Clifford Geertz

Dzieła

• 1973Interpretacja kultur: wybrane eseje

  Piętnaście esejów z lat 1957–72, otwartych nowym, programowym esejem „Opis gęsty”: kultura jest publicznym systemem symboli, który antropologia interpretuje; tom zawiera „Religię jako system kulturowy”, „Ideologię jako system kulturowy” i „Głęboką grę” o balijskiej walce kogutów.

• 1983Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (Wiedza lokalna: dalsze eseje z antropologii interpretacyjnej)

  Eseje o interpretacji w różnych dyscyplinach: „Zamazane gatunki” opisują, jak nauki społeczne zwracają się ku analogiom gry, dramatu i tekstu; inne traktują zdrowy rozsądek, sztukę i prawo jako systemy kulturowe i pytają, co znaczy uchwycić „punkt widzenia tubylca”.

Stanowisko

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”.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Religion of Java (1960)
• Islam Observed (1968)
• The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
• Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980)
• Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988)