Against self-conscious self-consciousness

Geertz has encouraged a whole generation of anthropologists to parade their real or invented inner qualms and paralysis .... They agonize so much about their inability to know themselves and the Other, at any level of regress, that they no longer need to trouble themselves too much about the Other .... Why waste too much time in the physical discomfort of the fieldwork situation? [C]ognitive impotence and angoisse can be felt just as well in Paris as in the Middle Atlas. Better, really.

-- Ernest Gellner.