"it's turtles all they way down"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 11/18/06, Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at ohio.edu> wrote:
>
> I first read the turtle story in an article by Clifford Geertz, the
> anthropologist ("From the Native's Point of View"?  I'll look it up
> later).  He suggested it was an ancient Indonesian/Balinese? myth.  The
> Hindu account would therefore seem plausible in terms of an
> Asian-disseminated origin.

Geertz tells the story in "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive
Theory of Culture," the introductory essay in _The Interpretation of
Cultures_ (1973). He doesn't suggest an Indonesian origin and is in
fact a bit hazy about the tale's provenance:

"There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it was an Indian story
-- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on
a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in
turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer;
it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another
turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the
way down.'"


--Ben Zimmer

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