Clifford Geertz
Born in 1926 and now retired from academia--though still a much published and often translated author--Clifford Geertz is among the best known and most influential U.S. anthropologists of the mid- to late-twentieth century. Geertz is known especially among scholars of religion for his often utilized definition of religion as, in his famous words, "a cultural system." Having obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1956--after serving in the US Navy during the last years of World War II--Geertz held academic positions at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, Oxford University, and Princeton University's prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies. His early studies of Javanese culture (Java is an island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago and which contains the country's capital, Jakarta), were followed by repeated fieldwork--now generally understood as a requirement for producing legitimate anthropological knowledge. Geertz spent time in such other places as Bali and Morocco, ensuring that his work has been particularly well known to some scholars of modern Islam. Unlike his anthropological predecessors who were intent on explaining the natural causes of elements of culture, Geertz is today associated with an anthropological tradition known as symbolic anthropology, which is concerned with studying the meaning (as opposed to either the origins or the causes) that beliefs, behaviors, institutions, and symbols have for the members of a culture--which is itself seen by those who follow Geertz as an elaborate, interconnected system of symbols. As such, Geertz is part of the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions of scholarship--traditions with a long and still active history in the humanistic study of religion. That is, to study a culture adequately, one must understand fully the meaning that a system of symbols and actions have for a group of cultural actors; this understanding presupposes correct interpretation on the part of the observer. In a classic example Geertz borrowed from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), he cites an observer--inevitably disconnected from the "local knowledge" possessed by a group of cultural participants--witnessing what might be called a "wink." Yet, this observer is incapable of distinguishing a meaningless twitch from a sly wink from what could even be an elaborate parody of a wink (in which the secrecy sometimes communicated by a wink is undermined by being broadcast to the entire group). For those who possess this knowledge, this seemingly subtle body movement could mean anything from an attempt to lessen the bite of a criticism to a recognition that someone was "in on the joke," to a sexual advance. To understand the meaning of the wink--and therefore to understand the manner in which shared sets of interconnected ideas and symbols (that is, cultures) make our worlds inhabitable by making them meaningful and therefore sensible to us--required what Geertz famously described as "thick description" of culture's interconnected symbols and the changing contexts in which they operate. A merely "thin description" of the behavior known as "a wink" was therefore hardly sufficient to understand it.
Major Works
Religion in Java (1960)
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia
(1968)
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973)
Kinship in Bali (1978)
Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980)
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983)
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988)
After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (1995)
Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics
(2001)
Quotation
"Without much further ado, then, a religion is (1) a system
of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting
moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general
order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura
of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
- from Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System" (1966;
reprinted in The Interpretation of Cultures)
Select Web Resources on Geertz
HyperGeertz
World Catalogue on Clifford Geertz's Work
Encyclopedia
of Religion and Society
entry on Clifford Geertz
"A
Life in Learning" by Clifford Geertz (the 1999 Haskins Lecture)
Institute
for Advanced Studies' faculty web page for Clifford Geertz
"Big
Ideas," a series of interviews with Institute for Advanced Studies
faculty, including Clifford Geertz
"'I Don't Do Systems': An Interview with Clifford Geertz," PDF
version of interview published in Method & Theory in the Study
of Religion 14/1 (2002): 2-20
Secondary Literature on Geertz and Religion
Talal Asad, "The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,"
The Genealogy of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Walter Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline, pp.
180-181. Fortress Press, 1995.
Daniel Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, chapter 7. Oxford University
Press, 1996.
Sherry Ortner, The Fate of "Culture" Geertz and Beyond.
University of California Press, 1999.
Nancy Frankenberry and Hans Penner, "Geertz's Long-lasting Moods,
Motivations, and Metaphysical Conceptions," Journal of Religion
79/4 (1999): 617-640.
Fred Englis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom, and Ethics. Polity
Press, 2000.
Arun Micheelsen, "'I Don't Do Systems': An Interview with Clifford
Geertz," Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 14/1
(2002): 2-20.
Richard Schweder and Byron Good (eds.), Clifford Geertz, By His Colleagues.
University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Kevin Schilbrack, "Religion, Models of, and Reality: Are We Through
with Geertz?" Journal of the American Academy of Religion
73/2 (2005): 429-452.