Clifford Geertz
Following Weber, Geertz held that humans are suspended in webs of significance they have spun; because culture is public, its analysis is an interpretive search for meaning that reads a ritual like the Balinese cockfight as a story people tell themselves about themselves.
Placement
American anthropologist who did fieldwork in Java, Bali and Morocco: culture, he argued, is a public web of meanings to be interpreted rather than a set of laws to be discovered, and ethnography is “thick description” that reads social action like a text.
Key ideas
- Thick description
- Culture as webs of significance
- Religion as a cultural system
- Local knowledge
Influence
Influenced by 3
Max Weber
influenced by
Geertz founded his semiotic concept of culture on Weber: ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’, analysed by interpretation (‘Thick Description’, 1973). C. Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); SEP “Max Weber”
Evidence: AI draft
Max Weber › 1864–1920
Gilbert Ryle
influenced by
Geertz took Ryle’s distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ description – twitch, wink, parodied wink – as the model of ethnography as interpretation (‘Thick Description’, 1973). C. Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); G. Ryle, “The Thinking of Thoughts: What is ‘Le Penseur’ Doing?” (1968); SEP “Gilbert Ryle”
Evidence: AI draft
Gilbert Ryle › 1900–1976
Talcott Parsons
influenced by ✓
Trained in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, Geertz used Parsons’s distinction between cultural and social system to explain a failed Javanese funeral (‘Ritual and Social Change’, 1957). C. Geertz, “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example”, American Anthropologist 59 (1957), in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); “Passage and Accident” (2000)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Talcott Parsons › 1902–1979
Influenced 1
Paul Ricœur
influenced
In his Chicago lectures (1975; publ. 1986) Ricœur took up Geertz’s ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’ (1964): at its basic level ideology integrates a community symbolically. P. Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (ed. G. H. Taylor, 1986); C. Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System” (1964), in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
Evidence: AI draft
Paul Ricœur › 1913–2005
Criticism
Criticized by 2
Richard Rorty
criticised by
Against Geertz’s warning, Rorty defended ethnocentrism: a liberal culture can only start from its own beliefs, but is distinguished by widening its sympathies (‘On Ethnocentrism’, 1986). R. Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz”, Michigan Quarterly Review 25 (1986); in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991), 203–210; C. Geertz, “The Uses of Diversity” (1986)
Evidence: AI draft
Richard Rorty › 1931–2007
Talal Asad
criticised by
Asad argued against Geertz’s definition of religion as a system of symbols that a universal definition of religion is itself a product of post-Reformation Christian history, which separated belief from power and discipline. T. Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz”, Man 18 (1983); Genealogies of Religion (1993), ch. 1
Evidence: AI draft
Talal Asad › b. 1932
Criticizes 1
Claude Lévi-Strauss
criticised
In ‘The Cerebral Savage’ (1967) Geertz objected that Lévi-Strauss dissolves particular cultures into the universal operations of an abstract mind, losing their local meaning. C. Geertz, “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss”, Encounter 28 (1967); in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
Evidence: AI draft
Claude Lévi-Strauss › 1908–2009
Works
Fifteen essays from 1957–72, opened by the new programmatic essay “Thick Description”: culture is a public system of symbols that anthropology interprets; the volume includes “Religion as a Cultural System”, “Ideology as a Cultural System” and “Deep Play”, on the Balinese cockfight.
Essays on interpretation across the disciplines: “Blurred Genres” describes how the social sciences turn to the analogies of game, drama and text; others treat common sense, art and law as cultural systems and ask what it means to grasp “the native’s point of view”.
Position
Geertz is on the map as a bridge between anthropology and the philosophy of the social sciences. In “Thick Description” (1973), the programmatic opening of “The Interpretation of Cultures”, he called his concept of culture semiotic: “believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”, he took culture to be those webs and its analysis to be “an interpretive one in search of meaning”. From Gilbert Ryle he took the distinction between a “thin” description of a movement – the contraction of an eyelid – and a “thick” one that says whether it is a twitch, a wink or the parody of a wink. The ethnographer, he wrote, “inscribes” social discourse, and for this he referred to Paul Ricœur’s model of the text. Essays such as “Ideology as a Cultural System” (1964), “Religion as a Cultural System” (1966) and “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1972) applied the approach; Ricœur discussed Geertz’s concept of ideology in his Chicago lectures of 1975. In the 1980s Geertz defended what he called “anti anti-relativism” and argued with Richard Rorty about ethnocentrism. Talal Asad and the authors of “Writing Culture” (1986) questioned a universal concept of religion as a system of symbols and the authority of the interpreting ethnographer; these debates are set out under “Context & critique”.
Life & context
Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco on 23 August 1926. After serving in the US Navy from 1943 to 1945 he studied philosophy at Antioch College in Ohio (BA 1950) and then anthropology in Harvard’s interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, where he worked with Clyde Kluckhohn and Talcott Parsons. As a member of the Modjokuto Project he did fieldwork with Hildred Geertz in eastern Java in 1952–54 and received his doctorate in 1956 with a thesis on Javanese religion. Fieldwork in Bali followed in 1957–58 and, from 1963, repeated stays in Sefrou, Morocco. He taught at Berkeley (1958–60) and at the University of Chicago (1960–70), where he worked in the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations. From 1970 he was professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, emeritus from 2000. “Works and Lives” received the National Book Critics Circle prize in criticism in 1988. He died in Philadelphia on 30 October 2006.
Further main works
- The Religion of Java (1960)
- Islam Observed (1968)
- Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980)
- Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988)
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