and our sympathies narrowed by the overlearned and overvalued acceptance of our own society. What the anti-relativists, self-declared, want us to worry about, and worry about and worry about, as though our very souls depended upon it, is a kind of spiritual entropy, a heat death of the mind, in which everything is as significant, thus as insignificant, as everything else: anything goes, to each his own, you pays your money and you takes your choice, I know what I like, not in the south, tout comprende, c'est tout pardonner [all understand, that's all to pardon]."

Geertz finds provincialism a greater concern. We concur. Anti-relativists, most, appear as fundamental SOMites, afraid of other, afraid of difference, and as such, since reality is about ever- and relentlessly-changing differences, we must question their judgments. Provincialism from a quantum perspective is less an issue once one admits consensus as always tentative, inevitable waxing and waning of cultural islandicity, with cross-cultures compenetrating one another as real, and all miscible and omniadic.

As those SOMites see it, "The fear of relativism, raised at every turn like some mesmeric obsession, has led to a position in which cultural diversity, across space and over time, amounts to a series of expressions, some salubrious, some not, of a settled, underlying reality, the essential nature of man, and anthropology amounts to an attempt to see through the haze of those expressions to the substance of that reality." P. 59.

Geertz ends chapter III speaking of those SOMitic anti-relativists thus, "If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home." P. 65.

We ask, "About what kind of relativism do we speak, when we say, 'We are anti anti-relativism?'" Real quantum subjective negation is there, and it is n¤t going away, like it ¤r n¤t.

Chapter Index

Chapter IV - Pages 68-88 - The Uses of Diversity, "Either Ethnocentricity Or Not?" —

Geertz surmises in 'The Uses of Diversity,' and we concur, that ethnographers¹² are commencing grand intuitions ("alien turns of mind[s]") of a n¤vel quantum subjective reality accepted as increasingly more open and real than its classically more objective and closed antecedent.

Our ethnographic Chautauqua, needed to arrive where Geertz is (quantum Casa Buenoisimo), is somewhat arduous. It is worth our time, however, since it allows us to understand how misguided early thinking on ethnocentricity was. Plus it adeptly abets our own predilections here in Quantonics.

AL HotMeme™: On our first exposure to this chapter's title (with our contrived, double-quotes subtitle), we discern both Wittgensteinian (use) and classical (di versity) rutting semantics. Former, "use is meaning," and latter "dichotomy dogmatizes either/or." What does di versity mean? Does it mean either versity or not versity? Two versities? Well of course Wittgenstein is correct. Contemporary culture uses diversity not as a binary choice, rather as spectral and multitudinous choice. So, literally, cultural diversity means, as used, "many cultures." However, that is n¤t what formally hermeneutic "di" implies. In Quantonics, "di" informs a classical dichon. And, in Quantonics, we know that most classicists 'thingk' using dichons. So we want to warn you that we find classicists' use of "diversity" to mean "many" is suspect on its own face. We doubt that happens often. We should like to re-engineer our cultures' "use is meaning" of "diversity" to use is meaning "multiversity" or perhaps better "omniversity" where latter suggests a probability of some/many included-middle cultures. AL HotMemes™

Somewhat agreeing with our previous paragraph, Geertz claims, "…my purpose here is not to defend the prerogatives of a homespun Wissenschaft¹³ whose patent on the study of cultural diversity, if it ever had one, has long since expired. My purpose is to suggest that we have come to such a point in the moral history of the world that we are obliged to think about such diversity rather differently¹⁴ than we had been used to thinking about it." P. 85.

We concur, and affirm that Geertz offers alternatives which do oblige us to think rather omnifferently.

To start, he warns us that legacy anthropological approaches have their costs: "We may be faced with a world in which there simply aren't any more headhunters, matrilinealists, or people who predict weather from the entrails of a pig." I.e., teaching our world classicism's one great monistic truth has imposed extinction of many classically 'immoral' cultures. "…the good old days of widow burning and cannibalism are gone forever." P. 68.

Then Geertz embarks on a treatise about "The Future of Ethnocentrism."

He begins by juxtaposing old Claude Lévi-Strauss and new Claude Lévi-Strauss with UNESCO on ethnocentricity. Old (ethnocentrism is racism) helped to justify UNESCO, and new (ethnocentrism is di/omniversity) finds Lévi-Strauss' former recommendations to UNESCO disgusting. Too, Geertz commingles Richard Rorty's views among Claude Lévi-Strauss' and UNESCO's. Bluntly, we can summarize UNESCO's views like this: ethnocentricity equates racism. As a result UNESCO thinks (and justifies its continuing existence based upon a concept that) our world needs one global, unified ethnicity to eliminate racism. Of course this position flies in any faces of cultural diversity.

Herein we see an ethnographic battle for world populaces' mind (singular mind, UNESCO), vis-à-vis minds (many minds and local-mental/-cultural diversity, Lévi-Strauss and Rorty). Lévi-Strauss and Rorty argue in differing ways, that (local) ethnocentricity is crucial to cultural diversity. And vast differences among a spectrum of cultures is a good meme. Their views both c¤mplement and abet nature's own quantum reality. UNESCO's self-serving, hegemonic, tiny-minded views align an old, worn, torn classical mindset whose wane is nigh. UNESCO does not understand that if it is normal for different humans to be locally distinct individuals, then it is normal for different cultures to be locally distinct societies. If it is normal for humans to interrelate one another, it is normal for cultures to interrelate one another. Moreover, if those preconditions are normal, it is normal for those normal interrelationships to be both relatively friendly and relatively unfriendly, and with multiversal degrees of freedom in their friendliness (tolerate, cooperate) and unfriendliness (suppress, defend).

Geertz sympathizes Lévi-Strauss' and Rorty's positions, while intuiting their views are still and yet naïve. Why? Ethnocentricity on its classical face is still pugilistic, warlike. So Geertz asks, "Is it good and moral to have many ethnocentricities warring among themselves?".

For us, in Quantonics, this is crux! Geertz is on an ethnographic Chautauqua's scent trail whose footprints we super-walk. That trail shows how devastating classical thing-king is and has been to cultural interrelationships world wide.

Why? Simply, classical thing-king is objective, causal-effective (classical being ontology), and property-esque quantitative, where actual nature is mostly subjective, affects-choices-consequences (quantum being ontology), and value-esque qualitative. And, absolute-classical-objectivity models nature state-ically. Nature is n¤t static, n¤r may we model her in that manner.

Unfortunately, in a process of insisting on an absolutely objective nature and concomitantly denying nature's intrinsic subjectivity, classicists have built a wall, a Maginot line twixt their own induced objective selves and nature's proemial subjectivity. That wall encloses classicists and entraps (paradigmatizes) most of what they do. We say their thing-king is in SOM's box. Now you may fathom how classicists see ethnocentricity as a box. Racism arises when classicists say their box, the box can only be one color/race. Religionism arises when classicists say their box, the box only has one god, and their god is the god.

Geertz appears to intuit what we just offered, and he arrives in a good place. He tells us that ethnographers are now seeing reality's more quantum subjective nature. What does that accomplish? It tears down that damned classical wall! It allows a pragmadigm shift of mindset ("alien turns of mind[s]"). It allows those of that n¤vel mindset to intuit — rather than SOM's one closed, static ("semper fi"), analytic, dichotomous, lisr box of culture — instead many both coherent and open, animate ("semper flux"), stochastic, complementary, commingling, intersolute, interpenetrating, fusing, both lisr and n¤nlisr quantum islands of cultures, ethics, and morals. We may use that n¤vel mindset to infer how nature is more ethno-islandic than ethnocentric.

And given that our cultural world is ethno-islandic, "…there is also, and I think not least important, the rise in awareness that universal consensus — trans-national, even trans-class — on normative matters is not in the offing. Everyone — Sikhs, Socialists, Positivists, the Irish — is not going to come around to a common opinion concerning what is decent and what is not, what is just and what is not, what is beautiful and what is not, what is reasonable and what is not; not soon, perhaps not ever." P. 73. Why? Common opinion, like common sense (viz. classically cloned identical enlightened sensibilities) is common-ism. Reality is not common-istic! (Consider that Geertz' Master, Wittgenstein agrees.) No two physical constituents of reality are or can be identical to one another. No physical constituent of reality is identical to itself longer than a few Planck moments! Physical reality mutates too quickly for any classical notion of commonality to hold, in general. And then consider cultures whose natures are very unphysical, depending greatly on viral memes whose I³ ethereal mutations are even less stabile than physical reality only appears to be.

Geertz sympathizes both Levi Strauss' and Rorty's views but finds their outcomes somewhat disgusting because both "…regard[] invidious distinctions between groups as not only natural but essential to moral reasoning…" P. 73. His disgust, we think, rouses from their objectification of cultural groups and of moral reasoning.

As very quantum evidence, "An anthropology so afraid of destroying cultural integrity and creativity [measures of ethnocentricity], our own and everyone else's, by drawing near to other people, engaging them, seeking to grasp them in their immediacy and their differences, is destined to perish of an inanition for which no manipulations of objectivized data sets can compensate. Any moral philosophy so afraid of becoming entangled in witless relativism or transcendental dogmatism that it can think of nothing better to do with other ways of going at life than to make them look worse than our own is destined merely to conduce toward making the world safe for condescension." P. 74. (Our brackets and bold. We effaced a parenthetical.)

Geertz' "perish of an inanition" hints at quantum reality's overriding maxim: change or become extinct.

We love his use of "entangled." Quantum reality entangles its constituents via encounters. Once entangled, just as we see in cultures, quantum constituents preserve their entanglements independent of metric separation. So, too, previously- and however-entangled cultures quantum n¤nlocally affect one another.

His use of "condescension" denigrates classicism, as we agree it should.

AL HotMeme™: "The trouble with ethnocentrism is that it impedes us from discovering at what sort of angle, like [E. M.] Forster's [Constantine] Cavafy, we stand to the world; what sort of bat we really are." P. 75. (Our brackets.) In other words, ethnocentrism, like most ISMs, places its practitioners in a box, a limited axiomatic mindset, an intellectual self-imposed detention center.

The social world is quantum, i.e., it "…does not divide at its joints into perspicuous we's with whom we can empathize, however much we differ with them, and enigmatical they's, with whom we cannot, however much we defend to the death their right to differ from us. The wogs begin long before Calais." P. 76. His words here make us think of Hesse's use of The Glass Bead Game as an alternate title for his Nobel prize winning (1946) Magister Ludi. Classicists analytically divide reality, "at its joints into perspicuous," integrable and differentiable side-by-side, state-ic glass beads. As Geertz alludes, classicists play similar games in anthropology. His "…wogs…Calais" sentence regards English ~racist capture and 211 year reign of "across the channel" Calais, and permutes "England's problems start at home, not in Calais." AL HotMemes™

And nearby Geertz discloses his own flavor of anthropology, "Both recent anthropology of the From the Native's Point of View sort (which I practice) and recent philosophy of Forms of Life sort (to which I adhere) have been made to conspire, or to seem to conspire, in obscuring this fact by a chronic misapplication of their most powerful and most important idea: the idea that meaning is socially constructed." P. 76. (Our bold.)

Geertz' phrase which we emboldened does not agree with Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, and thus by analogy does not agree with quantum science. Had he said "affected" vis-à-vis "constructed," our quote above would likely only appear as a way of allowing Geertz to disclose his own anthropology and philosophy to our readers.

Pirsig's MoQ says that meaning is dynamic Value interrelationships twixt Dynamic Quality and intellectual patterns of Value. As such we can say meanings are memes. Further, Pirsig's MoQ teaches us that patterns of Value evolutionarily form hierarchies. Pirsig arbitrarily chooses four levels for discussion, and Earth-chauvinistically layers them like this:

1. Intellectual patterns of Value (most highly evolved; invent TBD patterns)
2. Social patterns of Value (next most highly evolved; invent intellectual patterns)
3. Biological patterns of Value (next least highly evolved; invent social patterns)
4. Inorganic patterns of Value (least highly evolved; invent biological patterns; invented by Dynamic quality)

All of these patterns constitute MoQ's universe of actual known and knowable reality. Dynamic Quality interpenetrates all actual patterns of Value, latter when aggregated, Pirsig refers as Static Quality.

Had Geertz said "intellectually created/invented" instead of "socially constructed," we might not have quoted his sentence except for reasons given above. Construction is a classical act. Worse it is an analytic Glass Bead Game. It is in-form-ation. It is manufacturing of new using existing objects. Nature transcends naïve classical transposed-object manufacturing. Nature emerscentures reality! Geertz shows us how cultures and their social patterns are not transposed-objective, but he uses classical language which retains classical, objective and functional, process. Nature's processes are quantonic and emergent, n¤t objective and functional. Just as sentients emerge and change, societies emerge and change. Just as sentient intellect invents, with enormous DQ assistance, new societal memes and their meanings — societies invent new cultures — adopting and adhering those memes. Society emerscentures — vis-à-vis constructs — cultures. Intellect invents, among many others, n¤vel cultural memes. It would be good to know Geertz' reaction to our take on this.

Caveat: Most followers of Pirsig see his four pattern levels as anthropocentric. We do n¤t. Quantum reality scales. We see those patterns of Value (with some quantum extensions above and below his four layers) deeply playing nature's ~143 octave¹⁵ musical scale (SQ), plus her limitless semper isoflux scale (DQ).

There is much more to Geertz' Chapter IV than we can cover adequately in this tiny space. E.g., The Case of The Drunken Indian and The Kidney Machine, Geertz' assessment of limits of language constrains how we interpret our world, his view of our uses of cultural diversity, our world as more like a quantum bazaar than a classical cathedral, and his statement of purpose suggesting, "…we have come to such a point in the moral history of the world (a history itself of course anything but moral) that we are obliged to think about such diversity rather differently than we had been used to thinking about it." P. 85.

Our biggest concern here is: we think human anthropology loses much of its 'ology' in a provincial sense that it needs scalable juxtaposition to other n¤n-anthropo 'ologies.' E.g., here in Earth: apes, birds, elephants, fishes, molecules, organs, plants, et al., and extra-stellar: Alpha Centaurians and Betelgeusians (imagined other ologies, just as exercises). We think cultures scale quantum reality, not just its human sub-spectrum, n¤t just in classical either genericity or specificity, but in a quantum both-all and-many of genericity/specificity.

We captured ample notes here, and will delight in any discussions our readers might advance regarding Geertz' many other fascinating memes broached in Chapter IV.

Chapter Index

Chapter V - Pages 89-142 - The State of the Art, Waddling In —

Geertz opens by bluntly telling us that no one really knows what anthropology is. His reason is that it is so many techniques, styles, memes and methods all jumbled together. And all that mess is evolving… Which simply tells your reviewer that anthropology is quantum real. It shows Geertz that this is how anthropology has been from its inception and he offers that is how it probably will be. He says it is, "…a triumph, and a genuine one, of life over logic." P. 90. To him, apparently, anthropology is more romantic and less enlightened. To our eyes, tired of gazing upon a vast Babel of classical, scientifically reasoned hyperBoole, this is a quantum holistic cultural remedy: Alka Seltzer over reflux. Studying emerging and animate life ascends ratiocination of it. Bravo!

However, scientific logic is still there, and offers some objective successes…

Anthropology's great problematic is its dis ease with paradice which arise from commingling both its Romantic and Enlightened conjugates. Geertz sees them as centrifugally pulling anthropology apart at its seams:

• Romantic anthropology is losing its subjects and their former perceived research isolation.
• Scientific anthropology, threatened by its qualitative conjugate, appears paradigmless.

So, scientific anthropologists seek paradigms, and romantic anthropologists worry about moral issues of practicing, e.g., cultural diversity demands decency: both moral and ethical diversity. So how can a romantic anthropologist "speak for" any subject's culture without polluting study results with other-cultural implicit biases and unintentional perturbations?

This anthropological quantum conjugation of both romantic and scientific anthropology, and introspection it garners, to Geertz' keen sensibilities is 'better,' "…if not the best…anyway…better." P. 96. Anthropology is questioning itself, as it (and as all romantics and scientists) should, and while at Millennium II's close it is confused, however Geertz tells us, "In our confusion is our strength." P. 97

In our review of Available Light, with our perspective as quantum as we know how to offer, Geertz' admission to anthropological confusion is, for us, quantum affirmation! Reality is quantum uncertain! Reality is quantum "confused." Reality is quantum contingent! Reality is, as Isaiah Berlin says in his The Magus of the North, "…contrasts and conflicts between the categories of quantity [science] and quality [romance]…" P. 125. (Our brackets.) Reality sometimes painfully and usually pragmatically favors quantum irrationality over classical illusions of ideal and ordered and lisr and radically mechanistic rational reason. Geertz' admission of anthropology's confusion uncloaks how a culture war, which started with French Enlightenment, virally infected anthropology's recent birth and still rages there and elsewhere.

"Anthropology is a conflicted discipline, perpetually in search of ways to escape its condition, perpetually failing to find them." P. 97.

Where Geertz describes an anthropological cultural war dyad of either holism or di versity, we see a better quantum perspective of an omniad of both holism and di-/multi-versity.

Geertz goes on, "And argument, endless argument." P. 97. From whence this "argument?" From whence this "culture war?" We claim with others from our extended list of a few favored names, including Bergson, Capra, Ho, Howard, James, Pirsig, Zohar, and Zukav, that both arise from normal science's metastatic presumption of either/or. Enlightenment's parental 'either/or' infections — of: dichotomy, contradiction, excluded-middle, SOM's wall, radical mechanism, formal predicate 'logic,' objective negation, Aristotelian syllogisms, falsifiability, testability, verifiability, 'proof,' absolute truth, scientific method — parent indeed, of all classical science's war-making accoutrements.

Then, on page 98, he appears to relent, "Anthropology generally, and cultural anthropology in particular, draws the greater part of its vitality from the controversies that animate it. It is not much destined for secured positions and settled issues." If he relents to quantum reality's semper flux, we concur. However, if he relents to this anthropological culture war's classical dichotomy we must assert our unease. His relented either/or appears wholly classical. If that is so, then his war is over! Science wins hands down.

Normal science's rational reason demands an either/or of objective quantity over subjective quality, with remorseless disgust and denigration of latter, and full and dedicated worship of former. We call this classical position, "science's deign of feign." Quantum reality is n¤t an either/or, excluded-middle reality! Quantum reality is a both/and, included-middle reality! Normal science is blind to and denies quantum reality, thus we trumpet its deign to feign. Normal science, in our opinion, disqualifies itself from any genuine culture war. Why? Based upon its own quantum ineptness. Based upon its insensate denial of qualitative, "Bs Value preconditions As," affective reality's more rapidly evolving animacy over quantitative reality's exclusive and immutable stasis.

Not to worry, Geertz tells us, "The days of simple 'the Dangs believe, the Dangs don't believe' anthropology seem truly over." P. 102.

Geertz rather densely covers two sets of case histories. One more prominent case history discusses alternate views of two anthropologists (Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins) on a topic of Hawaiian anthropology: What happened to Captain Cook? Geertz favors Sahlins more scientific "substance," and "analytical structuralist glitter" over Obeyesekere's romantic "surface," and "rather relaxed methodology." Sahlins claims Obeyesekere's book shows that instrumentalist philosophy is still too much on anthropology's how-to scene. Obeyesekere claims that Sahlins' book shows that irrationalism is a still much too residual model for primitive tribes.

"What is at stake here is thus a question that has haunted anthropologists for over a hundred years and haunts us even more now that we work in a decolonized world: What are we to make of cultural practices that seem to us odd and illogical? How odd are they? How illogical? In what precisely does reason lie?" P. 104. We love this quote! Geertz tells us what anthropology's greatest problems are. We love it because those are what we think our world's greatest problems are. And even better, notice an enduring quantum both/and in most of his observations and conclusions: both romantic and scientific, both irrational and rational, both relaxed and analytical, both illogical and logical, both normal and odd, both unreasonable and reasonable…, n¤t either/or, rather indeed, quantum both/and! Then why problematic? Simply, few people on Earth today see reality as quantum! Many, especially those of us in Western culture, see reality as classically objective (cultural relativism, in our view, is only a simple pluralistic extension of classical objectivism). A few others (read Isaiah Berlin's The Magus of the North, and its protagonist, Johann Georg Hamann) see reality as romantically sensual and irrational. Few have merged both into a n¤vel c¤mplementary way of thinking about reality. Geertz appears to us, at Millennium III's start, standing at that threshold.

His other Chapter V case history compares abuses of anthropological privilege in first Pierre Clastres' almost lurid study of Paraguayan Guayaki, and second James Clifford's later Paraguayan study — each totally unaware of his alter-other, and temporally disparate from one another by at least a decade. Geertz laments Clastres as "unreadable." Clifford sees a bright new global anthropological future, Clastres sees an effaced and lost past.

But we should have worried!

AL HotMeme™: Geertz, digesting his Clastres/Clifford set of comparative histories, resurrects science's dichons again! He lists them as binaries which we quote as bulleted items here, Clastres left of versuses and Clifford right:

• "Drawing near versus hanging back,
• "Confident empiricism versus 'lucid uncertainty,'
• "Immediacies of the local versus the refractions of the uncentered,
• "Insular (and doomed) stability versus global (and encouraging) commotion.

"These may be a bit crude as binaries; and in such matters there are no pure types. But, for adepts of the special, the singular, the different, and the concrete — that is, among others, anthropologists — they do rather capture the question here: How are we now to practice our trade?" Pp. 116-117. Geertz, to our absolute glee, understands binaries' problematics, especially problems which arise when they are treated as ideal dichotomies — which is what most objectivists do to natural, quantum interrelationships — i.e., whip out their SOM sabres and cut neatly and finally twixt 'em. Geertz admits, that in anthropology (as in reality), there are n¤ pure dichons. From that we may infer he might accept our conjecture that there are only quantons. Would he, our glee would go hyperbole. J AL HotMemes™

Wow! Geertz nails it for us, except for one glaring word: 'dialogical.'

Again, 'di' is problematic here, in our view. 'Dialogical' is a classical word. It puts us back in that dank amphora¹⁶ from which Geertz is attempting to extract anthropology. We would substitute 'paralogical,' and possibly 'omnilogical' to quantum co-here his uses of 'multiply centered' and 'pluralistic.' How many sets of senses may ultimately consume Available Light? How many informants' sets of senses measure an anthropologist in "the field" and vice versa? How many multi-sensory informants has any multi-sensory anthropologist? How many multi-centered cultures has any anthropologist and his informants? Are there only two?

Aside - 28Mar2008:

It has been about seven years since Doug asked those queries. We understand more now than we did then, all of us do.

"Doug, what do we understand now, that we didn't understand then?"

Then, many of us thought we could look at an object, study it, collect data about it, and report our efforts to our community. We assumed that report, if we had done our job well, would be timeless. That is what we refer 'classical science.'

Trouble is, objects aren't! Hold still, they do n¤t! Classical 'state' is bogus.

Quantons aræings. And change issings. Quantum æv¤luti¤nary changings aræ ræal!

Each of us is evolving at up to Planck rates. All quantons (n¤t objects, since objects by dialectical edict and canon 'law' have perpetual 'state,' i.e., 'state' as classical duration — by comparison quantum reality issi perpetual changings, i.e., quantum~changæ as durati¤nings) are evolving at up to Planck rates. All views we have of any quanton, since all viewers, all quantons, and all comtextings are evolvings, all views we have are evolving! We call that ensemble of all of any individuals' views of any quanton over many timings, spacings, and massings~energyings "ensemblings stochasticings ontologyings." And those ensemblings and all their holographic EIMA interrelationshipings are evolvings too.

Local, planetary, stellar, galactic, cluster, super cluster, etc., polycycloidal peregrinations in hyperspace add up to a very high rate of polymotionings in reality. Earth alone is rotating openly and polycycloidally at equator about 500 meters per second, Earth is in a polycycloidal open 'orbit' around Sol moving at about 30 kilometers per second, Sol is in a polycycloidal open 'orbit' around Milky-Way of about 300 kilometers per second, and so on... Classical notions of 'where' and 'when' suddenly become meaningless. Classical 'scientific' notions of 'zero momentum' suddenly become meaningless.

(Ask self, "Self, whereings and whenings am I?" Self should answer, "You will never, ever, ever, ever, ever,...ever return to anywhereings you wereings and any whenings you wereings!" Y~¤ur ædgings of n¤wings aræ pærpætually changing at up to Planck rates. Y~our classical notions of 'state' are all bogus. Y~our classical notions of 'identity' are all bogus. Y~our classical notions of 'linearity' are all bogus. Y~our classical notions of 'law' and 'proof' are all bogus. Y-our classical notions of stability, independence, localability, isolability, separability, reducibility, negation, contradiction, logic, reason, proof, and decidability are, in general, all bogus. And on and on and on.... See Doug's Bases of Judgment.)

Every quanton in that whole reality hologram is evolving at up to Planck's rate. All quantons (interrelationshipings) among all quantons are evolving at up to Planck's rate.

So any notion of a 'stable' view of anything is simply classical-nonsense (Classicists even believe they can negate 'sense.' J).

Dialectic fails in that quantum~comtext! How we currently think and believe now, as classicists, fails in that quantum~comtext. Massive ensemblings of...Now aræ evolving. ...Where aræ evolving. ...What aræ evolving. ...Why aræ evolving. ...How aræ evolving. ...Who aræ evolving. ...All of that is perpetually evolving.

Classicism is dead. All institutions which depend upon classicism are dead.

Quantum~sophism is alive and changing so rapidly we can barely keep up with it. Pirsig's ancients were right: "Monism is deceit (from which we can easily infer, dialectic is deceit)." "Principle (static logic) rules something not itself." "State is (n¤t) absolute." "Change is (n¤t) unitemporal linear motion."

Earth's greatest Gn¤stics warned dialecticians of their "tragedy of commons sense" Error!

Until n¤wings, Gn¤stics were ignored.

Doug - 28Mar2008.

End aside - 28Mar2008.

Pluralistic, multi-centered anthropology is n¤t dialogical! To say that it is, is to obtain and inform classical objectivism, period.

All that said without fathoming depths of Hermann Hesse's many multi-centered cultures co-here-ing any Homo sapiens. (See Hesse's Steppenwolf.)

Geertz summarizes Clastres and Clifford like this: "Clastres, whatever his orthodoxy and his straight ahead temperament, knew where he was going, and he got there. Clifford, whatever his originality and his openness to experiment, seems stalled, unsteady, fumbling for direction. It is, perhaps, rather too early to exchange roots for routes." P. 118. (Roots is a well-known black culture text. Routes is title of Clifford's book which Geertz examines here. Clifford punned 'roots' with his 'routes.')

To finish Chapter V, Geertz spends almost 20 pages showing us another major anthropological problematic: a quarrel twixt anthropologists and historians about impacts of anthropology on history. This portion of Chapter V garners plethoric comments, and we see Geertz again showing us his many philosophical hues and flavors. He uncloaks some classical-, some relativistic-, and some quantum-Geertz synaesthetically commingling all immanently. Of course, we believe his classical hues and flavors are restricting his memes and his awesome rhetoric, his relativistic ones are only slightly and incrementally better, and his quantum coherence of both-all/and-many are (for us) transcendencies. And we think, amazingly, n¤ne of this is intentional, and whether it is — regardless — Geertz is sheer genius. Our only affects for discomfit here are that we desire being in n¤vel modes of think-king in anthropology (and other sciences) where all are sharing multiversal quantum comtexts (vis-à-vis classical contexts) — which we think offer n¤vel means — better for seeing, modeling and understanding reality in all its guisings — of which anthropologies and histories are but two few.

A fine exemplar of our point is his list of things which this quarrel may be all about. Here they are:

• "Space and Time,
• "Big and Little,
• "High and Low,
• "Dead and Living,
• "Written and Oral,
• "Particular and General,
• "Description and Explanation,
• "Art and Science."

Notice how Geertz avoids classicism's usual 'OR' here. His use of 'AND' is a huge quantum tell, and would be even more profound had he preceded all with "Both," e.g., "Both Space and Time." These simple, intuitive, emergent and still infantile quantons also subsume some essence of relativism via their implied partial plurality and di versity. Further (Remember Jamal Wallace and professor Robert Crawford in Finding Forrester?), his monads and their singularity subsume some essence of monism and classical uni-versity. Consider his use of "Dead and Living." Why did he not say one of these, "Dead and Alive," "Dying and Living," "Death and Life," "Deaths and Lives," "Dyings and Livings?" etc.

We all know by simple observation that reality is n¤t classically singular. Similarly, we know reality is n¤t classically and immutably static. N¤r is it adequately relativistically improved by plural and di verse extensions. N¤, reality is quantum. Our bodies, through both biological emergence and biological apoptosis are "Both living and dying!" simultaneously. Reality is both living and dying. Reality is both posentropy and negentropy. Reality is both plural and (only) apparently singular, both dynamic and (only) apparently static, both coherent and (only) apparently locally autonomous. Reality is n¤t, as classicists would have it, approaching J. C. Maxwell's ultimate posentropy heat death. Rather, reality is relentlessly and simultaneously and ontologically Planck rate Li-la dancing to and fro with variable persistencies among many entropies including negative, zero, positive, and mixtures of those.

AL HotMeme™: To some of you, it may be evident that we have a much greater problem than a quarrel over whether anthropology is adversely affecting history and vice versa. As Wittgensteinianesque George Edward Moore might query, "What exactly do [we] mean?" when we use common English language, syntax and grammar. Of course we can quantumly improve on that query similarly, "Whatings inexactly are we meanings?" Whatings we quantum uncertainly are meanings is that quantum reality is a semper fluxing, entropically cohesive and paralogically pluralistic reality. No sooner can we say something about it, than it has already changed. We must learn to use both-all/and-many lingual, paralingual, pluralingual, metalingual, and pragmalingual communications. We must learn qualogos! Yes, SOMites will call us names. They frequently do that. For hundreds of years of pogroms and inquisitions, they tortured and killed us (Joan of Arc, Brujo, Giordano Bruno, Loyola, Pirsig, Galileo, Jesus, et al.). Yet, we already know they do that, and we expect it, so we can move ahead, quantum leapfrog them, and leave them hilted and hunkered in their deign of feign sheigm. AL HotMemes™

Again, we think, Geertz intuits much of this. How can we infer that? His prescient aver to Paul Veyne, "Sociology, Veyne says, meaning by this any effort to discern constant principles in human life, is a science of which the first line has not been written and never will be." P. 120. In other words, Earth's numerous symbolic spoken and written languages, including English — unremediated — are innately (by intentional design) incapable of expressing Sociology's, Anthropology's, and others' modelings of concrete, multiversal, animate, indeed quantum, reality. Some even go so far as to say that human intellect is incapable of genuine animate thought (Most classical scientists and philosophers, more recently David Deutsch, JohnJoe McFadden, et al.). We call them "SOMites." We claim their purpose is to hegemonously keep all of us in their classical church of reason, their intellectual detention center, their university of rote, their objective box, their analytic, monistic, dichotomous dogma d'Enlightenment… However, if we assume humans, as all reality's multiverses, are quantum beings then we can unashamedly declare those SOMites "inept." (See Don Howard's superb paper entitled, 'Holism and Separability,' in Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory, UND Press, 1989. Howard is a full professor at University of Notre Dame.) Geertz more intuitively, and we more explicitly and urgently, want to leap out of SOMites' Aristotelian/Newtonian (ex) cathedrals into a much more quantum-enlightened multiversal bazaar.

AL HotMeme™: "If this is what the argument is really about, this methodological thrashing around amid the grand dichotomies of Western metaphysics, Being and Becoming revisited, it is hardly worth pursuing. It has been quite some time now since the stereotypes of the historian as mankind's memorialist or the anthropologist as the explorer of the elementary forms of the elemental have had very much purchase. Examples of each doubtless remain; but in both fields the real action (and the real divide) is elsewhere." P. 120. (Our bold.)

Our simple remark here is, "But isn't it really time to review core assumptions?"

OK, where is "…the real action and the real divide?"

Geertz' genius erupts again, and it is blunt force traumatic. He says that "the Other" is not a universal Value. All cultural interrelationships taken most simply as dyadic pairs are uniquely and uncertainly changing. And their "the Other" order is important! This is very quantum! We would say in our own script that:

cultural_interrelationship_jk issi quanton(culture_j,culture_k) issi_n¤t cultural_interrelationship_kj issi quanton(culture_k,culture_j).

In other more quantum physi-al terms, in general, Poisson's bracket of paired cultural interrelationships (a quanton) does n¤t commute! In summary, n¤ two quantons are ever identical, and n¤ quanton commutes Value, in general. Perhaps we can say this better, anthropologically, using quantonics lingo. Investigator-informant coobsfection is intrinsically (naturally) noncommutable. Using our script, we can show it like this, with a classically subjective 'n¤t_equals:'

quanton(informant,investigator)quanton(investigator,informant).

Using our quantonic equals, commutability as an issue vacates due asynchronous Planck rate animacies of both informant and investigator:

quanton(informant,investigator)quanton(informant,investigator).

Geertz calls this cultural interrelationship/Poisson bracket noncommutativity, "irreversibility." Analogously, a quanton of an anthropologist visiting/immersing in a culture is grossly omnifferent from a quanton of an anthropologist and an informant visiting said anthropologist's local culture. AL HotMemes™

"What has undermined them has been a change in the ecology of learning that has driven historians and anthropologists, like so many migrant geese, on to one another's territories: a collapse of the natural dispersion of feeding grounds that left France on the one and Samoa on the other." P. 121. Again, in our jargon, we see a quantum both/and of anthropology and history. Only in a pure, classical realm could they ever have been conceived as ideally, Platonic, separable, conned-ceptual 'objects.' Both — historians do some anthropology, and — anthropologists cannot help but do some history! Quantumly, we can say they are both naturally cohesive and co-here-nt, and they are both local and autonomous.

We have Mae-wan Ho to thank for that quantonic percept. Their coherence arises from sharing Values, their autonomy arises historically from local foci on larger temporal patterns vis-à-vis local more temporally limited cultural patterns. Where History used to be more like a panoramic movie, History has become more like a picture album of movies, and where Anthropology used to be mostly picture albums, anthropology has become more like movies of picture albums. Their "bickering" arises from increasingly shared, increasingly qualitative and more subjective Values. Their "centrifugal movement" appears to us only a legacy artifact of their prior individual foci only on their respective objective autonomies, while classically excluding their more subjective coherencies. Classical academia carefully programmed them with that methodology. Two kids in a sandbox (classically trained and tautologized to be) fighting over toys. Two tigers in a jungle bipolarly, centro-dichotomously urinating territorial perimeters.

On that methodology, Geertz has this to tell us, "In the human sciences, methodological discussions conducted in terms of general positions and abstracted principles are largely bootless. A few possible exceptions possibly apart (perhaps Durkheim, perhaps Collingwood), such discussions mainly lead to intramural bickering about the proper way to do things and the dreadful results ("relativism," "reductionism," "positivism," "nihilism") that ensue when, perversely or in ignorance, they aren't done that way. The significant methodological works in both history and anthropology — The King's Two Bodies, The Making of the English Working Class, or The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; The Social Organization of the Western Pueblos, Trade and Markets in the Early Empires, or The Forest of Symbols — tend at the same time to be significant empirical works, which is perhaps one of the deeper characteristics that, across whatever divides of aim and topic, most connects the two fields." P. 122. (Our thelogos bold italics and bold.)

Next Geertz covers several case studies as exemplars of what happens when historians and anthropologists tentatively conjoin. We leave that text for your own perusal.

Finally, in Chapter V, Geertz tackles essence. For us, this brief section is one of Available Light's most prominent atlantes.

He calls it, "'Local Knowledge' and Its Limits: Some Obiter [passing] Dicta [words]." P. 133. (Our brackets.) He offers six negatives (which we see as "virtues'" c¤mplement) and two "virtues," which we choose to perceive, though inanimate and taken together, as quanton(their_c¤mplement,virtues) of c¤mplementary Values. We review them numerically, in order:

1. "'Local' is a 'relative' term." P. 133.
   
   He uses Earth as a 'locality' in our Solar System as an example. He says Earth is local to Solar System is local to Galaxy is local to Universe, etc. Having shared our own version of this metaphor elsewhere, we partially agree. But we query, "Is it (are they) just local and just locally relative?"
   
   Quantum reality insists that they, e.g., Earth, et al., are both n¤nlocal and local! Yes, all reality, humans and their cultures too! J
   
   Quantum primordial entanglements, though in some cases now billions of light years separate, still correlate superluminally. Our best of unlimited possible exemplars is gravity. All multiversal aggregations, from subatomic to cosmic, share gravity superluminally! Gravity is an animate interrelationship twixt knowable reality and its quantum c¤mplement whose various appellations are: vacuum space, vacuum energy, vacuum flux, n¤n space, isoflux, Dynamic Quality, etc. Thus Earth's gravity is both n¤nlocal and local. So we sort of agree that "Local is a relative term." However, we insist on quantum c¤mplementary affects which deny any sense of classical absolutely local (see lisr) relativism.
   
   An enormously important issue here is that once an anthropologist engages another culture, in whatever manner, they become and remain quantum entangled regardless how far removed said anthropologist is when his studies are finished. As a devout SOMite Albert Einstein called this quantum n¤n locality "absurd." He especially thought quantum superluminality (zero latency action at a distance, e.g., atemporal gravity) was "absurd." For more on this topic web search these topics: Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) gedanken experiment , Bell's Theorem, and Zeilinger/Gisin.
   
   If we take a look at how Cultural Relativism perceives locality, it is just what Geertz says: many plural and thus relative localities, yet still each retains a classically objective concept.
   
   What about Subject-Object Metaphysics? SOM says space-time is an monolithic analytic uni-spatial-uni-temporal extensity, OGC harboring OGT, absent any plurality, thus absent any relative localities. If you made it this far in our review, this might appear empirically and patently naïve now. We concur. Consider an empirical reality that this latter SOM bilge is taught, at Millennium III's start, throughout US's education systems, as fact, at least up to and including baccalaureate levels.
   
   
2. "Thus the opposition…" P. 134. He agrees that classically local relativism, as we ended topic 1 above, imposes Aristotelian disjunction twixt and among relative localities. Geertz enunciates SOM's most deleterious problematic. It is why we cry so urgently for subsumption of SOM under a new way of thinking, our version of which we call "Quantonics."
   
   AL HotMeme™: This opposition, "…is not one between 'local' knowledge and 'universal,' but between one sort of local knowledge (say neurology) and another (say ethnography). As all politics, however consequential, is local, so, however ambitious, is all understanding. No one knows everything, because there is no everything to know." P. 134. (We assume Geertz' "local" is essentially classical locality and thus lisr.)
   
   So we see again, that classical 'relative locality' engenders an either/or, versus, oppositional mindset. And again, Geertz intuits an essential quantum percept, "…there is no everything to know." (We choose to perceive his use of 'no' as a subjective, included-middle logic, quantum 'n¤.') Though apparently intuited classically, this statement is brilliant! If "everything" is all known classical reality, then descriptively, in quantum reality "all" is both "everything" and its quantum c¤mplement which is yet unrealized, unlimited and unknowable. Using our script,
   
   all_quantum_reality issi quanton(everything_known,everything_known's_c¤mplement).
   
   And all of that is changing at massively iso-parallel iso-asynchronous Planck rates. And all quantum futures (~ futurings) have yet to emerse! Geertz offers this prescient, quantum metaphysical meme formidably! AL HotMemes™
   
   
3. "The failure to see this shining truth by people otherwise apparently rational is the result, in part, of an endemic confusion in the social (or human) sciences (or scientists) among:
   
   

   a. "universals ('everybody has,' to quote a false, or at least highly misleading example 'the incest taboo'); b. "generalizations, which may be probabilistic, have exceptions or contradictions without fatality, or may be mere ceteris paribus, 'as a rule' approximations that are instrumentally useful ('Horticultural societies are more peaceful than pastoral ones' — but consider the Maya, regard the Laps); and c. "laws. (It is hard to produce an example — 'group marriage to matriliny to patriliny' — in cultural anthropology, or indeed anywhere in the human sciences, that is not laughable or outmoded. Perhaps a proposal from a few years back that cultural traits diffuse — that is, migrate across the globe — on an average of plus or minus two miles a year conveys some of the comic effect involved.)" P. 134. (Our bold.) See our more recent, 2003-2004, Bases of Judgment, logic, QTMs, and probability. Please compare classical and quantum genericity. Please read all of those QELRs, completely. Doug - 22Nov2004. Geertz grasps quantum essence, but retains some quantum-invalid classical jargon to do so. See our emboldened words above. His use of "truth," perceived classically implies an either/or: either verity or falsity. This classicism is what he abhors! It is source of his highly appropriate complaints about opposition. Ditto his use of "rational." Classical reality is "rational." Quantum reality is n¤t classically rational! Rather it is c¤mplementary! Classical rationality depends almost wholly on Aristotle's three syllogistic "laws" which demand that reality's middle be excluded. Quantum reality's middle is included, at least in most interrelationships of c¤mplementarity! Classical either/or opposition is impossible in a reality whose middle is included! For very similar reasons, we say "Ditto" to Geertz' uses of "false" and "contradiction." Quantum reality offers n¤ absolute verity, and it offers n¤ absolute falsity. Quantum reality is uncertain! Absence of absolute falsity refutes radical mechanism and thus cripples classical 'science's' only hope: Popperian falsifiability and its attendant contradiction.

   
   
4. "My own view, merely to give it, because in a short compass I can hardly defend it, is that either:
   
   

   a. "most (conceivably all) universals are so general as to be without intellectual force or interest,…[or] b. "if universals do have some degree of nontriviality, circumstantiability, and originality, if they actually assert something interesting enough to be wrong…they are ill-based…" (Our bold. Ditto our either/or comments in 3.) "This is unremediable…If you want a good rule-of-thumb generalization from anthropology, I would suggest the following: any sentence that begins 'All societies have…' is either baseless or banal." Pp. 134-5. Geertz arrives at quantum quintessence. However, we believe that if we take off our classical objective and our classical relative thing-king hats, and put on our quantum think-king hats we will achieve partial remediation. See our quantum stages.

   
   
5. "Generalities of the 'not in the South' sort can, of course, be had and can, of course, be useful; but more as heuristic starting points for deeper-going local inquiries than as bankable conclusions fit for textbooks…" P. 135-6.
   
   Geertz in his first sentence and indeed in most of this topic reverts to classical views. This is classical Geertz. His "not" is certainly classical. It offers little hint of any North-South included-middle c¤mplementarity.
   
   
6. AL HotMeme™: But then Geertz goes back to a wholly quantumesque perspective, "As for laws, I have already suggested that I can't think of any serious candidates in my field with which to contend. One of the most irritating things in my field is people who say you're not doing any 'real science' if you don't come up with laws, thereby suggesting that they themselves have done so, without actually telling you what these laws are. On the rare occasions they do tell you — two miles a year, cannibalism and protein shortage — the situation is worse. Scientism, and here I will talk of the human sciences overall, is mostly just bluff. It's one thing to call the spirits from the misty deep, quite another to make them come when you call them. But it is not just imposture that's involved: the utopianism induced by a misconceived view of the pre-twentieth-century physics (the world before Maxwell), that was imported into the human sciences has led not to the gates of paradigm-land, but to a great deal of wasted motion and high proclamation. " pp. 136-7.
   
   Except for his Maxwell parenthetical, we say "Marvelous!" In place of his parenthetical we offer "the world before quantum science." We agree. In quantum reality both truth and laws are agencies of their own uncertainty and change. Semper flux! AL HotMemes™
   
   
7. To permit our readers to grasp Geertz' "virtue" topics as well as possible here, and to permit a fledged review of them, we need to quote topics seven and eight in their entirety.
   
   "So much for negatives. What are the virtues of a 'local knowledge' sort of tack?
   
   

   a. AL HotMeme™: "Limits. The title of this discussion [i.e., Chapter V title] seems to assume that the existence of limits is a counterargument to something. (Why isn't it called "'Universal Knowledge' and Its Limits"? Possibly because to do so would raise the possibility that, being universal, it hasn't got any, and therefore isn't knowledge.) To my limited mind, direct and open acknowledgment of limits — this observer, in this time, at that place — is one of the things that most recommends this whole style of doing research. Recognition of the fact that we are all what Renato Rosaldo has called 'positioned (or situated) observers' is one of its most attractive, most empowering features. The renunciation of the authority that comes from 'views from nowhere' ('I've seen reality and it's real') is not a loss, it's a gain, and the stance of 'well, I, a middle-class, mid-twentieth-century American, more or less standard, male, went out to this place, talked to some people I could get to talk to me, and think things are sort of rather this way with them there' is not a retreat, it's an advance. It's unthrilling perhaps, but it has (something in short supply in the human sciences) a certain candor. (Views from nowhere can be imaginatively constructed, of course. If they are done well they can be, and in natural sciences have been, immensely useful. But thus constructed, they are in fact a particular variety of view from somewhere — the philosopher's study, the theorist's computer.)" (Our brackets.) P. 137. We agree! There are n¤ GUTs and TOEs! Anything less than reality itself is innately only partially capable of describing (n¤t defining, but describing) reality. (Consider that assisted human sensory bandwidth is only 10-21 of reality's whole spectrum!) This is another way of saying that all local views of anything larger than a local view's context (e.g., "this observer, in this time, at that place") are uncertain. Why are they uncertain? Because they are intrinsically nonlocal and thus even less complete than any local view. SOM's great deign of feign is that GUTs and TOEs may be absolute. What Geertz is saying here is that to have scientific integrity, one may not bootstrap limited knowledge to complete knowledge. It is, as reality shows empirically, over and over, n¤t possible to use finite induction to describe whole reality. To say, "…that it is possible," is an extreme kind of hubris. SOMites possess that arrogant and ugly hubris, abundantly. And we have n¤t even touched upon a most supreme issue of animacy vis-à-vis inanimacy. AL HotMemes™ Geertz' choice of an example context, potent as it is — too — is yet encumbered with classical legacy baggage. It, in addition to absent mentions of real animacies (real time emergences), fails to acknowledge real coobsfection of observer and observed. It fails to acknowledge contexts as n¤n homogeneous, etc. Our list can run on and on, almost endlessly. Again, partial concord, because potential local multi-contextual descriptions are limitless, we have n¤ choice, given our finite intellect, to limit our contexts of study — a crudely classical act — like n-bit encoding of an irrational analogue metric. Encore, we see more n¤vel flavors of quantum uncertainty. Geertz' "views from nowhere" correspond our own "context free." Restated, in classicalese, "no context," "unlimited homogeneous context," "analytic continuum," and so on… We must learn to ask classicists to explain, since they claim their methods provide ideal absence of ambiguity, to unambiguously explain these terms to us: "no," "where," "analytic," etc. Also "length," "mass," and "time." Does 'no' imply ideal classical negation, or c¤mplementarity? They must respond, "ideal classical negation," else their claim of fundamental objectivity loses its grip. Then "where" has an ideal classical negative? Oh, that must be minus "where"…hmmm. Again, we resurrect E. G. Moore, "What exactly do [they] mean?" What does "minus where" mean? Take their symbols away, insist that they must deal with physical reality, and classical 'scientific' methods lose their grip. More: how can classicists assume 'views' (plural) and n¤t 'wheres?' Why do classicists accept plural viewpoints and insist on ONE where? Is reality classically singular, or is it plural? "Hey, SOMite, do your views come from 'nowhere,' or 'one where?' Is your view from a uni-spatial-uni-temporal ideal Newtonian point locus? Can you observe all reality from that observation station? If you move, does your sensory experience change? Is your locus ideally static, do you have absolutely zero momentum? Does your target of observation hold still and have zero momentum concomitant yours? Now, tell us again SOMite, how is it exactly that you coerce reality to hold still whilst you observe it?" AL HotMeme™: Geertz appears well-reasoned. Anthropology as a science has more candor in a simple observer-informant coobsfective interrelationship than classical 'science' has in all its objective Babel. Classical science has manufactured a closed, analytic, static, axiomatic system and called that tiny domain "reality." They claim it is "…one where," "…the one-liest where." Just as their predecessors claimed — "the Earth is flat," "the Earth is the center of the Universe," "ideal point objects have mass and may experience zero momentum (Newton)," "Earth's orbit and all planets' orbits are circular," "there are only two sexes: male and female (e.g., government laws, church dogma)," "reality is only local, there is no n¤nlocal action at a distance (Albert Einstein, et al.)," "God does not throw dice (Albert Einstein; i.e., reality is analytic, closed and formal)," "our universe is anthropocentric; humans are the only sentients in our uni-verse," "logical, moral, and ethical judgment are dialectical," "laws are absolute because truth is absolute," "absolute truth is always consistent and always complete, i.e., absolute truth always states truth and states all truths (at least some n¤n Gödelians say this)," "we can decide absolutely and simultaneously both position and momentum of an electron (e.g., David Miller, English philosopher, noted sceptic)," "our uni-verse is radically mechanistic," "negation is objective (virtually all mathematicians and most classical scientists make this claim)," "complementarity is subjective and thus logically useless (e.g., Albert Einstein)," "change is uni-temporal motion (e.g., virtually all classical scientists believe this)," and on and on and on… — classicists claim their fundamental church of reason is the only church of reason. Quantum science denies all this. Quantum science claims there are many quantum both local and n¤nlocal islands of relatively both locally certain and n¤nlocally uncertain truth. Classicists naïvely choose to stand on one side of that quantum both/and and classically 'either/or' in only one ratiocinative locale. AL HotMemes™ Just one other note of potential interest. Elsewhere in Quantonics we show that any notion of 'context freeness' is paralogical. Think about it… Geertz did. Did you see it in his words above? We reiterate, Geertz appears well-reasoned. There are many concrete contexts. Two or mo