Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Clifford Geertz’s career has interesting parallels with Schneider’s: Harvard beginnings, a short period in California and a longer one in Chicago, an attachment to a concept of culture as meaning derived in equal part from Parsons and the Boasian tradition in American anthropology, and oracular pronouncements in the 1960s on symbols and cultural systems and the idea of the person. But it also has its differences too: Geertz left Chicago for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1970; where Schneider’s influence was as much felt through his students and followers, Geertz’s influence was broader (especially outside anthropology itself) but more diffuse, owing more to literary and intellectual panache and less to personal attachments. And while Geertz’s influence, like Turner’s, owes much to sheer ethnographic élan, it is ironic that his best-known and most apparently virtuosic work—the essays on the person and the cockfight in Bali (Geertz 1973:360–453)—has now been almost completely rejected by many area specialists (cf. Wikan 1990).
Geertz has carried out fieldwork in Java, Morocco and Bali and published important monographs on such apparently diverse topics as agricultural development and the dual economy in Java, the rituals of the pre-modern *state in Bali, *Islam, kinship, and ethnographic writing. Despite this, his most influential work is contained in four chapters of his first collection of essays: ‘Thick description’, ‘Religion as a cultural system’, ‘Person, time and conduct in Bali’ and ‘Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight’ (Geertz 1973). The earliest of these, the essay on religion, reveals much of Geertz’s Parsonian heritage—not least in the isolation of a cultural system, in this case *religion, as a ‘system of meanings’, which once it is understood in its own terms can then be related to questions of psychology and social structure. The essays on the person and the cockfight investigate the area of †ethos—the distinctive moral, aesthetic and affective ‘tone’ of a culture—which was a central concern of the culture-and-personality theorists of the 1930s. (Critics would claim that his essays on Bali owe as much to the study of Balinese Character by †Gregory Bateson and †Margaret Mead, as to anything the Balinese themselves might do or say.)
And the opening essay of the collection, †‘Thick description’, makes a powerful case for anthropology as an interpretive activity, concerned above all with the elucidation of local detail rather than grand comparison.
The expression ‘thick description’ itself derives from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, and refers to the embeddedness of the tiniest detail of human life in layers of contextual significance. Anthropologists deal above all in interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations. To employ the word which was just beginning to gain wider currency through the work of Ricoeur (who Geertz cites) and †Habermas (who he doesn’t), anthropology should be concerned with †hermeneutics. Understanding another culture is like reading, and interpreting, a text. And difficulties in formulating and communicating that understanding are as much as anything problems of writing. Geertz concludes by making *ethnography, conceived as a kind of writing, central to anthropological practice.
In many ways, Geertz represents the sharpest break with earlier anthropology. His commitment to the particularity of ethnographic description sets him far apart from the grand ambitions of *structuralism or Marxism, even as it anticipated the noisily trumpeted ‘decline of metanarratives’ (or big stories) of the postmodern 1980s. Similarly his intellectual points of reference—Ricoeur, Kenneth Burke, the later †Wittgenstein—helped prepare the ground for the so-called ‘literary turn’ in anthropology, signified above all by the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Certainly when scholars from the humanities—historians and literary critics—cite an anthropologist, it is more often than not Geertz they are citing, and usually it is Geertz on thick description or Geertz on the cockfight.
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