power of critical analysis and interpretation. They have a legitimacy of their own and if carefully pursued can lead the scholar from information to knowledge and even, perhaps, to wisdom.

Today, more than at any time in recent memory, researchers feel the need to move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, communicate with colleagues in other fields, and discover patterns that connect. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has gone so far as to describe these shifts as a fundamental “refiguration, . . . a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just another redrawing of the cultural map—the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes—but an alteration of the principles of mapping. Something is happening,” Geertz says, “to the way we think about the way we think.”

This is reflected, he observes, in:

... philosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism (think of Stanley Cavell on Beckett or Thoreau, Sartre on Flaubert), scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux (Lewis Thomas, Loren Eisley), baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Borges, Barthelme), histories that consist of

equations Engerman, like true ethnograph as travelo cast as his temologic (Paul Fey personal

These exam disciplinary, inte evidence that an perhaps as mom of knowledge, Today, interdisc academic life, a intellectual que boundaries of h academy surely integration.

The first knowledge—academic life moves toward be responsibly helpful to indicate cial problems tion?

Reflecting turies, not on Rensselaer Po founded on th

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