We use the work of Clifford Geertz to examine long-standing questions about the relationship between interpretation and explanation. We extract from Geertz’s work explanatory theories of what we are calling meaning and meaningfulness. We argue that making explicit interpretivists’ implicit theories about how these differing kinds of cultural experience work clarifies what interpretivists like Geertz are doing, but also allows us to examine the strengths and weaknesses of theories that underlie interpretive practice. We find that Geertz was more of a generalizing theorist of culture than he claimed to be and that the theories he worked with provide fruitful elements for an ongoing, theoretically-guided research program into how culture works.

Part personal autobiography, part intellectual history, this article offers lessons from a long career, reflections on my sociological contributions, and an account of how major social changes shaped my trajectory and made me the sociologist I am. I also offer an assessment of some of my central ideas and some new suggestions about how to understand culture.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewGive and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa. By Nitsan Chorev. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. xii+305. $95.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).Ann SwidlerAnn SwidlerUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 126, Number 6May 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714031 Views: 122Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Viewing missionary Protestantism and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as carriers of transnational institutional innovation, this article compares their successes and failures at creating self-sustaining institutions in distant societies. Missionary Protestantism and NGOs are similar in that they attempt to establish formal organizations outside kinship, lineage, and ethnic forms of solidarity. Focusing on institutions as ways to create collective capacities that organize social life, we trace the route whereby Protestant missionaries established congregational religion in Africa and identify social practices that made this enterprise successful but are comparatively absent in current NGO attempts to transform organizational life. Largely ignored by sociologists interested in institutional transformation, the history of congregational religion offers valuable sociological lessons about the conditions for radical institutional innovation. Its success was rooted first, in colonial missionaries’ ability to enforce new ways of life on small exemplary communities; second, in local adaptations (African prophetic movements, Pentecostalism) that deepened and widened the social reach of congregational principles; and third in the incentives Protestantism created for propagating the congregational form.

This chapter explores the varied practices through which donors assure their funders and themselves that their efforts have succeeded. NGOs that implement interventions to prevent HIV deploy three techniques to show that their efforts have been successful: testimonials from those whose lives they want to change, listing and counting the activities they conduct to produce change, and end-of-project evaluations. Many projects organize a celebration with speeches and testimonials when a donor visits or when the project has ended. Journalists are often invited by the NGO to attend the ceremony, with the understanding that they will write a feature story on the event. A key event in the celebration is when a beneficiary takes center stage and tells the audience a before-and-after story of the change that the NGO has made in her, or his, life.

This chapter explores the intersecting fantasies that lock donors, brokers, and villagers together in a fraught embrace. Donors imagine the poverty and powerlessness of their potential beneficiaries—poor villagers or desperate slum dwellers—and the empowering, transformative help they can offer. Brokers and villagers imagine that the NGOs have a lot of money and that anyone from a wealthy country is rich, and thus that the altruists have the potential to improve their country and, particularly, their own lives. Their embrace of altruists, like the altruists' of them, rests on powerful fantasies. The frustrations arise as those with differing and often-conflicting imaginations attempt to collaborate in transforming the lives of the poor who are living through the tsunami of AIDS in Malawi.

In the wake of the AIDS pandemic, legions of organizations and compassionate individuals descended on Africa from faraway places to offer their help and save lives. This book shows how the dreams of these altruists became entangled with complex institutional and human relationships. The book describes the often mismatched expectations and fantasies of those who seek to help, of the villagers who desperately seek help, and of the brokers on whom both Western altruists and impoverished villagers must rely. Based on years of fieldwork in the heavily AIDS-affected country of Malawi, this book digs into the sprawling AIDS enterprise and unravels the paradoxes of AIDS policy and practice. All who want to do good—from idealistic volunteers to world-weary development professionals—depend on brokers as guides, fixers, and cultural translators. These irreplaceable but frequently unseen local middlemen are the human connection between altruists' dreams and the realities of global philanthropy. Personal stories, public scandals, and intersecting, sometimes clashing fantasies bring the lofty intentions of AIDS altruism firmly down to earth. The book ultimately argues that altruists could accomplish more good, not by seeking to transform African lives but by helping Africans achieve their own goals. It unveils the tangled relations of those involved in the collective struggle to contain an epidemic.

This chapter illustrates the misunderstandings and accommodations that brokers and donors make. It begins with a story which, like many stories in the world of African aid, is an almost surreal cultural mash-up. There are conflicting motives and complex misunderstandings between donors and brokers, and between both of these and villagers. Each arouses fantasies in the others that cannot be fulfilled. Nonetheless, because it is in the interest of each to do so, brokers and donors, and sometimes villagers, fumble toward working misunderstandings—ways of accommodating one another that allow them, however uncomfortably, to get along. The chapter takes up two themes that work very well for both donors and brokers: “fighting stigma” and “orphans and other vulnerable children,” both of which have been perennial favorites of the AIDS enterprise.

This chapter discusses how practices—routinized activities that allow people to cooperate—bind donors, brokers, and villagers together in a collaborative effort. These practices also bind them by sharply constricting the range of activities that AIDS projects actually implement on the ground. The necessity of uniting actors with divergent agendas gives development projects their static quality. International and domestic NGOs seeking funding claim that they have innovative themes, but there is monotonous uniformity in what they actually do. NGOs employ a very narrow set of practices that work—work not in the sense that they effectively prevent AIDS, but in the sense that they satisfy the varied agendas of the actors. These ubiquitous practices are conducting a “training” and “monitoring and evaluation,” known as M&E.

This chapter discusses how institutional altruists support technical approaches, such as screening the blood supply for the HIV virus, providing antiretroviral drugs to HIV+ pregnant women so as to prevent transmission to their babies, and voluntary counseling and testing. Donors also spend heavily on information, education, and communication about the ABCs—abstain, be faithful, and condomize—since it seemed impossible that Africans would persist in their sexual practices if they really understood how dangerous AIDS was and how to prevent it. It was not clear, however, and still is not clear, just what programs can effectively change longstanding practices of intimate sexual behavior. The chapter shows that some of the cultural creations delighted the villagers while others offered stern admonitions.

This chapter considers how brokers perceive that merit, miracles, and malice structure their opportunities and thus their outcomes. It analyzes the ways that the career aspirations of brokers at all levels can suddenly be derailed by the death of a parent, salvaged with the help of a benefactor, or altered by any number of others who have the power to help or harm. Malawian brokers, particularly, tell their career histories by drawing on three narratives: that of Merit, emphasizing their objective achievements; that of Miracles, emphasizing the remarkable coincidences or the unexpected help from relatives or strangers that make success possible; and Malice, or simply misfortune, when anyone from capricious donors to envious co-workers can sabotage a career.