Social Science
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
When an anthropologist, urged on by an attentive publisher, begins to gather together certain of his essays for a kind of retrospective exhibi tion of what he has been doing, or trying to do, over the fifteen-year pe riod since his release from graduate school, he is faced by two tearing decisions: what to include, and how reverently to treat what is included. All of us who write social science journal pieces have a nonbook in us, and more and more of us are publishing them; all of us imagine that anything our past self has done our present self could do better, and stand ready to perpetrate improvements upon our own work we would never stand for from any editor. To try to find the figure in the carpet of one's writings can be as chilling as trying to find it in one's life; to weave, post facto, a figure in-"this is what I meant to say" -is an in tense temptation.
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