Clifford Geertz
1926 Clifford Geertz
1926
Anthropologists are "merchants of astonishment," wrote Clifford Geertz in AVAILABLE LIGHT, ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS (2000). Geertz is Professor Emeritus of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he has been on the faculty since 1970.
Geertz is known for breaking away from the 1950s emphasis on scientistic inquiry and for introducing a more metaphorical and literary style to the discipline of anthropology, according to his biographer Fred Inglis, author of CLIFFORD GEERTZ: CULTURE, CUSTOM, AND ETHICS (1999).
Encyclopedia Entries
Peddlers and Princes (1963),
Agricultural Involution (1963),
Islam Observed (1968),
The Interpretation of Cultures (1973),
Myth, Symbol, and Culture (1974),
Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980),
Local Knowledge (1983),
Works and Lives (1988),
After the Fact (1995).
HyperGeertz© WorldCatalogueHTM
Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System"
School of Social Science http://www.sss.ias.edu/home/geertz.html
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Professor Geertz's curriculum vitae]
(BIOGRAPHY:Reed Pick)
Clifford Geertz can be regarded as one of the most important social scientists of our time. He has conducted extensive ethnographical research in Southeast Asia and North Africa. He has also contributed to social and cultural theory and has been influential in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live out their lives. He has worked on religion, most particularly Islam, on bazaar trade, on economic development, on traditional political structures, and on village and family life. He is presently professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton and working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.
(FROM: HyperGeertz WorldCatalogue)
Clifford Geertz has conducted extensive ethnographical research in Southeast Asia and North Africa. He has also contributed to social and cultural theory and been influential in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live out their lives. He has worked on religion, most particularly Islam, on bazaar trade, on economic development, on traditional political structures, and on village and family life. He is at present working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.
(FROM: School of Social Science)
In his first chapter in The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz discusses the role of the ethnographer. Broadly, the ethnographer's aim is to observe, record, and analyze a culture. More specifically, he or she must interpret signs to gain their meaning within the culture itself. This interpretation must be based on the "thick description" of a sign in order to see all the possible meanings. His example of a "wink of any eye" clarifies this point. When a man winks, is he merely "rapidly contracting his right eyelid" or is he "practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive a an innocent into thinking conspiracy is in motion"? Ultimately, Geertz hopes that the ethnographer's deeper understanding of the signs will open and/or increase the dialogue among different cultures.
(FROM: Cultural Landscape Bibliography)