Clifford Geertz: American Anthropologist

Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist known for his contributions to social and cultural theory, his extensive and exhaustive ethnographic research and his rejection of functionalism. His approach and commitment to symbolic anthropology was provocative and brought to the fore the frames of meaning within which people live out their lives (IAS 2006). Geertz researched religion, specifically Islam, bazaar trade, village and family life and traditional political structures. His field research was capacious; in about ten years in the field, he conducted ethnography in various parts of Indonesia and Morocco and produced voluminous notes he referred to as “thick descriptions” (Hammerstedt 1999).

Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco in 1926. Early in his life his parents divorced and he was raised by a foster-mother. He rarely saw his own parents but once a year and did not form strong bonds with either during his formative years (Inglis 2000:3). Growing up on a farm in Northern California, Geertz was aware that his intellect was the ticket out of his rural surroundings and into the greater world. The first ticket, however, was World War II and at 17, Geertz volunteered for the Navy. He was allowed to work as an electrical technician’s mate repairing radar gear on the USS St Paul (Inglis 2000:4). He narrowly averted a potentially bloody invasion of Japan, the first atomic bomb being dropped just before the scheduled invasion. Geertz emerged from the Navy in 1946 first to San Francisco and then to Antioch College in Ohio via the GI Bill. He received his BA in Philosophy and eventually moved on the Harvard where he received his Ph.D. in Anthropology (Geertz 1999). Geertz always envisioned himself as a writer and had planned to work in journalism while moonlighting as a novelist. He found neither feasible nor satisfying and stumbled into Anthropology only after encouragement from a number of former teachers. The way Geertz found Anthropology would be played out many times over the course of his career. When choosing field work, areas for research and even universities to work for, he was either in the right place, knew the right people or had the curiosity to put himself into the right position at the right time (Geertz 1999).

In 1952, Geertz was invited (in the right place) to work with a group of fellow Harvard graduate students in Modjukoto, a small town in Java Indonesia (Inglis 2000:55). Over the course of over two years in the field, Geertz gathered data, in his case thick interpretive descriptions, that ultimately led to the composition of his dissertation - a comprehensive analysis of Javanese religion in its social context. The Religion of Java, the result of this dissertation was published in 1960. After returning from his first stint in Indonesia, he taught or held various positions in academia and in 1960 took a position at the University of Chicago where he spent 10 years, ultimately as a professor. In 1970, he became professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until 2000, then as emeritus professor until his death in 2006 (IAS 2006).

Geertz’ background was multi-disciplined; bits of philosophy, psychology and literature influenced both his approach and his final products. He was highly influenced by Max Weber and his flavor of anthropology was wholly interpretivist. Early in his early career, his fieldwork was spent in Indonesia and Bali. His interpretive works aimed to analyze the meaning of ritual, belief systems and art through the lens of symbology. He saw culture as a system of meanings embodied in symbols. And it was this system that provided the framework by which individuals assigned meaning and made sense of the world unique to their context. Although his early works were more traditional ethnographies that concerned the economics and political development after decolonization, he did distance himself from a functionalist approach that attempted to define culture by the functions they served (Yarrow 2006). Where functionalists saw cultural phenomenon as the bricks of structure, Geertz saw culture as the mortar, bricks and the designer of its own structure. Geertz also rejected the notion that social science could develop inclusive, sweeping theories about culture. He saw culture as the symbol sets out of which meaning was created. Societies faced different circumstances, in different times with different pressures and each culture needed to be treated independently (Yarrow 2006).

During his decade at Chicago, he further advocated symbolic anthropology. This approach saw culture as an established set of signs and symbols that shaped the experiences and life patterns of those within the culture. The anthropologist’s tool kit pulled from psychology, history and literature to analyze how people give meaning to their reality (McGee 2004). Geertz defined culture as:

"A historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life" (Geertz 1973:89).

Geertz’ approach to symbolic anthropology was interpretivist and his field notes came in the form of thick description. Because culture was based on symbols that guide activity, they obtained meaning according to the role they played in the pattern of social behavior (Geertz 1973:9). Culture and behavior were linked and could not be analyzed separately. Accordng to Geertz, thick description was requisite.

"The study of other peoples' cultures (and of one's own as well, but that brings up other issues) involves discovering who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, something a good deal less straightforward than the ordinary canons of Notes and Queries ethnography" (Geertz 1999).

After much of Geertz’ fieldwork had concluded, he took a critical eye to the methodology of ethnography and the role of the anthropologist. Using history as a guide, he questioned how the discipline, born out of the post colonial West, could actually conduct objective research of foreign cultures. Furthermore, how could anthropologists, each armed with unique worldviews, accurately represent the meaning sets of other peoples (Yarrow 2006)? He concluded that the anthropologist had to be an interpreter of symbol sets by observing them in use. Cultural analysis was a process of assessing the meanings of cultural symbols, refining those assessments by including actors of the culture under analysis and then drawing larger conclusions from the agreed assessments. Fieldwork started as a conversation with the culture under analysis and the ethnographic data as an interpretation of that conversation (Yarrow 2006).

Clifford Geertz was an interpretive symbolic anthropologist influenced by Max Weber, literature, history, his experience in World War II and his involvement in the field of anthropology after the war. The war set his career in motion by way of the GI Bill. “The great boom in American higher education was just getting underway, and I have ridden the wave all the way through, crest after crest, until today, when it seems at last, like me, to be finally subsiding” (Geertz 1999). His generation of students, anthropologists and social scientists believed in their ability to influence academia and to change the world for the better; and Geertz was right in step. His dedication to fieldwork and exhaustive descriptions framed by symbolism influence anthropology as well as other social sciences (Yarrow 2006). For this Geertz is remembered, as well as for his persuasive and provocative writing regarding the nature of culture and ethnography. Although towards the end of his career he was discouraged with the relevance of social science, he advocated his field and academia to the end stating that an academic career in anthropology is “an excellent way, interesting, dismaying, useful and amusing, to expend a life” (Yarrow 2006).





Works cited:

Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Geertz, Clifford
1999 A Life of Learning. Electronic document, http://www.acls.org/op45geer.htm, accessed November 3, 2007.

Hammerstedt, Scott
1999 SYMBOLIC AND INTERPRETIVE ANTHROPOLOGIES, Electronic document, http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/symbolic.htm, accessed November 2, 2007.

Inglis, Fred
2000 Clifford Geertz: Culture Custom and Ethics. Cambridge UK: Policy Press.


Institute for Advanced Study
2006 Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), Electronic document, http://www.ias.edu/newsroom/announcements/view/geertz-1926-2006.html, accessed November 2, 2007.

McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms
2004 Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. New York: McGraw Hill.

Yarrow, Andrew
2006 Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80, Electronic document, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/obituaries/01geertz.html?_r=2&oref=slogin &oref=login, accessed November 4, 2007.