‘A twenty-four hour job’. Hildred and Clifford Geertz’s first foray into the field and the scholarly persona of the ethnographer

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe paper details how, during the 'Modjokuto Project' of 1952–1954, Hildred and Clifford Geertz embodied in their decisions and actions the ‘Malinowskian palimpsest’ of the lonely ethnographer, thus creating a series of oppositions between their individualistic understanding of the ethnographer and the needs of teamwork in the field. Apart from the historical record, this reconstruction aims at focusing on several questions in the history of cultural anthropology and the social sciences: How do ethnographers come to understand their professional role and the specific scientific virtues attached to it? How are scholarly personae and other cognitive-normative schemas put to the test (and modified) during fieldwork? How does the lack of methodological reflection on the ways of the anthropologist impact on the completion of specific research projects and, more generally, the reproduction of professional lore and structures?KEYWORDS: Scholarly personaethnographyClifford GeertzHildred GeertzteamworkCold War social science AcknowledgementsThanks to the participants in the George W. Stocking, Jr., Symposium (Seattle, 12 November 2022), the members of the Anthropology group of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (1 February 2023), and two anonymous reviewers from History and Anthropology. I would especially like to acknowledge the help of Karen Blu, Freddy Foks, Matt Watson, Alice Kehoe, Herb Lewis, Jason Pribilski, Tullio Viola, Stephen Foster, Stephen Turner, Gary Alan Fine, David H. Price, Hans Bakker, Harlan Stelmach, Bijan Warner, Andrea Cossu, Gerardo Ienna, Giovanni Zampieri, and Zhe Yu Lee. Archival materials are cited by courtesy of Karen Blu and the Harvard University Archives. This article is dedicated to the memory of Hilly Geertz, whom I had the fortune to meet for one last interview in September 2021.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 I wrote this article using mainly letters written by Clifford and Hildred Geertz to friends and relatives in America and preserved as part of the Geertz Papers (henceforth CGP) at the Special Collections Library of the University of Chicago. Their copious fieldnotes from the period were checked to confirm my hypotheses, but were not incorporated into the text as a deeply reflected-upon decision on my part. The letters that ethnographers write home might have different functions, especially if fieldwork is conducted in a faraway land and relatives, friends, and colleagues might have expressed their worry about, or even opposition against, the trip. Letters might thus involve (and almost certainly do) a Goffmanian front/backstage dynamic, where ‘the personal, the familiar, the intimate’ (Dobson Citation2009, 57) are intertwined with encouraging words written in order to reassure the receiver. To make a careful selection and hierarchization of the sources it becomes crucial to understand the reciprocal positioning of senders and addressees. In the case at hand, the recipients included at least three groups of people: parents, close relatives, and the occasional family friend; fellow graduate students in anthropology, professors, and administrative staff at Harvard or the MIT; other significant individuals, such as George R. Geiger, Clifford’s mentor at Antioch College. After comparing the letters addressed to different categories of acquaintances, it seems clear to me that the most interesting were those written to colleagues and peers. In the communications exchanged with the members of a peer group who shared similar aspirations, training, attitudes, goals, and grievances, the Geertzes needed not hide their innermost feelings as they would when writing to worried parents or grim supervisors. As Roger Sanjek (Citation1990, 111) would say, these letters were ‘a first step in committing headnotes to paper’. Given the Geertzes’ positioning as graduate students (a particularly ambivalent condition, swinging rhythmically between excitement and misery, then as now), it is clear that often their correspondence with their peers—and especially the exchanges between Clifford Geertz and the Ayoubs—had the pace and the flavor of a continuous therapeutic session on various levels (methodological, organizational, disciplinary, normative, and personal, to say the least) where meaning, identity, and solidarity were not only expressed, but constructed via the very acts of writing, narrating, reading, and reacting (on narrative and the scholarly self see Gross Citation2008, 269 ff.). It is not clear if the letters sent by the Geertzes circulated beyond the specific individuals to whom they were addressed, but one might easily imagine their content becoming the object of prolonged gossip and discussion among those who were still (or already) ‘at home’. On the other hand, while (some) letters might not be fully transparent or truthful, fieldnotes seem to be too idiosyncratic (and often chaotic) to become a reliable source for historical research. In this case, the absence of any methodological reflection on the use of fieldnotes as empirical or archival data for the history of anthropology and ethnography does not help.2 Quotes (verbatim) from Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub, December 28, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Clifford Geertz’s fieldnotes, fn#70.5, p. 232, CGP, box 10, folder 1. The move was also recounted in Clifford Geertz to ‘Dave’ [probably Laudry], December 1, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz to Family, December 9–10, 1952, CGP, box 4, folder 7.3 Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub, December 28, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1. As it will be clear later in the paper, the Geertzes were never really ‘alone’, for they formed a couple of equals. This, however, does not invalidate my claim on the influence of the Malinowskian palimpsest, for the latter was for the most part a symbolic and regulative model.4 I will use the words ‘anthropologist’ and ‘ethnographer’ as synonims throughout this paper, but see the last section for an assessment of this decision.5 In this paper, I will use ‘iconic’ and related terms in a technical sense. According to Dominik Bartmanski and Jeffrey C. Alexander (Citation2012, 2), ‘icons are cultural constructions that provide believer-friendly epiphanies and customer-friendly images’. As such, they allow members of groups (and sometimes entire societies) ‘(1) to experience a sense of participation in something fundamental whose fuller meaning eludes their comprehension and (2) to enjoy the possibility for control despite being unable to access directly the script that lies beneath’. On the specific topic of iconic social thinkers see Bartmanski Citation2012, which includes a section on Malinowski.6 It was clear that studying Javanese society put into question any artificial distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘urbanized’ societies. A trace of this reflection (which will be the topic of another paper) can be found in the unpublished version of Clifford Geertz’s dissertation (Geertz Citation1956).7 In the United States the number of institutions offering instruction in anthropology tripled between 1894 and 1917, grew fourfold by 1940, and then doubled again before 1948 (Voegelin Citation1950, 351; UNESCO Citation1954, 177 ff.).8 As shown by Steven Shapin (Citation2008, ch. 6), in the 1950s an intense discussion on the pros and cons of teamwork in the natural sciences revolved around the paramount values of the independence and personal genius of individual scientists. The bias in favor of the individual scholar I am sketching here thus seems to be connected to a broader conception of the scientific ethos. This said, it seems that the importance attributed to being able to ‘see the whole’ and its intrinsic relationship with being alone in the field is a constellation of requisites/virtues that was typical of the discipline of anthropology.9 The 1949 USD100K grant roughly corresponds to USD1.2M in 2023.10 John Robert’s letter to K. Spencer of September 9, 1949 (HUG 4490.20, Clyde Kluckhohn Papers, Harvard University Archives) is quoted in Powers Citation1997, 1965. On Roberts see Goodenough Citation1995.11 As far as I know, the economic and political goals of the Modjokuto Project were never explicitly formalized. At the same time, it was well-known that Indonesian markets were crucial for US import and export, so that the young postcolonial republic had to be helped in its agricultural and industrial development. From a geopolitical point of view, Indonesia had to be mobilized as part of a ‘great wall’ again the expansion of Soviet Communism. For a general assessment of US-Indonesian relations during the postwar period see Roadnight Citation2002; Fakih Citation2020. USD250K in 1952 roughly correspond to USD2,7M in 2023. See n.w.a., ‘Java 'Middletown’ To Undergo Study; Nine Americans to Carry Out 18-Month Survey Financed by Ford Foundation’, The New York Times, October 5, 1952, p. 3.12 I will use as an outline for this section a letter from Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub, April 18, 1953 (CGP, box 6, folder 1), an extraordinary document where Geertz summarized most of the events from the fall of 1951 to April 1953.13 Hildred Geertz to Parents [Walter Rendell Storey and Helen Anderson Storey], February 1952, CGP, box 5, folder 8.14 Clifford Geertz to ‘Mom’ [Lois Brieger], October 24, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz to Parents, October 25, 1952, CGP, box 4, folder 7.15 Hildred Geertz to ‘Folks’, November 14–16, 1952, CGP, box 4, folder 7.16 Clifford Geertz to George Geiger, December 5, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1.17 Clifford Geertz to Utomo, November 15, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Clifford Geertz to ‘Jack’ [John M. Roberts], December 28, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1.18 Clifford Geertz to ‘Pangalima Tertingg’ [means ‘honorable supreme’, i.e. Rufus Hendon], January 20, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz to ‘Hil and John’, February 20, 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 7. Clifford Geertz to Ruth Hollis, February 20, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz to Mom and Pop, March 22, 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 7.19 On this, see Clifford Geertz to Mr. and Mrs. Corey, January 4, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz to Warren Storey, February 28, 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 7.20 Hildred and Clifford Geertz to ‘Arnie’, November 20, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz to Family, April 7, 1953, CG, box 4, folder 7.21 Hildred Geertz to ‘Lea’ [Williams], March 29, 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 7.22 Hildred Geertz to ‘Lea’ [Williams], March 29, 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 7.23 Hildfred Geertz to Family, March 29, 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 7. Hildred Geertz to ‘Mom and Dad’, April 30(?), 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 8. Clifford Geertz to ‘Mom’ [Lois Brieger], March 31, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1.24 Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub, April 18, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz to Family, May 9, 1953, CGP, box 4, folder 7.25 Geertz Citation1989, 340. They were admitted at Harvard on June 7, 1950 (UAV 801.2010, box 6, DSR Correspondence etc. 1950–1951, F-J, folder ‘Graduate students, General 1950–1951’). See also the document on ‘Qualifying Examinations, Fall Term 1950–1951’ (UAV 801.2138, HD/DSR, box 1, folder ‘1950–51’), and the minutes of the DSR Committee on Higher Degrees, June 13, 1951, where both Geertzes are reported to having passed their Qualifying Examinations with distinction (UAV 801.2005, DSR, box 1, Book minutes 1950–51).26 Clifford Geertz to ‘Jack’ [John M. Roberts], December 28, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub, January 9, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1.27 See Evon Z. Vogt to Clyde M. Kluckhohn, May 1, 1951, CKP, HUG 4490.5, box 27, folder ‘E.Z. Vogt 1947–1951’.28 Hildred Geertz to Family, February 1952, CGP, box 5, folder 8.29 As was customary at the time, some of the male members of the Harvard-MIT group were accompanied by their wives (Anola Ryan, Anne Jay, and Jane Hendon), but the latter were not enrolled in the PhD program and were marginal members of the team (Dewey Citation1962, xiii). See also Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub, December 15, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1. The theme of the role and contribution of wives in early ethnography should receive more attention. See, among others, Wolf Citation1992, and the monograph section in an old issue of Cross-Cultural Research, 2(2), 1967.30 Geertz’s papers include two memos summarizing the decisions taken by the group. See Clifford Geertz, Untitled memo, January 17, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Hildred Geertz, ‘Division of Labor in a Cooperative Project’, January 17, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1.31 Clifford Geertz to Mom, March 31, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1. See also Clifford Geertz to ‘Dave’ [probably Laudry], December 1, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1; Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub, December 28, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1.32 Clifford Geertz to George Geiger, December 5, 1952, CGP, box 6, folder 1. In 1953 Pare had a population of around 20,000 individuals. With all due differences, Newburyport, where Warner brought some eighteen fieldworkers, counted only 17,000 citizens.33 Clifford Geertz, Jr., to Clifford Geertz, Sr., January 2, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1. See also Hildred and Clifford Geertz to ‘Arnie’, November 20, 1952, CGP, box 6; folder 1.34 See Paul Citation2014, 363 ff.; Paul Citation2019, 9 ff., and the papers collected in the same volume.35 In reviewing the pros and cons of cross-disciplinary collaboration, sociologist Joseph W. Eaton (Citation1951, 708–709) wrote that creativity depended on solitary work, and that being part of a team would confront the scholar with problems of adjustment, recognition, and psychological stress. See also Leighton Citation1949, 145 ff. On the enduring connection between solitude and scholarship see, among others, Shapin Citation1991 and Mayrl and Wilson Citation2020.36 On the persistence of these tropes into the twenty-first century see at least Di Leonardo Citation2006; Weston et al. Citation2015; Holtorf Citation2016.37 Clifford Geertz, Untitled memo, January 17, 1953, CGP, box 6, folder 1.38 Both the introduction and the conclusion (where Geertz discussed the work of Robert Redfield on great and little traditions) were not included in the published version of the dissertation: compare Geertz Citation1956 and Geertz Citation1960.39 As underlined by Neil Gross (Citation2008, 269) and Herman Paul (Citation2014, 355, 362, 367), the various elements of this self-concept and the commitment to a multiplicity of goods have a ‘potential to influence’ actual behavior. See also Guetzkow, Lamont, and Mallard Citation2004. A letter from Clifford Geertz to Victor and Millah Ayoub dated December 15, 1952 (GCP, box 6, folder 1), represents his most thorough (early) reflection on a wider understanding of what ‘being an intellectual’ and ‘being a social scientist’ means.40 Geertz is ironically quoting from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.41 Correspondence, phone calls, and the exchange of drafts and other written material are but a poor ersatz for face-to-face interaction. Interestingly, the texts on training in anthropology from the 1950s surveyed above often present an irreflexive understanding of solo fieldwork as an analogue to medical internships (which is in fact the supervised practice par excellence): Leighton (Citation1942) used the analogy in an article on the prospects of the social sciences written during the war; Mead (Citation1952) repeated it in her intervention at the 1951 AAA annual meeting; and Lévi-Strauss (Citation1954) employed it (along with a risky parallel between fieldwork and psychoanalysis) in his chapter for the UNESCO report on the teaching of the social sciences.42 A quick survey on ethnographers memoirs across the twentieth century seems to validate this point, which undoubtedly needs more research. See Jongmans and Gutkind Citation1967; Spindler Citation1970; Freilich Citation1970; Golde Citation1970; Watson Citation1999; Hewlett Citation2020.43 The accounts collected by Roger Sanjek (Citation1990) on the practice of writing, using, and (not) sharing fieldnotes might be seen as a perfect representation of this professional anomie.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the University of Padova (grant number BORT_BIRD23_02).