CLIFFORD GEERT2 (1926-2006) CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006)

—- —(1978) ‘An Anthropologist’s Apprenticeship,’ Annual Review of increasing r e l a t t v i s m and particularism. His analysis o f Islam in
Anthropology 7: 1—30.
Indonesia, especially Java, was pivotal for many years, b u t younger
(1983) Rules and the Emergence of Society, London: Royal Anthropological
scholars, all supported by Geertz, eventually m oved in various
Institute.
Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (eds.) (1940) African Political Systems, directions.
London: Oxford University Press. From the early 1970s, G eertz’s position becam e m ore relativistic
ROBERT GORDON and particularistic. T he relativism was filtered through G erm an-
R om antic thought primarily and was strongly influenced by Johann
W olfgang G oethe’s ideas and writings on elective affinities, ideas
w hich influenced W eber. G oethe described the processes by w hich
C L IF F O R D G E E R T Z (1 9 2 6 -2 0 0 6 )
social beings becom e associated w ith each other in an elaborate
m etaphor derived from the notion o f ‘affinities’ in the chemistry o f
W ith the death o f Clifford Geertz the academy lost one o f its most
his time. W eb er described the ‘elective affinity’ betw een the
prom inent thinkers o f the latter part o f the tw entieth century. For
Protestant w ork ethic and die rise o f capitalism, a relationship that is
50 years G eertz’s writings had a vital im pact on h o w the subject
b oth unconscious and unintended, b u t nonetheless coherent.
m atter o f' culture, society, and m eaning changed and developed
For Geertz the particularist, terms and concepts w ith a capital, such
through m any disciplines.
as Econom y and Kinship, w ere to be rejected or used w ith extreme
B o m in San Francisco, Geertz attended A ntioch College in O hio,
caution. Som ething like R eligion w ith a capital R em braced a
graduating in philosophy in 1950. H e finished his doctorate in
num ber o f features and meanings that m ight be highly variable and
A nthropology at H arvard’s D epartm ent o f Social R elations (1956),
that variability is lost or m inim ized by the over-arching label or
w here he was im m ersed in Parsonian s t r u c t u r a l - f u n c t i o n a l i s m .
categorical designation. This position is also applicable to the concept
Geertz taught at the U niversity o f California/Berkeley (1958—60), at
o f Culture. His interests w ere directed tow ard cultures in the plural.
the University o f C hicago (1960—70), and th en jo in ed the Institute
After the 1950s, Geertz was one o f the few writers on Islam w ho
for Advanced Study at Princeton as the first Professor o f Social
took the religion and its scriptural texts seriously in their ow n
Science. H e did fieldw ork for various lengths o f tim e in Indonesia,
right, som ething that could not be converted into som ething else.
focusing on Java and Bali, and from 1963 to 1986 also w orked at
M ost social scientists then w riting in the m ode o f developm ent and
different intervals in M orocco.
m odernity, especially in new nations and the ‘T hird W orld,’ used
M ost o f his writings situate theory or better, interpretation, w ithin
titles like ‘Education and Islam’ and cast Islam as a dependent variable
a dom inant ethnographic context. The Religion o f Java (1960) and
and thus it never enjoyed primary consideration or treatment; it was
Agricultural Involution (1963a) w ere his early key works and even today
seen as an ancillary, dependent, and passive social force. M oreover,
retain their relevance. His initial writings w ere heavily influenced by
Geertz realized the shortcomings o f his early w ork on Islamic Java and
the W eberian side o f the paradigm developed by the Harvard sociol­
it was to his credit that a w hole generation o f younger scholars
ogist Talcott Parsons. G eertz’s writings in the 1960s relied on M ax
expanded on the textual and scriptural basis o f Islam and how it co­
W eber b u t subsequently they also increasingly differed in significant
varied w ith social differentiations in Javanese society.
ways. T h e m onolithic and essentializing aspect o f the W eberian
From the early 1970s, G eertz’s ethnographic analysis moves
paradigm as in The Religion o f China or The Religion o f India did not
tow ard w hat I call ‘cultural portraits.’ T he idea o f C ulture and
play o u t for Islam, and G eertz realized this. Indeed, he apparendy
cultures is similar to that in R uth B e n e d ic t’s w ork, minus her
w anted the title o f the religion volum e to be The Religions o f
psychological characterizations. A t the same tim e, Geertz jettisoned
Java , w hile the publisher insisted on the singular to follow the tides
the formal m odel o f society and culture im plem ented in the
o f W eb er’s oth er w orks on religion in China, India, and Judaism. (Harvard-based) Parsonian m odel based on social needs and
Geertz increasingly attem pted to m ove away from W eb er’s corresponding institutions, b ut m aintained a vigorous interest in the
writings, especially W eb er’s depiction o f Islam as a consistent and
‘informal processes o f everyday life’ that perpetually shape and reshape
unified entity. This distancing from W eb er was due to G eertz’s
culture. Cultural portraits differed betw een Java and Bali and the

72
CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006)
différences m ight reflect culture and ideology or belief and action —
b u t as w ith any portrait in art, literature, or music, the interpretation
is m ade by the view er or by the reader. In the w riting o f cultural
portraits, G eertz was m arkedly dubious o f generalized cultural
theories that w ere universal or causal and he was always wary o f
entering a dom ain o f theory that he found adverse. R eading his
descriptions o f Bali and Java, it is critical to note the virtual absence o f
any analysis o f class either in the cultural description or the ideological
portrait.
It is imperative to realize that Geertz always understands ideo­
logy as a cultural system, thus locating it squarely in the realm o f
culture. B ut at the same tim e, ideology is understood as a special
variant o f cultural trends. Balinese culture is described and set forth as
a fundam ental ethos, radiating b o th vertically and horizontally
th roughout all levels o f Balinese society. H ow ever, the cultural por­
trait o f Java is concerned primarily w ith ideology and Islam, and thus
one must ask w hat it is about each local ethos that is Javanese a n d /o r
Islamic.
T h e distinction betw een ideology and culture comes in m any
forms. Bali is conceptualized as m ore culturally hom ogeneous
in comparison to Java, w hich is portrayed as m ore diverse and
heterogeneous. In the Balinese context, symbolic structures and ethos
are interpreted as w hat I te n n ballast, in that they seldom are utilized
as a sense o f p o w er and control over various segments o f society.
Cultural systems in Java are always expressions o f the political and
social dynamics and the kinds o f stratifications that exist, and again
the concept o f ethos is differentiated according to social category.
Geertz describes abangan, rural people w h o com bine Islam w ith folk
religion, sa.nt.ri, pious M uslims living mainly in the towns, and priyayi,
bureaucratic elites. Thus in Java, w e have a portrait that is far m ore
‘post-traditional,’ emphasizing the contestation am ong and betw een
rival varieties o f Javanese religion. In contrast, the m odel o f Bali was
far m ore conventional and unitary.
In his rejection o f universal theories from Marxism to
s t r u c t u r a l i s m , and in his treatm ent o f the idea o f culture in tenns
o f its particularisms, Geertz contem plated the m any ways in w hich
hum ans differ from one another. In m any o f his early general essays,
Geertz asks a critical question, nam ely w hy and h o w have humans
invested so m uch in the particular? Overall, G eertz’s approach is n o t a
denial o f th e real existence o f the w orld, b u t a means o f getting at
w hat is ‘in ’ the w orld. W ithin this approach, culture, the self, and
reflexive consciousness are crucial to the re-constitution o f the world.
74
CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006)
T he task, then, is to explore cultural being. T he aim is therefore the
discovery and understanding o f the features o r principles that order
and define the w orld for Balinese.
Apart from Agricultural Involution G eertz’s writings m oved in essen­
tially humanistic directions. Thus the interest in explanation became
almost m ute. W ithin this tradition, description and explanation are
essentially com pounded. Thus explanation was n o t an issue; it was
solely based on the depth and detail o f the description. Description
that was detailed, heavily docum ented, and ethnographically rigorous
stood as the explanation. In short, culture is there and it describes and
explains itself.
Some argue that Geertz gave up on social science explanations for
cultural explanations or cultural portraits. B ut for Geertz, the real
difference was that, unlike mainstream social science, he recognized
the cultural contingency o f his ow n position although he m ight not
have quite resolved the relationship betw een explanation and inter­
pretation. H e saw them n ot as opposed, b ut as premised on different
criteria o f critical self-awareness.
T h e Benedictian cultural position solidified in Islam. Observed (1968)
and in 2005 he noted that his w ork on Islam needed to be coupled
w ith textually oriented studies o f Q u r’anic, H adith, and Shari’a
traditions if one w ere to grasp the role o f ‘scripturalism’ in nationalist
politics. Bali posed a different challenge. H ere the D utch tradition
had utilized structural models for understanding the com plexity o f
Bali. T he internal com plexity o f Bali was pivotal to both D utch
scholarship and the writings o f Geertz and his first wife, H ildred
Geertz. Them es such as stasis appear in virtually all o f their descrip­
tions. Stasis is n ot stationary, it works back on itself and in Bali stasis
pervades m ost o f the cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical life and
cannot be reduced to any single factor. T he best example o f stasis and
involution is Balinese teknonymy w hich is pervasive throughout the
Balinese culture. T he term refers to a com plexity o f relationships and
to a form o f nam ing w hich interconnects all relatives in a com bina­
tion o f ways - a married adult m ight be referred to as ‘father o f X ,’
his first child. T eknonym y is interpreted as a cultural paradigm creat­
ing and enhancing ongoing complexities and establishing new cultural
connections that bear its stamp.
In Negara (1980) Geertz argues that concepts like pow er need
to be re-thought from the top to the b o tto m using a center/
periphery m odel. State pow er was also partly and possibly primarily
symbolic and must be interpreted w ithin the context o f Balinese
symbolism.
75
CLIFFORD GEER.TZ (1926-2006)
O n e o f the lasting influences o f G eertz’s scholarship relates to
the hum anities in general and history in particular. By the 1970s,
m any fields in the hum anities turn ed to anthropology and the idea
o f culture. Philosophers and linguists w ere especially interested in
the culture concept and h o w systems o f m eaning w ere part o f various
discourses. A t the same tim e, some social scientists found theoreti­
cal connections w ith the biological sciences and m odels o f rational
choice theory. As Geertz no ted it was a tim e o f ‘blurred genres,’ but
G eertz’s ow n interest was in a history that he perceived as essentially
relativistic. Furtherm ore, history as he saw it in its various forms o f
significance and interpretation was based on empiricism, n o t
em bedded or based on abstractions or on theories w hich he labeled
‘bootless.’ M oreover, ‘A nthropology gets the tableau, History gets the
drama; A nthropology the forms, H istory the causes’ (Geertz
2000: 124).
According to Geertz, textual tactics allow scholars to m ove from
the local and marginal to broad issues, such as h o w the pow er o f
m eaning is created through the panoram a o f political theology.
H ere the role o f symbolic forms and forces are critical to under­
standing Bali as a cultural portrait, and the parallels w ith medieval
E uropean divine kingship and funerary crem ation may be revealed
by tacking back and forth. Anthropologists seek to find o ut how
things fit together, historians venture into how things are brought
forth.
G eertz’s adherence to history had m uch to do w ith history’s
relativ istic fo u n d a tio n s a n d p ro v id e d him w ith a m e a n s o f n ot h a v in g
to address any theory in social anthropology. T he only larger ‘ism’
that Geertz w ould accept was that o f relativism, b ut even relativism
becam e problem atic since it was com pounded into various versions
o f p o s t m o d e r n i s m . T h at is w hy Geertz is better described as parti-
cularist than relativist and ‘labeled’ him self an anti-anti-relativist.
Interestingly, historians generally read Geertz as a highly theoretical
thinker. His m ove to history starts early and, by the late 1960s,
anthropological theory hardly comes into his w ork. ‘T hick descrip­
tio n ’ and ‘webs o f m eaning,’ his m ost famous coinages, are hardly
theory. H e rejected global theories like structuralism, Marxism, and
cultural Marxism.
G eertz w rote w ith conviction that explanation and interpretation
w ere the same; thus the m ove to history was a safe departure. Y et
relativism and particularism w ere always the critical foundations to his
thinking, thus explaining the gradual and em erging departure from
W eber and Parsons. A nd postm odernism was only a by-product o f
76
MAX GLUCKMAN (1911-75)
these positions and n ot o f his making. These issues are further
explored in Y engoyan (2009).
Selected readings
Geertz, C. (1960) The Religion of Java, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
-—— (1963a) Agricultural Involution, The Processes of Ecological Change in
Indonesia, Berkeley: University of California Press.
(1963b) Peddlers and Princes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(1968) Islam Observed: Religions Development in Morocco and Indonesia,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic
Books.
(1980) Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
(1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology,
New York. Basic Books.
—(1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
— —(1995) After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ortner, S. B. (ed.) (1999) The Fate of 'Culture’: Geertz and Beyond, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Shweder, R., and. Good, B. (eds.) (2005) Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Yengoyan, A. (2009) ‘Clifford Geertz, Cultural Portraits and Southeast Asia,’
Journal of Asian Studies, 68(4): 1215—30.
ARAM YENGOYAN
M A X G L U C K M A N (1 9 1 1 -7 5 )
G luckm an m ade significant and lasting contributions to social, legal,
and political anthropology. As a researcher in South Africa and British
Central Africa in the late 1930s and 1940s he, along w ith his collea­
gues, initiated the critical study o f colonialism, racial segregation,
urbanization, industrialization, wage labor, and comparative law, and
sought to push anthropology beyond s t r u c t u r a l - f u n c t i o n a l i s m ,
at that tim e a dom inant anthropological approach. As director o f
the R hodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in N o rth ern R hodesia
(present-day Zambia) in the 1940s and later as the founder o f the
D epartm ent o f Social A nthropology at M anchester University,
G luckm an trained and prom oted a generation o f talented, influential
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v V ' Geertz, Clifford
k
W -:
continuity, as well as surveying the m ulti­
ethnic, social, and cultural composition of this
region. Another o f Gamio’s contributions was
I an emphasis on the social responsibility of
researchers, that is to say, a demand that
anthropological research make a contribution
e-
■S X :
to the solution of social problems within
^ X Mexico, particularly amongst the more dis­
f advantaged Indigenous and rural populations.
ÏX This emphasis became the defining character­
•.
istic of Mexican social anthropology.
X
. Gamio’s greatest theoretical contribution is
I" his model o f Mexican culture based on its
ethnic diversity, and the effort to understand it
I
; r.'? .-
and contribute to its transformation w ith the
scientific tools of anthropology. W ithin the
X
-X ■: ideological context of the nationalism of the
Mexican Revolution, this proposal formed the
X
basis for a policy towards the Indigenous
: population, in which the participation of
anthropologists became fundamental. One of
Gamio’s most original researches was under­
taken in 1925 for the American Social Science
Research Council and focused on the char­
acteristics of Mexican immigrants and the
social and cultural problems they faced in the
USA. This study represented pioneering re­
search on this topic, and its relevance has
become all the more evident at the beginning
of the third millennium. Gamio’s thinking has
been the axis upon w hich the Mexican
government formulated its policy towards
the indigenous population, throughout the
twentieth century.
Education
MA Columbia University, 1911
Ph.D. Columbia University, 1921
Fieldwork
Teotihuacan Valley, 1917-22
Mezquital Valley, 1931-3
Key Publications
(1916) Forjando patria (Forging the Nation),
Mexico: Editorial Porrua.
189
(1922) La poblacion del Valle de Teotihuacan(The
Population of Teotihuacan Valley), Mexico:
Talleres Graficos de ia Nacion.
(1930) Mexican Immigration to the United States,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
ANDRÉS MÉDINA
Geertz, Clifford
b. 1926, San Francisco, California, USA
In the wake of The interpretation of Cultures
(1973), and its sister volume of collected
papers, Local Knowledge (1983), Clifford Geertz
became celebrated for initiating an interpretive
revolution across disciplines, which shifted the
focus of anthropological study from structure
to meaning. The result is that the prestige of
sociocultural anthropology among philosophy,
literary criticism, history, and politics has
never been higher.
Available Light is Geertz’s second retrospective
memoir where he contrives to craft the fable of
‘a charmed life [and] errant career’ ‘before the
necrologists get at him ’ (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000: 10, 20). To read
Available Light is to appreciate also the extent to
which Geertz’s ‘interpretation of cultures’ is an
application of Wittgensteinian themes. Geertz
describes Wittgenstein as his ‘master’ (2000:
xi). He it was who puts into words what
Geertz only inchoately sensed: the need to
critique the notion of language as private; to
identify those ‘forms of life’ by which people’s
understandings of the world are framed and to
make thought public (a language-game and a
set of practices); to recognise matters of
sameness and difference as conceptually
blurred and polythetic.
Demobbed (from the US Navy) in 1946,
Geertz pitched up at Antioch College, Ohio, a
liberal arts college, where he met his wife,
Hildred. Graduate study found them both at
Harvard where Clyde Kluckhohn, with the
help of Talcott Parsons and Gordon Allport,
was developing a social relations department,
bringing anthropology together with disci­
plines such as psychology and sociology,
 190 Geertz, Clifford
D uring a 10-year association, G eertz w ro te a
thesis o n Javanese religious life (u n d e r the
supervision o f Cora Du Bois), then re tu rn e d to
In donesia for fu rth er fieldw ork in Bali and
Sum atra; he shared ideas w ith th e likes o f
G eorge H om ans, B arrin g to n M oore, Evon
Vogt, Pitrim Sorokin, R om an Jakobso'n, David
Schneider, M eyer Fortes, Edw ard Shils, Jerom e
Bruner, WV.O. Q uine, an d T hom as Kuhn.
T here follow ed a year at Berkeley, then ten at
Chicago, G eertz directing the C om m ittee for
the C om parative Study o f N ew N ations, an d
u n d ertak in g fu rth er fieldw ork in M orocco.
Finally, Geertz sp en t m ore than thirty years at
the P rinceton institute for Advanced Study - its
first and only an thropolo g ist - fo u n d in g the
School o f Social Science.
Fieldw ork G eertz cites as the experience
that, far m o re than the academy, ‘n o u rish [e d
his] soul, and in d eed create[d] i t ’ (Available
Light, 2000: 19). But then ‘[w'Jhat does the
eth n o g rap h er d o ?’, Geertz asks him self; p ri­
m arily ‘[h ]e w rite s’ (197 3 : 19), And G eertz
has b eco m e celebrated as a w riter, an d as a
th eo rist o n the w ritin g o f culture - b y locals
a n d a n th ro p o lo g ists alike. F ro m Javanese
r e lig io n , s o c io e c o n o m ic a n d e c o lo g ic a l
change, to Balinese calendars, kinship, cock­
fights, village life and statehood, to M oroccan
city design, social identity, m arabouts, m o n -
archs, and m arkets, here w ere enacted state­
m en ts o f particular ways o f b e in g -in -th e -
w o rld that sh o u ld be read -o ff as texts. This
w as an essentially h erm en eu tic enterprise that
tu rn e d o n the ‘thick d escrip tio n ’ o f cultural
ethos, w o rld view, and practice. A nthro p o lo g y
w as n o t an experim ental science in search o f
com parative structural laws so m u ch as ‘fac­
tio n ’ (1 9 8 8 : 141): im aginative w ritin g a b o u t
the culture o f real people in real places.
C ulture, G eertz elaborates, is that a c c u m u ­
lated totality o f sym bol system s (religion,
id e o l o g y , c o m m o n s e n s e , e c o n o m i c s ,
s p o r t. . , ) in term s o f w h ich people b o th
m ake sense o f them selves and their w orld, and
rep resen t them selves to them selves and to
others. M em bers o f a culture use its sym bols
(w inks, crucifixes, cats, collars, foods, fo o t­
balls,- p h o to g ra p h s, w o rd s) as a lan g u ag e
th ro u g h w h ic h to read an d in te rp re t, to
express and share, m eaning. And since the
im p o sitio n o f m ean in g on life is the m ajor en d
and p rim ary co n d itio n o f h u m a n existence,
this read in g o f culture is constant; culture
m em bers are ever m aking in terp re tatio n s o f
th e sy m b o l system s they have in h e rite d .
C ulture is an acted sym bolic docum ent.
T hought rep resen ts an ’in ten tio n al m a n ip ­
u lation o f cultural fo rm s’ that are socially
established, sustained, an d legitim ised, and
w hose en actm en t is public. G iving m ean in g to
experience is n o t so m eth in g that h ap p en s in
private, in insular indiv id u al heads, but is tied
to concrete social events and occasions, and
expressive o f a c o m m o n social w o rld a n d its
logics. Accessing an o th e r fo rm o f life is a
m atter n o t o f think in g or feeling as som eone
else b u t o f ‘learn in g to live w ith th e m ’ (Available
Light, 20 0 0 : 16).
Education
BA A ntioch College, 1950
Ph.D. H arvard University, 1956
Fieldwork
Pare, Java: 1 9 5 2 -4 , 1971, 1986
Bali: 1 9 5 7 -8
Sefrou, M orocco, 1 9 6 3 -4 , 1968, 1969, 1972,
1976
Key Publications
(1 9 6 3 ) Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and
Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns,
Chicago: U niversity o f Chicago Press.
(1 9 7 3 ) The Interpretation of Cultures, N ew York:
Basic.
(1 9 8 3 ) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive
Anthropology, N ew York: Basic.
( i 988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author,
C am bridge, UK: Polity.
N IG E L R A P P O R T