Quote of the Day (3/17/11)

Indeed, when we get down to the substance of things, unbemused by covering terms like "literature," "sociology" or "physics," most effective academic communities are not that much larger than most peasant villages and just about as ingrown. Even some entire disciplines fit this pattern: it is still true apparently, that just about every creative mathematician . . . knows about every other one, and the interaction, indeed the Durkeimian solidarity, among them would make a Zulu proud. To some extent the same thing seems to be true of plasma physicists, psycholinguists, Renaissance scholars, and a number of other of what have come to be called, adapting [Robert] Boyle's older phrase, "invisible colleges." From such units, intellectual villages if you will, convergent data can be gathered, for the relations among the inhabitants are typically not merely intellectual, but political, moral, and broadly personal (these days, increasingly, marital) as well. Laboratories and research institutes, scholarly societies, axial university departments, literary and artistic cliques, intellectual factions, all fit the same pattern: communities of multiply connected individuals in which something you find out about A tells you something about B as well, because they have known each other too long and too well, they are characters in one another's biographies.
--Clifford Geertz, "The Way We Think Now: Ethnography of Modern Thought"