Report for the Academic Year 1992-1993 - The Institute Libraries ...

THE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
INTERPRETIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE
Faculty
CLIFFORD GEERTZ [Harold F. Under Professor]
JOAN WALLACH SCOTT
MICHAEL WALZER [UPS Foundation Professor]
Professor Emeritus
ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN
Since its inception, the School has been committed to broadly humanistic, "inter-
pretive" approaches to the social sciences. Interpretive social science embraces all
the ways in which scholars make sense of the social world — policy, economy,
religion, and family — through empirical study, discussion within and across
disciplinary communities, and the critical revision of accepted conceptions. The
School is interested in cultural concepts as they shape the disciplines and, more
generally, as they organize all forms of social activity. From this perspective
"interpretive social science" is the study of the ways in which human beings
create their societies and make life within them meaningful.
With a faculty of four members, the School can hardly hope to cover all the
relevant academic disciplines. Yet the presence of a permanent faculty provides
continuity and coherence for the program of the School over the years and in any
single year. Faculty members have participated actively in the most important
contemporary debates about the centrality of culture, language, ritual, and moral
and aesthetic understandings in the study of society. And although each is rooted
in his or her own discipline, all do work that cuts across disciplinary boundaries.
It is the common interest in interpretation and in the construction of meaning
that lends coherence to the School's program. The School is committed to bring
to the Institute each year scholars who address issues of culture and meaning
through concrete study and from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as
scholars who work in the same discipline as one or another faculty member but
differ in intellectual perspective. This results in a wide-ranging Membership that
represents in any given year a more or less coherent set of arguments — the
arguments through which, at that moment, the shape of scholarly work is being
decided.
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