After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist,

Sefrou, a Moroccan town nestled at the foot of the Middle Atlas Mountains, was an enchanted oasis where Berbers, Arabs, Jews and French settlers coexisted, when cultural anthropologist Geertz first went there in 1963. But by 1986, the French and Jews had left, and the population, which had tripled, was deeply divided between old-timers and recent immigrants, mostly Berbers. The other focal point of this affecting scholarly memoir, Pare, Indonesia, a town in central Java where Geertz has done fieldwork since 1952, was wracked by internecine combat among Islamic, nationalist and Communist parties until the army imposed military rule in 1965. Today, status-ridden ideas of right and propriety dominate daily life as Pare's inhabitants attempt to reconcile group diversity with ideals of national unity. Using his fieldwork in these towns as a prism, Princeton anthropologist Geertz charts the transformation of cultural anthropology from a study of ``primitive'' people to a multidisciplinary investigation of a particular culture's symbolic systems, its interactions with the larger forces of history and modernization. (Feb.)