Then he set to work, using the tools most suited for prying open a foreign way of thinking and exploring an alien mental world. He borrowed them from linguistic philosophy, semiotics, Weberian sociology, and any other field likely to be helpful for the task at hand. His harshest comment after sitting out a disappointing paper at the Institute for Advanced Study was usually "underconceptualized." But he did not invent many concepts of his own.
Not that he lacked rigor when it came to confronting theoretical issues. He cobbled together arguments from different, disparate sources. Despite his deep-dyed Weberianism and the years spent under Talcott Parsons, Geertz had no interest in combining propositions into a systematic structure. The long, baroque sentences with their parentheses, piled-up adjectives, and convoluted syntax defied imitation. Indeed, Geertz's literary flare got in the way of systematizing. If he could have been anyone in the 20th century, he once told me, he would have chosen James Joyce.
Yet Geertz never tried to found a school. Fired by Geertz's notions of symbolism and cultural systems, they attempted to do ethnography in the archives. Among historians, he left his mark on the generation that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s and who had had their fill of statistical models, functionalist explanations, structures and conjunctures, and dialectical materialism. Like a tiny number of other masters-Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu-he inspired general readers and ordinary scholars operating at lower frequencies throughout the human sciences. Read Excerptįoreword Anthropology, History, and Clifford GeertzĬ LIFFORD G EERTZ BELONGED to that rare species known as maîtres à penser. This definitive edition, with a foreword by Robert Darnton, remains an essential book for anthropologists, historians, and anyone else seeking to better understand human cultures. Named one of the 100 most important books published since World War II by the Times Literary Supplement, The Interpretation of Cultures transformed how we think about others’ cultures and our own. A thick description explains not only the behavior, but the context in which it occurs, and to describe something thickly, Geertz argues, is the fundamental role of the anthropologist. Rather, it is a web of symbols that can help us better understand what that behavior means. Culture, Geertz argues, does not drive human behavior.
With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he virtually rewrote the rules of his field. One of the twentieth century’s most influential books, this classic work of anthropology offers a groundbreaking exploration of what culture is
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