Said’s sudden hostility to Geertz followed Geertz’s critical review of Said’s own book

Evidence

But five years later, in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Said wrote of the ‘standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory clichés about hermeneutic circles offered by Clifford Geertz’. Had Geertz’s methodology changed in those five years? Not really. What had changed was that Geertz had written critically of Said’s Covering Islam in the New York Review of Books in 1982, where he had referred to Said’s ‘easy way with the evidence’ and his ‘tone of high moral panic’ and concluded that the book left ‘a bad taste in the mind’. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 538

Categorization

• CANDY: A gossipy, pointed anecdote about intellectual vindictiveness — a critic praised to the sky who gets trashed once he turns on the author.
• SHARE: Good for an academic friend who enjoys intellectual feuds and the sociology of criticism.

Related

• Debating Said’s Orientalism degenerated into motive-attribution rather than argument. (similarity 0.79)