Saba: Contextual Reading
Prompt:
Talk about the following excerpts/quotes at length. First as texts embedded within larger conversations (books, broader discussions, living and perhaps contested traditions, etc) and then treat their selection and public posting as communicative acts that may be completely divorced from that contextual reading. What might someone posting these texts on social media be trying to say?
“The locus of study is not the object of study.”
- Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973)
Detached from anthropology, it starts sounding almost like a maxim about category errors.
The place where a phenomenon becomes visible is not necessarily where its explanation resides.
A classroom may be the locus where educational inequality becomes visible, without being its ultimate object or cause.
A hospital may be where the consequences of poverty appear.
A social-media platform may be where political resentment manifests without being its origin.
A relationship may be the site in which someone’s insecurity becomes painfully visible without being the source of that insecurity.
A particular argument may merely be the location where a much older conflict surfaces.
Once extracted from Geertz, the line becomes an unusually portable injunction: do not mistake the container for the phenomenon, the symptom for the structure, the scene for the subject.
That portability is probably part of why it feels so contemporary. A great deal of contemporary discourse proceeds by identifying a conspicuous location and treating it as though it were the phenomenon itself: “Twitter is like this,” “universities are like this,” “dating apps are like this,” “London is like this,” “this workplace is toxic,” “this generation is anxious.” Geertz’s sentence introduces an irritating but necessary question: what exactly is the thing you think you are studying?
The commonest posting is the disciplinary flex, and it is usually defensive in origin even when confident in tone. A graduate student has been asked, at a committee meeting or in a hostile peer review, why they are writing a dissertation about a Discord server, a Twitch chat, a single hospital ward, a suburban megachurch. The question carries the implication that the site is too small or too weird to matter. Posting Geertz converts a defensive crouch into a lineage. It says: this objection was answered in 1973 by someone your advisor cites, and I am standing where he stood. The addressee is often a specific person who will never see it. Citation as subtweet is one of the load-bearing genres of academic posting, and this quote is unusually well-suited to it because it names the accuser's error without naming the accuser.
