"it's turtles all they way down"

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:18 PM -0500 11/18/06, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>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
>
Well, yes, but the Ross (1967) version is better told.  Actually,
wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down )
gives both the Hawking (1988) retelling (with Bertrand Russell the
possible target) and Ross's (with Wm. James), and it quotes Haj as
saying it may be apocryphal and he's not sure where he got it from.
The wiki entry also has the Geertz and one from Scalia, and lots more.

LH

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