What Capital Markets Can Learn From Clifford Geertz

By CAITLIN ZALOOM

Cultural anthropologists often turn an eye to their own kinship structure, and on the master chart of intellectual relations, Clifford Geertz is my grandfather. His name, enclosed within the points of a black-line triangle, hovers above that of Paul Rabinow, my dissertation adviser and Geertz's former student, and is two tiers above my own open circle. Unfortunately this lends me little genetic claim on Geertz's talents as a close observer of social life or his flourish as a writer. Yet I am