Who's afraid of 'Teutonic professors'?

摘要

In his well-known essay 'Blurred Genres', Clifford Geertz points out that the word 'hermeneutics' frightens people, because it conjures up 'images of biblical zealots, literary humbugs, and Teutonic professors' (Geertz 1980-1983: 21). To exorcize the menace represented by the 'Teutonic professors', one may want to call them by their names: Herder, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas for example. As a matter of fact ethnology in Germany decided to exorcize the menace by ignoring it, so that hermeneutics had no direct influence on theory building in our discipline.