Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)

## Quotes

*"The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong." - Clifford Geertz*

## Biography and History

Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist born in San Francisco. He served two years in the US Navy during the second world war, after which he studied English and Philosophy. In the mid 1950s, he spent two and a half years on the Indonesian island of Java, observing the religious and agricultural aspects of its inhabitants' livelihood. After earning a PhD as an anthropologist from Harvard University in 1956, he expanded his field studies to Bali and Sumatra. He became and remains a highly influential figure in American anthropology.

## Work

Throughout the 1960s, Geertz taught and worked at the University of Chicago, where he also published the results of his fieldwork in Indonesia. In 1973, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, Geertz published a collection of essays entitled *The Interpretation of Cultures*, in which he outlined his interpretive method and solidified his position as an anthropological theorist.

For Geertz, the goal of anthropology is to interpret culture to make it intelligible to an outsider. His *method of interpretation* consists of spending a lot of time in the field, immersed in the culture that is the object of study, aiming to experience what people of that culture experience and trying to understand the world the way that they understand it. By "thick description", Geertz meant that the deeper an anthropologist was immersed in a culture, the deeper the meanings and texts they could access, and the more complete and detailed an interpretation they could then make of that culture. In *The Interpretation of Cultures*, Geertz's published the article *Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight*, considered his most influential work, in which he demonstrates the method of interpretation.

## Influences

Probably during his time as a philosophy student, Geertz read Ludwig Wittgenstein's *Philosophical Investigations*, which became very important in guiding him toward the method of interpretation. Wittgenstein argues that language and logic, being sets of rules, can only be understood by how the community of rule followers participates in the activities involved in the rule. In other words, and against his contemporaries, Wittgenstein held that language can never be solely ground in logic. Likewise, Geertz became a staunch opponent of positivism and sciences of abstraction, more interested in the role that meaning played in people's daily lives than in the nature of meaning itself.

Geertz's doctoral advisor at Harvard was Talcott Parsons, a sociologist credited for introducing Max Weber's work to American audiences. Max Weber is easily the clearest and most important influence through which Geertz thought about culture. Much like Weber, Geertz sought to understand the meanings that people made for themselves. As Geertz himself wrote, “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973).

Note that Geertz did not randomly pick the words "experimental science in search of law". This quote is also a reaction to structuralism which considered anthropology to be a science in search of overarching principles governing culture, and with which Geertz's hermeneutics were obviously at odds. One of the points on which structuralism and hermeneutics butted heads most clearly was in their approach to symbols. Symbols were of central importance to both structuralism and hermeneutics but Geertz argued, contra Levi-Strauss, that symbols are meaningful because of the role they play in people's lives, not because of their relationship to each other.

Among Geertz's students were now renown anthropologists Sherry Ortner and Paul Rabinow, but Geertz's hermeneutics became widely influential throughout social anthropology especially as an alternative to structuralism, which was at the center of a critical maelstrom at the time.

## Analysis

Following Max Weber, Geertz considered the human to be "animal plus meaning". For Geertz, the best approach to study culture was to study meaning, and meaning could be arrived at by examining symbols and the role they play in people's lives. Geertz saw these interactions between people and symbols as texts which is why hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpreting written, verbal and visual texts, was particularly suited to his method. However, to have access to these texts and provide a legitimate interpretation, it seemed that the anthropologist needed to become as familiar with the culture of study as possible.

emphasis on extensive fieldwork

## Critique

Ahistorical

Critique of representation

Talal Asad

## Sources

Geertz. 1973. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. *In* The Interpretation of Cultures. Pp. 3-30. New York: Basic Books.

http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory\_pages/Geertz.htm

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