Pretty easy to read academic article. The title says it all: the piece explores in depth the attacks on relativism which are based upon a reversion to placing a universal form of knowledge at the top of a hierarchy. Just below that is morality. Geertz asserts that the two prime levers for doing this are "Human Mind" and "Human Nature."
The piece is an excellent example of professional writing which uses first person voice in places and engages in playful, sarcastic, and engaging tones. Similarly, he largely gives voice to the Anti Relativists before he pulls them apart. Very little discussion of Relativism takes place.
Key sections are second paragraph of 264: people spending too much time on what they do NOT believe; to question a universal truth often leads to being accused of not believing in anything.
page 270 Geertz covers the Anti R genre of child to adult as relativist to anti-relativist.
272 "There is the same tendency to see diversity as surface and universality as depth. And there is the same desire to represent one's interpretations not as constructions brought to their objects--societies, cultures, languages--in an effort, somehow, somehwat to comprehend them, but as quiddities of such objects forced upon our thought."
275 "Looking into dragons, not domesticating or abominating them, nor drowning them in vats of theory, is what anthropology has been all about."
Could you adjust that and change dragons to persuasion and anthropology to rhetoric?
276 The final words:
The objection to anti-relativism is not that it rejects an it-s'all-how-you-look-at-it approach to knowledge or a when-in-Rome approach to morality, but that it imagines that they can only be defeated by placing morality beyond culture and knowledge beyond both. This, speaking of things which must needs be so, is no longer possible. If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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