Hermeneutics in Anthropology: A Review Essay

Abstract

Recently two books appeared that, for me at least, announced the arrival of something with the mysterious name of "hermeneutics" into American cultural anthropology. One volume, Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, (1979) is edited by Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan. After an introductory essay, the reader consists of three programmatic pieces by Taylor, Ricoeur, and Gadamer. These are followed by sample applications of hermeneutic ideas in such fields as literature, political science, history of science, psychoanalysis, and the sociology of religion. Anthropology is represented in two essays by Clifford Geertz-one, his classic paper on the Balinese cockfight; the other, a more recent piece on anthropological understanding. The second volume is a single-authored work entitled The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning and Culture, (1978) by Stephen R. Tyler. Tyler is concerned with the everyday use of language. With this concern in mind, he evaluates a variety of formalisms in an-MICHAEL AGAR is Research Associate at the