Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
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.
Introduction
Geertz assembled The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973 from essays written over fifteen years and added “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” as its first chapter. There he defines culture as the webs of significance in which human beings are suspended and borrows from Gilbert Ryle the example of a wink, which a thin description cannot tell apart from a twitch. The later essays treat religion, ideology, nationalism in the new states and the Balinese sense of person and time as cultural systems; “The Cerebral Savage” discusses Lévi-Strauss. The closing essay on the Balinese cockfight became a model of interpretive ethnography far beyond anthropology. A German selection appeared in 1983 under the title “Dichte Beschreibung”.
Connections
Taken up in
- Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology1983 · Clifford Geertz
Criticized in
More works by Clifford Geertz
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