I've argued often for the idea that social science and historical explanations need to be "actor-centered" -- we need to ground our hypotheses about social and historical causation in theories of the pathways through which actors embody those causal processes. Actors in relation to each other constitute the "substrate" of social causation. Actors make up …
Anthropology as a discipline
Several posts have focused recently on the meandering pathways through which the social science disciplines have developed in the past century or so -- within and across nations (link, link). Anthropology is a particularly interesting example because of its proximity to power and empire. And Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar's recent World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations …
How many Geertz’s?
Clifford Geertz's contributions are wide-ranging, in a couple of ways. He wrote about North Africa as well as Indonesia; and he touched on Islam as well as water systems. So there was both geographical as well as topical diversity in his research life. But here is another dimension of range: Geertz demonstrated a surprisingly wide …
Understanding Society 