[Anthropgrad] wednesday seminar

[Fay castles]

Wednesday anthropology seminar. 9.30-11.00 am Room A, Coombs bldg

Geertz and Sahlins on agency: a comparison. Donald Gardner, 
Anthropology, ANU

If we think of much social theoretical work as concerned with 
articulating the appropriate relations among concepts of structure, 
process and agency (or some subset of these three), it is hard not to 
agree with the many commentators who have seen an important shift in 
anthropology’s preoccupations, after the 1960s, in favour of the 
last-mentioned of these. Geertz and Sahlins were two of the most 
important contributors to the discussions that constitute that shift, 
even though each did so in response to the works of third parties; the 
presentation will consider just how they did so and how their 
contributions articulated with one another—in fact or in principle. I 
will suggest that both of them allowed their thoughts on these issues to 
be clouded by mischievous but rather different conceptions of meaning.