ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

How to Interpret a Control-Mechanism: Metaphors, Cybernetics, and Clifford Geertz

• In Event: Cybernetic Anthropologies: Midcentury Redesigns of a Technomodern Field

English Abstract

Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century, is usually identified with the interpretive approach in anthropology he inaugurated in the early 1970s, while his previous work in modernization and systems theory has only attracted the (very good) work of a small number of specialists. Following in the steps of Joel Isaac, Andrea Cossu, and Poornima Paidipaty, this paper reconstructs how Geertz's early work made use of the new science of cybernetics (itself a rather fragmented and diverse subfield) and the discovery of DNA from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s. In particular, I will try to understand the import of the widespread use of biological (and in general scientific) metaphors in the social sciences connecting Geertz's publications from the 1950s and early 1960s to similar interventions by scholars with whom he was familiar with in his Cantabrigian circles, starting from Talcott Parsons and Clyde Kluckhohn, but not limited to them. The point is to explore how Geertz looked for a way out from the rather chaotic debate over the definition of "culture" typical of the first half of the 20th century (culminated in Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s infamous collection, to which Geertz himself collaborated as a research assistant), connecting it, at the same time, with his "hidden humanistic program" as recently discovered in his college-period works, which bore an extraordinary resemblance to his most mature work.

Author

• Matteo Bortolini, University of Padova