Acknowledgements

Read acknowledgements as a genre and they are extraordinary documents: shadow bibliographies, lists of the people whose labour is being converted, at the moment of thanks, from contribution into gift. My debt to X is inexpressible. Y read the whole manuscript twice. Z arranged the interviews and translated the recordings. The formula “without whom this book could not have been written” is used to describe someone who is not an author of a book that could not have been written without them. It is the politest sentence in academic English and one of the strangest.

from Reading Clifford Geertz in the 21st Century: Meaning, Interpretation, and the Trouble with Culture (2026)