I’m not sure that Geertz /has/ a theory of culture. He certainly has a disposition that he writes suggestively about, but it’s quite difficult to pull a coherent statement from the Thick Description of Balinese Cockfight essays which ARE Geertz for most non-anthros.

The idea that the meaning of acts or anything else is based on enduring, and collective systems of categorization rather than “actors’ itnention” is just what anthropology has always been about, and interpreting these wider societal notions is something that people like Sapir and Mauss (if I had to pick two) had been doing for some time. It wasn’t new to Geertz, although he is the first person that non-anthros often discover it in and of course he and others positioned it in a particular way in anthros history that ended up being productive.

Des—when you say ‘FDR’ you mean ‘University of Chicago’ right :?)

For Ricoeur claims that Freud, Marx, and a line of “prophets of extremity” [see Megill] stemming from Nietzsche have torn down every institution, every monument of civilization, including the institution of the self, leaving humanity with nothing but the movement of force and scattered elements of signification [Ricoeur and Ihde 148]. And yet these prophets evince a heroic embrace of a deeper truth than that whose edifice they have shattered. The result is a gain for consciousness. The Nietzschean overman, like the patient on the other side of psychoanalysis, has gained a certain adulthood of consciousness in recognizing and willing the loss of the dominance of consciousness within existence.

I’m not sure I see the “gain for consciousness” in this development (later in the same paragraph Andrew goes to Hegel), but it’s an interesting phrase nonetheless.

It is not impossible, but also not likely, that Ricoeur and Burke ever read one another. Strange to think that. By chance, I happen to be reading both of them lately and keep having moments of deja vu in moving from one to the other.

The interview is here.

Ricoeur was not only distressingly reasonable and lucid, he also spent most of the ‘70s in exile in the FDR after being tarred (and rubbishbinned) as a reactionary by the soixante-huitards. And he was even a practising protestant! (See the Libé article I linked, really do.)

So while it is arguably still very slack to leave him unillspokenof, your nutters have lucked out on their choice of non-target.

I don’t pretend to be either a Ricoeur or Geertz expert, but I do reckon that Geertz’s debt goes a lot farther than a few nods here and there. I think that Geertz’s effort to separate culture from the intentionality of actors owes an enormous amount to Ricoeur’s argument that social acts become separated from the intentionality of actors and their meaning a social meaning. In a very strong sense of the word, Geertz’s theory of culture is a hermeneutic one. Right?

Also Wikipedia’s entry has been updated and has further references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ricoeur

Shannon