Antropólogo

American Council of Learned Societies
Occasional Paper No. 45 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1999

A Life of Learning
by

Clifford Geertz
Overture

It is a shaking business to stand up in public toward the end of an

improvised life and call it learned. I didn't realize, when I started out, after an isolate childhood, to see what might be going on elsewhere in the world, that therewould be a final exam. I suppose that what I have been doing all these years is piling up learning. But, at the time, it seemed to me that I was trying to figure out what to do next, and hold off a reckoning: reviewing the situation, scouting out the possibilities, evading the consequences, thinking through the thing again. You don't arrive at many conclusions that way, or not any that you hold tofor very long, so summing it all up before God and Everybody is a bit of a humbug. A lot of people don't quite know where they are going, I suppose; but I don't even know, for certain, where I have been. But, all right already. I've tried virtually every other literary genre at one time or another. I might as well try Bildungsroman.

The Bubble

I have, in any case, learned at least onething in the course of patching

together a scholarly career: it all depends on the timing. I entered the academic world at what has to have been the best time to enter it in the whole course of its history; at least in the United States, possibly altogether. When I emerged from the U.S. Navy in 1946, having been narrowly saved by The Bomb from being obliged to invade Japan, the great boom inAmerican higher education was just getting underway, and I have ridden the wave all the way through, crest after crest, until today, when it seems at last, like me, to be finally subsiding. I was twenty. I wanted to get away from California, where I had an excess of relatives but no family. I wanted to be a novelist, preferably famous. And, most fatefully, I had the GI Bill. Or more exactly, we had theGI Bill: millions of us. As has been many times retailed—there was even a television special on the subject a year or so ago, and there is a book about it called, not inappropriately, When Dreams Come True—the flood of determined veterans, nearly two and a half million of them, onto college campuses in the half decade immediately following 1945 altered, suddenly and forever, the whole face ofhigher education in this country. We were older, we had been through something our classmates and our teachers, for the most part, had not, we were in a hurry, and we were wildly uninterested in the rites and masquerades of undergraduate life. Many of us were married, most of the rest of us, myself included, soon would be. Perhaps most importantly, we transformed the class, the ethnic, the religious,and even to some degree the racial composition of the national student body. And at length, as the wave moved through the graduate schools, we transformed the professoriate too. Between 1950 and 1970, the number of doctorates awarded annually increased five-fold, from about 6,000 a year to about 30,000. (In 1940 it had been 3,000. No wonder the sixties happened!) That was perhaps not what WilliamRandolph Hearst and The American Legion, who mobilized popular support for the Bill, precisely had in mind. But even at the time we knew we were the vanguard of something large and consequential: the degreeing of America. Having grown up rural in the Great Depression, I had not supposed I

would be going to college, so that when the possibility suddenly presented itself, I had no idea how torespond to it. After drifting around San Francisco most of the summer "readjusting" myself to a civilian existence, also at the Government's expense, I asked a high school English teacher, an old-style leftist and waterfront agitator who had first suggested to me that I might become a writer, like Steinbeck, say, or Jack London, what I should do. He said (approximately): "You should go to Antioch...