Essay on Geertz

Geertz Difficulty Paper

“It is this kind of bringing of assorted experiences of everyday life to focus that the cockfight, set aside from that life as “only a game” and reconnected to it as “more than a game,” accomplishes, and so creates what, better than typical or universal, could be called a paradigmatic human event – that is, one that tells us less what happens than the kind of thing that would happen if, as is not the case, life were art and could be as freely shaped by styles of feeling as Macbeth and David Copperfield are.” (Geertz 331).

This quote provides a very good example of why I found the entire Geertz essay hard to read and even harder to understand.

First of all, Geertz’s sentence structure can make almost anything seem very confusing. His sentences are needlessly long....