Beyond the Cultural Turn

Clifford Geertz

Common Knowledge, Volume 8, Issue 1, Winter 2002, pp. 204-205 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

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LITTLE REVIEWS

Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 152 pp.

The absence-of-color gray and the semiotics of the absence-of-quantity zero are
the lead actors in Fioretos’s play with words and moods. His text is situated in a
region beyond criticism and this side of literature, neither fiction nor fact, but
not as not one and not the other—more like a ghost story in which there are nei-
ther ghosts nor terrifieds, a tragedy of tears without sorrow: things forgotten but
still felt in a memory that cannot recollect. It is a rare form of writing inspired by
passages that Fioretos quotes and folds into his text like veins in marble: Homer
and Beckett, Bataille and Edgar Poe, Jane Austen and Kafka, and a Miguel de
Unamuno I’ve never heard of —“a book densely, downy in duplicity,” says Fiore-
tos, “thus unclouding and expelling; the double-dealing demonry of / gray / that
matches semblances and parity with disparity . . . explaining that you don’t get
anywhere by calling things names.” There remains for us, the readers, to follow
behind, apprehensive like blind men tapping their world into existence. This is
not a book of narratives. It leads nowhere and offers no information. Rather than
reading it, one feels it, thinks it, while struggling to remember where in the flow
of gray text one can find oneself as other than a mirror image clouded by the
familiarity of unrecognized thoughts.
—Wayne Andersen

Victoria E. Bonnel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 350 pp.

This is an uneven, but in places suggestive, collection of papers on the present

status of the concept of culture and cultural analysis in the historical sciences.
There is an overall anxiety, a bit excessive, about intellectual “fashion,” and being
left behind by it — missing a “turn.” Nevertheless, the pieces by Richard Bier-
nacki on “method and metaphor,” by Margaret Jacob (despite a certain sourness

Common Knowledge 8:1

Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

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of tone) on science studies, by Steven Feierman on writing the colonial history
of Africa, by Caroline Bynum on writings, modern and medieval, about “the
body,” and by Jerrold Seigel on the problematics of the self are valuable, and in

Li ttle R e vie w s
Bynum’s case genuinely innovative. For the rest, they are harmless enough, but
there is rather more of wheel spinning than there is of traction.
—Clifford Geertz

Joseph Alexander MacGillivray, Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and

the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 373 pp.

Schliemann, as we all know, discovered the ruins of Troy, circa 1871, and hung
jewelry, said to have been Helen’s, on his Greek wife Sophie, for a photograph.
A little less widely known is Sir Arthur Evans’s work, beginning in 1894, on the
palace at Knossos, in Crete. There he found the Labyrinth that was built to con-
tain a bull-headed monster, the Minotaur. Neither Schliemann nor Evans had a
scholar’s credentials. What they both had was (1) enough money to finance their
explorations and (2) a belief in the essential veracity of classical myths, as that
there had been a Trojan War, over a woman named Helen, or that there was
indeed substance to Greek tales of the monster hidden in the maze. It’s not sur-
prising, therefore, that both of them have been subjected to scholarly “correc-
tion,” based on evidence they were perhaps too naive to comprehend. Professor
MacGillivray’s book isn’t immune from that tendency, but it does offer us, in its
central 100-plus pages, a full enough account of the Cretan excavations and
reconstructions. One could wish to be able to search the details of larger illus-
trations — they tend to come four or five to a page — and for less space devoted
to Evans’s possible sexual proclivities, but what we have is a good survey of how
one man helped relate Greek myth to demonstrable fact.
—Hugh Kenner

Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 280 pp.

“Matters of fact,” “evidences of the fact,” “truth of the facts,” “discourses of the
fact,” “notorious matters of fact,” and the more emphatic “undoubted certainty
of the matters of fact” emerged in the lexicon of an early modern England with
an ever-increasing and “popular taste for facts.” In Shapiro’s formulation, then,