‘A twenty-four hour job’. Hildred and Clifford Geertz’s first foray into the field and the scholarly persona of the ethnographer

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper details how, during the 'Modjokuto Project' of 1952–1954, Hildred and Clifford Geertz embodied in their decisions and actions the ‘Malinowskian palimpsest’ of the lonely ethnographer, thus creating a series of oppositions between their individualistic understanding of the ethnographer and the needs of teamwork in the field. Apart from the historical record, this reconstruction aims at focusing on several questions in the history of cultural anthropology and the social sciences: How do ethnographers come to understand their professional role and the specific scientific virtues attached to it? How are scholarly personae and other cognitive-normative schemas put to the test (and modified) during fieldwork? How does the lack of methodological reflection on the ways of the anthropologist impact on the completion of specific research projects and, more generally, the reproduction of professional lore and structures?