Mimesis Conversations with a Concept

"It has thus dawned on social scientists that they did not need to be mimic physicists or closet humanists or to invent some new realm of being to serve as the object of their investigation. Instead, they could proceed with their vocation, trying to discover order in collective life, and decide how what they were doing was connected to related enterprises when they managed to get some of it done..." - this is how Clifford Geertz envisioned the interpretative, hermeneutical turn in the social sciences and humanities, and understood it as a liberation, a break from the one-sided mimetic relation these fields of study had long held with natural sciences. Instead of desiring the same objects, "laws like Boyle's, or forces like Volta's, or mechanisms like Darwin's" they find their own calling "in constructions like Burckhardt's, Weber's, or Freud's: systematic unpackings of the conceptual world in which condottiere, Calvinists, or paranoids live".
According to Geertz, as the social sciences interpret certain actions, people, and cases, rather than discover general laws, they apply analogies that orient them towards the humanities, a process which also promotes the blurring of genres and of disciplinary borders. These analogies both reflect and form how we think about culture and society. As natural sciences cease to be the model in this mimetic relation, the social sciences abandon the mechanical and biological analogies in their interpretations and understand culture and society in more ludic terms: "as social theory turns from propulsive metaphors (the language of pistons) toward ludic ones (the language of pastimes), the humanities are connected to its arguments not in the fashion of sceptical bystanders but, as the source of its imagery, chargeable accomplices".

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