Clifford Geertz

For more information on Clifford James Geertz, visit Britannica.com.

The American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (born 1926) did ethnographic field work in Indonesia and Morocco, wrote influential essays on central theoretical issues in the social sciences, and advocated a distinctive "interpretive" approach to anthropology.

Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco on August 23, 1926. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he received a B.A. from Antioch College in 1950 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1956. Having held a number of brief appointments early in his career, he took a position at the University of Chicago in 1960, where he was rapidly promoted to associate and then full professor. In 1970 he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as professor of social science, a position of rare distinction which he still occupied in 1995. Over the years Geertz received a considerable number of honors and awards, including honorary degrees from several institutions. In 1958 and 1959 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) and in 1978-1979 he served as Eastman Professor at Oxford University. His books won major prizes, including the prestigious 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author.

In 1952 Geertz first went to Indonesia with a team of investigators to study Modjokuto, a small town in east central Java, where he and his wife lived for more than a year. On the basis of his research there Geertz wrote his dissertation, later published in 1960 as The Religion of Java. A comprehensive analysis of Javanese religion in its social context, this book presents a picture of a highly religious culture composed of at least three main strands (related to different population groups). These include a traditional kind of animism, Islam (itself internally diverse), and a Hindu-influenced refined mysticism.

In later years Geertz returned to Java but also spent extensive periods in Tabanan, a small town in Bali. Initially treated with complete indifference by the Balinese, Geertz and his wife gained significant access to their community. He presented his interpretation of his time there in a classic essay on the Balinese cockfight. Both in the matching of the cocks and in the bets surrounding the fight, the Balinese dramatized their concern with maintaining a definite hierarchy of rivalries and groups in which everyone had his or her fixed place.

Geertz carried out field work in Sefrou, a town in north central Morocco, in the 1960s and early 1970s, enabling him to compare two "extremes" of Islamic civilization: homogeneous and morally severe in Morroco and blended with other traditions and less concerned with scriptural doctrine in Indonesia. In both countries he found traditional religion affected by the process of secularization; whereas people used to "be held" by taken-for-granted beliefs, in modern societies they increasingly have to "hold" their beliefs in a much more conscious (and anxious) fashion. Geertz published Islam Observed in 1968.

In his early work Geertz investigated why certain communities achieved greater economic growth and modernization than others. For example, he found that the "ego-focused" market peddlers of Modjokuto, who only looked out for their own and their families' gain, were in a less favorable position than the "group-focused" Tabanan aristocrats. The latter group could use their traditional prestige to mobilize communal resources for new investments, even though they had to temper their modern entrepreneurial drive with concern for the well-being of their community.

Geertz also authored a number of essays which elaborate on his theories, including The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973 and Local Knowledge in 1983.

In 1995, Geertz published After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. In the book, he charted the transformation of cultural anthropology from a study of primitive people to a multidisciplinary investigation of a culture's symbolic systems and its interactions with the larger forces of history and modernization. Geertz used the greatest strength of anthropology (the ability to compare cultures). His periods of extended fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco enabled him to view each through the lens of the other. He also used anecdotes in the book of nonwestern countries tackling the same social questions as Western countries: national identity, moral order, and competing values.

Throughout his career Geertz tried to make sense of the ways people live their lives by interpreting cultural symbols such as ceremonies, political gestures, and literary texts. Geertz was also interested in the role of thought (especially religious thought) in society. Analyzing this role properly, he argued, requires "thick description," a probing appraisal of the meanings people's actions have for them in their own circumstances - a method Geertz tried to demonstrate in his own work. Skeptical of attempts to develop abstract theories of human behavior but sensitive to issues of universal human concern, he emphasized that anthropologists should focus on the rich texture of the lives of real human beings. Yet he showed that in writing about others one necessarily transforms "their" world; the very style in which social scientists write conveys their distinctive interpretation. Geertz' own highly sophisticated, but dense and occasionally convoluted writing style exemplifies his influential "interpretive" approach to cultural anthropology.

Further Reading

The titles and publication dates of Geertz' main works clearly show the focus and evolution of his interests: The Religion of Java (1960), Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (1963), which explains the colonial background of and economic constraints inherent in labor-intensive Japanese agriculture; Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns (1963), a readable comparative study; Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis (1966); Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968), a small but elegantly written near-classic comparative analysis; The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), a well-crafted set of highly influential theoretical essays and illustrative case studies; Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (1979), with L. Rosen and H. Geertz; Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980); Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983); and Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), a subtle analysis of the works of four outstanding anthropologists.

For autobiographical resources see: Geertz, Clifford, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Harvard University Press, 1995. For biographical resources see: Morgan, John H., Understanding Religion and Culture - Anthropological and Theological Perspectives, University Press of America, 1979 and Rice, Kenneth, Geertz and Culture, University of Michigan Press.

For periodical articles about Clifford Geertz see: Publishers Weekly, January 2, 1995; The New York Times Magazine, April 9, 1995; The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 1995; and New Statesman and Society, June 2, 1995.

For on-line resources about Clifford Geertz see: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/rsauzier/Geertz.html and http://www.biography.com.

Quotes:

"To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes."

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (January 2007)

Clifford Geertz
Born	August 23, 1926(1926-08-23) San Francisco
Died	October 30, 2006 (aged 80) Philadelphia
Nationality	American
Fields	Anthropology
Institutions	Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Doctoral students	James Siegel

Clifford James Geertz (August 23, 1926^{[citation needed]}, San Francisco – October 30, 2006, Philadelphia) was an American anthropologist and served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

Contents 1 Life 2 Thought and works 3 Interlocutors 4 See also 5 Major publications 6 References 7 External links

Life

Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco, California on August 23, 1926. After service in the U.S. Navy in World War II (1943–45), Geertz received his B.A. in Philosophy from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH in 1950, and his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1956, where he had studied social anthropology in the Department of Social Relations. He taught or held fellowships at a number of schools before joining the anthropology staff of the University of Chicago (1960–70). He then became professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1970 to 2000, then emeritus professor. Geertz received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from some fifteen colleges and universities, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge. He was married first to the anthropologist Hildred Geertz. After their divorce he married Karen Blu, also an anthropologist. Clifford Geertz died of complications following heart surgery on October 30, 2006.

Thought and works

At the University of Chicago, Geertz became a "champion of symbolic anthropology", which gives prime attention to the role of thought ("symbols") in society. Symbols guide action. Culture, outlined by Geertz in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), is "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (1973:89). The function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. The role of anthropologists is to try (though complete success is not possible) to interpret the guiding symbols of each culture (see thick description). His oft-cited essay, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," included in The Interpretation of Cultures, is the classic example of thick description at work. Geertz was quite innovative in this regard, as he was one of the first to see that the insights provided by common language philosophy and literary analysis could have major explanatory force in the social sciences.

He conducted extensive ethnographical research in Southeast Asia and North Africa. He also contributed to social and cultural theory and is still very influential in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live out their lives. He worked on religion, most particularly Islam, on bazaar trade, on economic development, on traditional political structures, and on village and family life. At the time of his death he was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.

Geertz's career worked through, over time, a variety of phases and schools of thought. Gradually he came to see the limitations of each, and moved on. His final position was to take a strong view about objective reality of the complex social system of order. But he also recognised the difficulties that research has in getting at an adequate description of that objective reality: caused by the fact that people tell ethnographers what they believe to be their own motivations, but those people's actions then often seem to contradict their statements to the researcher. This effect is partly due to: the problems that people have in verbalising aspects of their life that they usually take for granted; partly due to how ethnographers structure their research approaches and frameworks; and partly due to the inherent complexity of the social order.

Harvard professor and literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt identifies him as a strong influence, and Geertz acknowledged Greenblatt as a faithful interpreter of his work.

Interlocutors

• Stephen Greenblatt
• Robert Darnton

See also

• Clifford Geertz' theory of religion

Major publications

• The Religion of Java (1960), University Of Chicago Press 1976 paperback: ISBN 0-226-28510-3
• Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns (1963), University Of Chicago Press 1968 paperback: ISBN 0-226-28514-6
• Agricultural Involution: the process of ecological change in Indonesia (1964)
• Islam Observed, Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968), University Of Chicago Press 1971 paperback: ISBN 0-226-28511-1
• The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Basic Books 2000 paperback: ISBN 0-465-09719-7
• Kinship in Bali (1975) coauthor: Hildred Geertz, University Of Chicago Press 1978 paperback: ISBN 0-226-28516-2
• Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980), Princeton University Press 2001 paperback: ISBN 0-691-00778-0
• Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983), Basic Books 2000 paperback: ISBN 0-465-04162-0
• "Anti-Anti-Relativism" (1984), American Anthropologist, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 263–278.
• Works and Lives: The Anthropologist As Author (1988), Stanford University Press 1990 paperback: ISBN 0-8047-1747-8
• After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Harvard University Press 1995 paperback: ISBN 0-674-00872-3
• Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton University Press 2000 paperback: ISBN 0-691-08956-6
• "An inconstant profession: The anthropological life in interesting times" (2002), Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 31, pp. 1–19 Viewable at hypergeertz.jku.at

References

• Geertz, C., Shweder, R. A., & Good, B. (2005). Clifford Geertz by his colleagues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• University of Chicago, & Geertz, C. (1963). Old societies and new States; the quest for modernity in Asia and Africa. [New York]: Free Press of Glencoe.

External links

• Interview of Clifford Geertz(video)
• Big Ideas: Clifford Geertz
• Clifford Geertz: A Life of Learning (Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1999)
• Obituary at Institute for Advanced Study
• HyperGeertz WorldCatalogue extended bibliography
• A short biography of Geertz from Richard Wilk's website
• Hyper Geertz World Catalogue HTM
• Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80 by Andrew L. Yarrow published on November 1, 2006 in the New York Times
• New Academic and Deep Book about the Work of Clifford Geertz: Nature, symbol and culture in Clifford Geertz, by Enrique Anrubia: printed in Spain, 2008
• Geertz author page and archive from The New York Review of Books
• Interview of Clifford Geertz by Alan Macfarlane 5th May 2004 (film). Linked to Frazer Lecture 2004 (sound only)

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