Clifford Geertz

August 23, 1926 - October 30, 2006

Life

Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco on August 23, 1926. At 17, he joined the US Navy in World War II, and, like anthropologist Marvin Harris, went on to college thanks to the GI Bill, where he never even took an anthropology class, instead graduating in 1950 with a BA in philosophy(Current Anthropology). He went on to graduate school at Harvard, where he graduated in 1956 as a student from the Department of Social Relations with training as an anthropologist. He spent over 2 years in Java doing field work, and earned in doctorate in 1956 with a dissertation based on religion in small towns in Java. From 1960 - 70, Geertz taught at the University of Chicago and published 3 books.

In 1970, Geertz left Chicago and began teaching social sciences at Princeton, where he remained until 2000. In 1973, he released a compilation of his essays from the 1960s and titles it The Interpretation of Cultures, which became his most popular book and solidified Geertz's credibility as not only a expert on Indonesia, but also an anthropological theorist. Geertz continued to right theoretical essays until his death, and earned Honorary Doctorates from over a dozen universities, including Harvard and Cambridge. He died on October 30, 2006 due to complications from heart failure.

Anthropological Ideas and Impact

The impact of Clifford Geertz on the field of anthropology is best stated by Richard Shweder in Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues, where he simply says "For three decades Clifford Geertz has been the single most influential and the single most controversial cultural anthropologist in the United States". Geertz helped push forward the ideas of thick description (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description) and symbolic anthropology(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_anthropology). Geertz also help create a general appreciation of philosophical pluralism, meaning that nothing can truly be understand without seeing its context. Geertz once wrote "If anthropology is obsessed with anything it is with how much difference difference makes." and "If you want a good rule-of thumb generalization from anthropology I would suggest the following: Any sentence that begins, 'All societies have' is either baseless or banal" (Shweder, 1). Geertz called his most prevalent theory "“Interpretive explanation…and it is a form of explanation, not just exalted glossography…trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs, all the usual objects of social-scientific interest, mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are."

What is Symbolic Anthropology?

Symbolic anthropology is a focus on how people understand and interpret the world around them. It studies symbols and how people assign meaning to these symbols in their everyday life. Specific focal points of symbolic anthropology could include religion, cosmology, rituals, and mythology. There are two different approaches, which are the symbolic approach and the interpretive approach. Clifford Geertz had a concentration on the symbolic approach.

Major Works and Publications

*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)

*The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

*Kinship in Bali (1975)

*Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980)

Learn More

https://biography.yourdictionary.com/clifford-geertz

https://www.ias.edu/clifford-geertz-work-and-legacy

https://www.questia.com/library/sociology-and-anthropology/sociologists-and-anthropologists/clifford-geertz

Works Cited

“Current Anthropology.” University of Chicago Press Journals, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/204008.

Shweder, Richard A., and Byron Good. Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues. University of Chicago Press, 2005.