In Place of an Interview

Abstract

It is thirty-five years since the publication of The Religion of Java. I thought of making an interview with Clifford Geertz; I would ask him, in particular, how he wrote his first book. He has explained how in the book itself but I wanted more. One asks anthropologists what students today must read in order to become anthropologists. They can always answer. But in ten years, their answers change. It is because ethnography is directed at doing away with books. Only by being there; only by hearing and by seeing can one find something one is not sure one is looking for. The aim of an ethnography is commemorative but it is also to make previous books useless. Many books have been written about religion in Java in the last thirty-five years, but The Religion of Java has not been replaced. I have taught The Religion of Java perhaps thirty times; more or less once a year every year since I began teaching in 1965. I have found something different to say about it each time. I wanted to know how one writes a book that escapes the law of anthropological writing.