From Clifford Geertz's "In Search of North Africa" published in the New York Review of Books 16, no 7 (April 1971)
Physicists, novelists, logicians and art historians have recognized for some time that what we call our knowledge of reality consists of images of it that we ourselves have fashioned. In the social sciences this is just now coming to be understood, and then only imperfectly. The contribution of the investigator not only to the description and analysis of an object of study but to its very creation still tends to be obscured by the sort of mentality which regards the Human Relations Area Files, the Gallup Poll, and the US Census as repositories of recorded truths waiting merely to be discovered. In the arts, the unimplicated observer has been reduced to a minor convention; in the sciences to an unreachable limiting case. But in most sociology, anthropology, and political science he lives on, masquerading as a real person, performing a possible act.
Part of the reason for this failure, on the part of investigators otherwise only too self-conscious, to reflect on the way in which they first construct the objects they then inspect is that the issue has generally confused with the not unimportant but rather less profound one of bias. Concealing private prejudices in public language is certainly an affliction of social scientific research; for some people, that, in fact, is its vocation.
But beyond the tired debates about "value neutrality" and the pious unmasking of other people's parti pris is the more disturbing question which the unreliable narrator raised for fiction, the complementarity principle for physics, and Rashomon for common sense: if what we see is to a considerable degree a reflex of the devices we use to render it visible, how do we choose among devices? Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird are twelve too many for someone who still believes that facts are born not made, and that differences of perception reduce to differences of opinion.
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