44 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
to mean. This fact, Geertz explains, will require more imagination
on our part, not the imagination to make up diversity but the imagination required to pick out subtle examples of it.
"The Drunken Indian and the Kidney Machine" provides a case in
point. Geertz worries about the case because he sees so little understanding on either side, but he comes down, as we might expect, on
the side of the drunken Indian. For Geertz believes that the doctors
had little appreciation for the historical turmoil that made the
Indian a drunk. Yet Geertz can offer no solution to the situation: "I
cannot see that either more ethnocentrism, more relativism, or more
neutrality would have made things any better (though more imagination might have)" (117). The episode takes place in the dark for
Geertz because no one grasped what it was to be the other and no
one learned much in the episode about either themselves or anyone
else. In a sense, what everyone lacked was the point of view of the
ethnographer. Ethnography, Geertz claims, "places particular we-s
among particular they-s, and they-s among we-s, where all...
already are, however uneasily" (119). It teaches us that we must
know others and live with that knowledge, and it accomplishes this
feat by making us visible to ourselves by representing us and everyone else "as cast into the midst of a world full of irremovable
strangeness we can't keep clear of" (120). In the final analysis, the
use of diversity is to make us understand that we live in a collage of
otherness.
Rorty's response to Geertz is that anti-ethnocentrism is the particular ethnocentric bias of the West, which means that anti antiethnocentrism should be viewed not as ethnocentric behavior but as
a self-critical attitude on the part of pragmatists and postmodern
bourgeois liberals. "We would rather die than be ethnocentric," he
writes, "but ethnocentrism is precisely the conviction that one would
rather die than share certain beliefs. We find ourselves wondering
whether our own bourgeois liberalism is not just one more example
of cultural bias" (Rorty 1986: 525).
The gist of Rorty's argument is best explained by looking at his
reading of "The Drunken Indian and the Kidney Machine." He sees
the darkness of the episode but believes that there was enough light
for everyone to do what was required. There is no need for improvement. The drunken Indian had the right to be on the machine, and
if the doctors had removed him for one of their own- which they
did not - the authorities would have descended upon them. In short,
