SOURCE: "Us/Not-Us: Benedict's Travels," in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 102-28.

Geertz is an American anthropologist whose numerous works focus on the cultures of Indonesian countries and reflect a method of study that combines various disciplines—including history, philosophy, psychology, and literary criticism—to analyse cultural structures and phenomena. Describing himself as an "interpretive social scientist," he is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary anthropology. In the following essay, Geertz examines Benedict's prose style, beginning with a passage from her essay "The Uses of Cannibalism. 'I

We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibalism. There are in fact so many and such excellent motives possible to it that mankind has never been able to fit all of them into one universal scheme, and has accordingly contrived various diverse and contradictory systems the better to display its...