ABSTRACT
Clifford Geertz begins his 1995 book, After the Fact: two countries, four decades, one anthropologist, by asserting the impossibility of the task at hand, which was, more or less, to give an account of his thoughts about two countries (Indonesia and Morocco) which he revisited in the early 1990s, about 40 years after his initial fieldwork. It is Heraclitus cubed and worse, he writes, because when everything has changed – the world, the anthropologist, the discipline – there is no place to stand and to locate what has changed and what hasn’t. ‘Change, apparently’ he writes a few pages later, ‘is not a parade that can be watched as it passes’; the stories one tells have a beginning, middle and end, not because that is the ‘inner direction of things’, but because of one’s own intersection with them, presumably at an earlier and a later point in one’s life. And, of course, he had no taste for the parade of change imagined from a vantage point outside of it – the voice of the omniscient narrator, as it’s called in the study of literary fiction.
