Transcript Clifford James Geertz

Clifford James Geertz
Born on August 23, 1926
Died on October 30, 2006
American
Anthropologist
Education
• After service in the U.S. Navy in World War II (1943–45), he received his B.A. in
philosophy from Antioch College in 1950.
• He earned his Ph.D. in 1956 from Harvard university, department of social relations with
a dissertation entitled “Religion in Modjukuto: A Study of Ritual Belief In A Complex
Society”.
Instruction and other activities
• He joined the faculty of the anthropology department at the University of Chicago in
1960.
• He expanded his focus on Indonesia, produced three books: “Religion of Java” (1960),
“Agricultural Involution” (1963), and “Peddlers and Princes” (1963)
• In the mid-sixties Geertz shifted course and began a new research project in Morocco
which resulted in several publications, including “Islam Observed” (1968), which
compared Indonesia and Morocco.
• In 1970 left Chicago to become professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1970 to 2000, then emeritus professor.
• In 1973 he published “The Interpretation of Cultures”. This became Geertz's best known
book, and established him as an anthropological theorist.
• In 1974 he edited the anthology “Myth, Symbol, Culture” which contained papers by
many important anthropologists on symbolic anthropology.
• He produced ethnographic pieces, such as “Kinship in Bali” (1975), “Meaning and Order
in Moroccan Society” (1978) and “Negara” (1981)
• From the 1980s until his death, Geertz wrote more theoretical and essayistic pieces,
including book reviews for the New York Review of Books.
• “Local Knowledge” (1983), “Available Light” (2000) and “Life Among The Anthros”
(published posthumously in 2010), “After The Fact” (1995) and “Works and Lives” (1988)
• He was the director of the multidisciplinary project “Committee for the Comparative
Studies of New Nations”.
• He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton.
• He is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of
symbolic anthropology.
• He was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist
in the United States."
Honors
• Association for Asian Studies (AAS), 1987 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian
Studies
• Geertz received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from some fifteen colleges and universities,
including Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge
Main ideas and contributions
• At the University of Chicago, Geertz became a champion of symbolic anthropology, a
framework which gives prime attention to the role of symbols in constructing public meaning.
• In his seminal work “The Interpretation of Cultures” (1973), Geertz outlined culture as "a
system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.“
• He was one of the earliest scholars to see that the insights provided by common language,
philosophy and literary analysis could have major explanatory force in the social sciences.
• Geertz aimed to provide the social sciences with an understanding and appreciation of “thick
description.”
• Geertz himself argues for a “semiotic” concept of culture: “Believing, with Max Weber,
that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun," he states
“I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an
experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is
explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical.”
• Geertz argues that to interpret a culture’s web of symbols, scholars must first isolate its
elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements and characterize
the whole system, in some general way, according to the core symbols around which it is
organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological
principles upon which it is based. It was his view that culture is public because “meaning
is,” and systems of meanings are what produce culture because they are the collective
property of a particular people. We cannot discover the culture’s import or understand
its systems of meaning when, as Wittgenstein noted, “We cannot find our feet with
them.” Geertz wants society to appreciate that social actions are larger than themselves;
they speak to larger issues, and vice versa, because “they are made to.”
• In seeking to converse with subjects in foreign cultures and gain access to their
conceptual world; this is the goal of the semiotic approach to culture.
• The essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to
make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within
them.
Major Works
• “Religion as a Cultual System". In Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion
(1966)
• The Religion of Java (1960)
• Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian
Towns (1963)
• Agricultural Involution: the process of ecological change in Indonesia (1964)
• Islam Observed, Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968)
• The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
• Kinship in Bali (1975) (with Hildred Geertz)
• Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980)
• Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983)
• "Anti-Anti-Relativism" (1984), American Anthropologist
• Works and Lives: The Anthropologist As Author
• After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist
• Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics
• "An inconstant profession: The anthropological life in interesting times" (2002)