Clifford Geertz: who he was and what interpretive anthropology is

Who Clifford Geertz was

Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco on 23 August 1926. The American Historical Association recalls that he arrived at Antioch College drawn to English literature and moved from there towards philosophy; sociology and anthropology came afterwards, at Harvard. The Antioch degree is from 1950, the Harvard doctorate from 1956.

His first long stretch of fieldwork was in Java, in Indonesia, together with his wife Hildred Geertz, an anthropologist as well. In Indonesia he also worked in Bali and in Sumatra. Later he moved his research to Morocco, taking in oral poetry, olive growing, the mosques and the bazaars. Two of his best-known case studies come from this fieldwork: the cockfights he watched in Bali, and the religious rituals he observed in Morocco.

From 1970 he was professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he stayed until his death. He died in Philadelphia on 30 October 2006, of complications from heart surgery.

Culture read as a text

In 1973 Geertz described culture as an inheritance of meanings that history hands down and that people put into symbolic form: a system of ideas passed on in symbols, which people draw on to communicate and to build up what they know and feel about living.

A definition like that carries a way of working with it. If a culture is a stock of meanings, it can be read like a text: you interpret it by looking at the symbols it is built from, rather than accounting for it with laws good for every society. The move is the one hermeneutics had been making on written pages for centuries, now applied to a market day or a ceremony: in place of the page there are people acting, and what they do has to be understood in its sense before it is filed anywhere. The opposite project, a secure method that leads to certain knowledge, is the subject of the Recap on Descartes and the problem of method.

What thick description means

Thick description is the tool that holds this approach together. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy takes it to mean describing cultural practice in such detail that the links of sense between the observed events can be put back together. It is not an invitation to write more pages; it is a rule about what has to end up in the notebook.

Practical example: a researcher sits through a ceremony and writes “wedding” in the notebook. For Geertz that label falls short. What the rite actually involves in the group under observation has to be spelled out, because meaning shifts from setting to setting: one word covers gestures, obligations and expectations that do not line up from place to place.

The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973

“The Interpretation of Cultures” came out in 1973 and is regarded as the most influential of Geertz’s works. It was not conceived as a single treatise: it collects essays he had already published through the 1960s.

The criticisms, and the author’s own doubts

The anthropologist Talal Asad faulted Geertz’s theory for a dualism in the way it handles culture and social reality, pointing to a gap between “cultural system” and “social reality”. The discussion stays inside the academic debate, and bears on the frame of the theory.

Geertz himself, after all, doubted that the study of cultures could be fully objective. How much we can really know of what we observe is a question modern philosophy had been turning over long before anthropology arrived, as in the Recap on David Hume’s empiricism. The American Historical Association also remembers a sharp-penned Geertz: his notices of other scholars’ work were witty and cutting, and now and then they drew indignant reactions.