Luis Zaldivar

Seminar in Anthropology

Final Draft

Clifford Geertz, a Very Long

Epitaph

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was an American scholar regarded as one of the main
representatives of the interpretative school of anthropology. Even though he is exhaustively
cited in anthropological literature, no official biography exists; his memoir, published six years
before his death, is in merely one chapter of biographical highlights plus a collection of essays
where he discusses philosophical issues in anthropology. As a result, those interested in
Geertz’ ideas as a whole are left with the choice of reading all of his literature, or reading a
synopsis in an introductory anthropology textbook. This paper is an attempt to solve this
dilemma, as it discusses Geertz’ ideas and influence chronologically, showing how and why his
ideas came about.

Most importantly, I have divided Geertz’ career into four different periods corresponding
to different publications and stages of his intellectual development. The first section introduces
the reader to the way Clifford Geertz became an anthropologist. The second, titled after the
decade on which takes place (the 1960’s), discusses his work between his first major
publication and his major theoretical contributions. The third, arguably the most important,
discusses his works published in the 1970’s, which have had the most impact on the field of
anthropology. Finally, the fourth section is concerned with his later contributions and his life until
his death. Hopefully, this format helps the reader to understand Geertz’ intellectual development
and makes it easier to understand why he has had such an impact in the field.

Without further due, this is where Geertz’ journey begins.

The Journey to Anthropology
Clifford Geertz was born in 1926 in San Diego. As most people of his generation, Geertz
spent his early years getting through the economic meltdown of the depression. Then, at the
age of 18, he went to fight fascism in World War II. In 1945, the detonation of the atomic bomb
put an end to what could have been a military invasion of Japan, letting young Geertz free to
join civilian life to pursue his personal ambitions outside of the military. As a WWII veteran,
Geertz benefited from the GI bill, a government program that invested heavily in the education
of veterans (Geertz 2000, 4). Having grown up in rural California during the depression, Geertz
had not supposed he would be able to go to college, so he had no clue how to respond to this
newfound opportunity (Geertz 2000, 4). Following the advice of a high school teacher, he
enrolled in Ohio’s Antioch College, with the hopes of getting a degree in English and become a
novelist (Geertz 2000, 4).

In Antioch, his scattered intellectual interests were reflected in his course choices, where
he took classes on every field of the liberal arts program (Geertz 2000, 6). As a result of his
determination to understand more than just novels, he dropped from his intentions of becoming
a writer and switched to Philosophy. Geertz graduated in 1950; however, Geertz found himself
again dissatisfied with his academic choice, this time because he considered Philosophy to be
“too abstract”, and he wanted to be more “empirical” (Handler 1991, 603).

After graduation, he met the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead through a

common acquaintance, who introduced him to anthropology. In their 5-hour encounter, Mead
showed Geertz notes from her fieldwork in Bali and talked to him about the kind of work she did.
Provoked by the apparent freedom of anthropology, Cliff decided that taking the path of the
social sciences was the most appropriate thing for him; after all, he claimed, “[you can] do
anything and call it Anthropology” (Handler 1991, 603). That very year, Geertz joined the Social
Relations Department of Harvard to be trained in Anthropology instead of following a career as
a philosopher.

As part of the Social Relations Department, Geertz was obligated to take classes in each
of the four subfields that Harvard offered: sociology, social psychology, clinical psychology and
social anthropology. In the “academic maelstrom” (Geertz 1995, 101) of Harvard, the one thing
that distinguished the path of social anthropology from the other subfields was the expectation
for fieldwork. Unlike the other, purely academic disciplines, anthropologists had a final rite of
passage to go through at the end of the journey (Geertz 2000, 8-9). In 1952, a project focused
on small towns in Indonesia offered him the opportunity for fieldwork researching religion in
Java. His wife Hildred –whom he married in 1948 and divorced in 1981-, was also part of this
project, researching family ties while he focused in religion.

For the next four years, Geertz worked on his dissertation recording and analyzing
religion and its interaction with other aspects of society in Modjokuto, a small town in Java. In
1956, he obtains his Ph.D and spent the next four years teaching at Harvard and –briefly-
Berkley while doing further research on Java. The result of all this work was his first major
publication titled The Religion of Java, in 1960.

The Religion of Java

Geertz’ background on Philosophy and English did not disturb his capacity of analysis. In
The Religion of Java, Cliff not only recorded the beliefs, rituals, and other expressions of religion
of his fieldwork site, but also accounted for the interaction between religion and politics,
formalized education, folk tradition, etc, that are central to understanding the role of religion in
society,

The main argument of the book, however, is that even though Java is more than 90%
Muslim, Geertz identified three “variants” of Islam that have emerged due to the cultural flux of
Javanese history. The three variants are: (1) Abangan, practiced mostly in small villages and
constitute “the island’s true folk religion” (Geertz 1960, 5) (2) Santri, practiced by the most
religious segment of the population, and more focused on doctrine (Geertz 1960, 5) (3)Priyayi,
mostly practiced by the bureocratic conservative elite, and is influenced by Hinduism within it.
While united under the label “Muslim”, Geertz argued that religion of Java was not a coherent
body of uniform practices, but a stew of traditions that are the result from a plural cultural
background (Geertz 1960)

The contemporary importance of the Religion of Java is not its description of the religious
beliefs in Indonesia –as they have changed greatly in the last 40 plus years, but that it set a
standard for how religion should be understood and analyzed. With this work, Geertz started a
career advocating for the study of diversity of societies, separating his style from the clearly
defined boundaries that many before him drew for religion and other cultural systems. The
following quote, together with a notable essay published in 1966 titled “Religion as a Cultural
System”, could very well sum up his thoughts on religious studies:

[Java] is not easily characterized under a single label or easily pictured in terms of a
dominant theme. It is particularly true that in describing the religion of such a complex
 civilization as the Javanese any simple unitary view is certain to be inadequate; and so I
have tried… to show how much variation in ritual, contrast in belief, and conflict in values
lie concealed behind the simple statement that Java is 90 per cent Moslem. If I have
chosen, consequently, to accent the religious diversity in contemporary Java… my
intention has not been to deny the underlying religious unity of its people or, beyond them,
of the Indonesian people generally, but to bring home the reality of the complexity, depth,
and richness of their spiritual life” (Geertz 1960, 7)

The Religion of Java was the product of the journey to Anthropology from a prospect of a
novelist to the author of one of the most important contributions in Javanese religious studies.
The reason why I have presented my discussion of this work in this first section and not in the
following, titled “The Sixties”, is because The Religion of Java is based on his dissertation of
1956, making this book a product of his work on the decade before its publication. Furthermore,
I truly feel that this work marks the transition from the philosopher to the anthropologist, from the
student to the master, and –most importantly- from the author to the icon. For the rest of his life,
Clifford Geertz would embrace and perfect the style with which he wrote The Religion of Java. If
tragedy would have prevented him from continuing his work, he would still have been relevant
and discussed by social scientists and Javanese scholars because of this book. The next few
sections will build up in this antecedent, incredibly until the end of his career.

The Sixties
In 1960, while the publication of The Religion of Java was taking place, Geertz started to
feel overwhelmed with the size and rigorousness of the Anthropology department at Berkley (
Handler 1991,606); consequently, he took a faculty position in the University of Chicago, where
he was given considerably more time to do research –which he preferred- (Handler 1991, 606).
Through the next ten years, Geertz used the freedom of movement that Chicago gave him to do
further fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco, while at the same time spending considerable time
changing the academic profile of the university. Although most of his theoretical work would wait
until the 1970’s, Geertz’ publications in the Sixties have had strong influence within and outside
Anthropology, which I discuss below.

It could be said, however, that none of these works in the Sixties was as important as his
influence in the Anthropology department of the University of Chicago. Along with his
colleagues, Geertz switched the emphasis of the department from the structural-functionalist
approach to a German historicism and what would later be called interpretative Anthropology.
Geertz would later reflect on the University of Chicago when he got there as “the most British
American Anthropology department” (Handler 1991, 607) which is understandable considering
that this university was the home of the holy grail of British Anthropology, Radcliffe Brown.

Geertz vs. Structural Functionalism

The aggressive stance that Geertz took on changing the academic program at Chicago
was not a spontaneous frenzy that either began or stopped with his time there. He spent a
considerable amount of time through his career writing and speaking against the British
functionalist approach to the social science. Social discourse, he believed, was not to be
measured or accounted for the same way that a biologist or a physicist could measure objective
data; instead, he moved Anthropology to a science of interpretation, where data-gathering,
hypothesis-testing, quantitative methods, etc, could only speculate about the supposed function
of cultural practices, but could not account for the meaning they have for its members (Handler
1991, 607) (Geertz 1973, 5).

Most importantly, Geertz did not believe that societies “functioned” or formed a definite
“structure”. He believed that “nothing has done more.. to discredit cultural analysis that the
construction of impeccable depictions of formal order in whose actual existence nobody can
quite believe” (Geertz 1973, 18).

Instead, Geertz saw societies as a fluctuation of behaviors held together by their culture
–a term he had a specific meaning that I will come back to later-, but are not absolute subject to
it. Instead of taking the outsiders’ view –what anthropologists call “etic” view-, Geertz preferred
to take the insider –or “emic” point of view, and understand how people understood their culture.
This approach approach helped deal with change and deviant behavior more effectively than
the British approach.

In addition, it is important to point out that the so called functionalists and structural-
functionalists usually had a background in the hard sciences, while Geertz’ background was in
the humanities. More explicitly, Geertz attempted to move Anthropology from a natural science
to an interpretative science, where the task of the scientist is much more like that of the literary
critic, trying to decipher the meaning of a manuscript (Geertz 1973, 9-10). Nevertheless, Geertz
was not fond of associating Anthropology within the Humanities either, he believed that “grand
[academic] rubrics… have their uses in organizing curricula, in sorting scholars into cliques and
professional communities, and in distinguishing broad traditions of intellectual style… but when
these rubrics are taken to be a boards-and-territories map of modern intellectual life… they
merely block the front view of what is really going on out there” (Geertz 1983, 7)
 While revolutionizing American Anthropology in one of its top universities, Geertz was
still doing fieldwork and publishing about Indonesian religion and society. In 1963, he published
Peddles and Princes, where he returned to his dissertation topic. That very same year, he
dramatically changes topics to write Agricultural Involution, the Processes of Ecological Change
in Indonesia.

Agricultural Involution and Historical Account

The publication of Agricultural Involution was, in retrospective, an unusual moment in a
scholar’s career. Up until 1963, and after that, Geertz worked on religion, kinship, markets,
academic theory, the state, and even philosophy, all cultural institutions or theoretical proposals;
yet, Agricultural Involution was concerned with agricultural techniques and the application of
social theory to a specific problem. According the Geertz, he wrote this book because he felt
that the economists working on agricultural issues in Pare (the Indonesian town where the book
takes place) did not understand the way agriculture had evolved to what it was at the time.
Geertz argued that western economists were trying to apply a foreign model to villages that had
evolved from an agricultural background different from those in the west, rendering it ineffective
(Handler 1991, 605).

Geertz’ model, on the other hand, experimented with a new way to present history.
Geertz thought that, instead of being affected from foreign technology or the environment,
Pare’s agricultural structure changed from within, simply becoming more complicated. (Davis
2005, 43).This new way of understanding change and progress adds up to Geertz ideas of
historical account being better understood from the insiders’ (emic) perspective than from an
etic perspective. Geertz believed that “change is not a parade that can be watched as it passes”
(Geertz 1995, 4).

In 1964, Geertz started a project to study religious life in four different Indonesian towns.
Unfortunately, civil war erupted in Indonesia and he had to spend a whole year in Bali; as a
result, he decided to focus in Bali and wrote Person, Time and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in
Cultural Analysis, which did not see its publication until 1966. In 1965, Geertz decided that
Indonesia was too dangerous and decides to take a break from research there to focus
somewhere else. During the\is period of indecision, a colleague recommended Morocco to him
as a good place for him to carry out his fieldwork; Morocco,he said, was also “Islamic but calm”,
even though it had “authoritarian tendencies” (Handler 1991, 610). Geertz took his advice and
carried his fieldwork in Morocco for the next 2 years (Handler 1991, 610).The outcome of this
first experience with Morocco was Islam Observed, an analysis of how Islam is practiced
differently in Morocco than it is in Indonesia.

Islam Observed and Islam expanded

In Islam Observed, Geertz argued that the sociological differences between Indonesia
and Morocco (such as their different economies, politics, social stratification, etc), had produced
two different breeds of the same religion. The exercise of contrasting his experience with
religion in Indonesia and Morocco brought a new life to the study of Islam. Islamic scholar Dale
Eickelman has even claimed that the ethnographic examples and interpretations posed in Islam
Observed have changed the way Islamic scholars see religious practices in general (Davis
2005, 63).

Further, Eickleman (Eickelman 2005, 70-72)–in an essay remembering Geertz’

contribution to Islam- points out four different ways on which Islam Observed – as well as his
other works on religion- changed Islamic studies:

1. Geertz recognized religious debate as an integrated part of contemporary society, not

a fading characteristic. Western scholars, in general, tended to see religious discourse
as a weakening feature doomed to disappear due to the advances of technology and/or
globalization (a theory sometimes called modernization theory). Geertz insisted that
religion as idea and practice still mattered, and that “modernization theory” deflected
attention away from the role of religion in contemporary societies.

2. Quantitative methods to account for Islam –such as statistical analysis of practitioners

of a certain ritual, were relegated to a second realm. Instead, Geertz captured religious
diversity and meaning by recording and interpreting everyday life, starting a new wave of
religious studies where Islam was lived not simply performed by the believers.

3. Islam Observed, as well as The Religion of Java, and others, switched the focus of
Islamic studies from urban areas to small villages. Before Geertz, the trend of studying
urban Islam was in line with the “self-image of traditionally educated religious scholars
throughout the Muslim majority as the “guardians” of faith and religious tradition”.

4. Geertz definition of culture [discussed later on this paper] has surpassed the
anthropological use and is now widely used in Islamic studies. The “new framework of
social thought” that Geertz gave has pervaded studies of Islam; thinking about religion
 as a “cultural system”, started a dialogue between researches of Islamic scholars and
anthropologists that has characterized Islamic studies until today.

In short, Geertz not only observed Islam, but expanded its conception by contextualizing
its practices and getting scholars to swift attention from the urban Muslim elites to the religious
discourse of the villages. Even though Islam Observed was his only work on Islam in itself,
many of the concepts, ideas, and arguments that Geertz proposed through the rest of his career
has been embraced by Islamic scholars as important contribution s to their field. Religious
studies, Eickelman claims, have a set of “theoretical assumptions” that help us embody complex
traditions (Eickelman 66). Without a doubt, Geertz was one of the best at creating such
frameworks, in anthropology as well as Islam.

The end of The Sixties came at a time where Clifford Geertz, now a mature family man,
was enthusiastically carrying fieldwork in Morocco, giving lectures at all of the major universities
in the English speaking world and having accomplished a full restructuration of the University of
Chicago. However, his most important intellectual achievements were still ahead, as he was
getting ready to leave Chicago and start publishing the lectures he had been giving in the late
Sixties about the theoretical foundations of Anthropology. Behind was his work on Javanese
religion, agricultural systems, traditional Islamic practices and university reform; ahead, there
was thick description, cultural systems, interpretative Anthropology, and –not less relevant-
Princeton.

The Seventies
In 1970, Geertz decided that his schedules at the University of Chicago where not
suitable for the frequent fieldwork he wanted to carry on in Morocco, where he was working with
his wife Hildred on a variety of topics, and decided to leave Chicago –not before making sure a
Moroccan research project was first established(Geertz 1995, 120). His new choice was to
accept an invitation from Princeton to direct the Social Science school –the first of its kind- at
the Institute for Advanced Studies. “The first two years”, Geertz later recalled, were nothing but
a “struggle to find my feet in what I soon discovered was an extremely tense and increasingly
obsessive community”. This only got worse when Geertz appointed Robert Bellah, a sociologist,
to be the second professor; “for nearly two years the Institute was convulsed in a struggle so
bitter that it became… a cause célèbre of major proportions” (Geertz 1995, 124). Nevertheless,
he went ahead with the formation of the Social Science school where he would stay for the rest
of his career, later becoming an emeritus professor. The irregularities of the Institute for
Advance Studies at Princeton might actually have played well with the personality of the
anthropologist, who seemed to enjoy the “unsettled intellectual field” (Geertz 1995, 133). With
constant changes in faculty and never ending “tooling up of the Institute”, Geertz affirmed “our
irregular school has proved an excellent place to observe the commotion and try out ways of
staying upright within it”, which seems an overall positive mental image of the Institute.

With Geertz there, the Institute became a harbor for strictly interpretative Social
Sciences, embracing his methodology and style as its hallmark, even to the point where other
approaches or perspectives were not to be taught at the same time as the interpretative
approach. Geertz preferred to choose “themes” every year, where a distinct topic or perspective
was discussed, but never was he fond of teaching different ways of analyzing cultures at the
same time (Handler 1991, 611). In 1973, Geertz collected his most important lectures and
essays where he discussed interpretative anthropology in The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays. This book was not only the most important work of his career, but the
guideline for the Institute in next few decades. If someone was to name a publication that could
be considered the base for semiotic or interpretative anthropology, it would be The
Interpretation of Cultures.

In The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz offers the basis for his approach to analyzing
“cultural systems”. In fact, “cultural systems” was one of the terms that he coined in The
Interpretation of Cultures, and would expand to a series of essays for he wrote during his
career. The importance of this work is further exemplified by the title of his legendary opening
essay: Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture. Obviously, Geertz knew
that he was writing towards something big when he published it, and he was not mistaken. All of
the essays in this book are necessary for a complete understanding of Geertz; however, I think
that his discussions the concepts of culture, as well as “thick description”, are of the most
important contributions to anthropology as a discipline.

Culture for the Semiotic

Clifford Geertz is very often quoted for the definition of culture that he gives on Thick
Description, on page five of The Interpretation of Cultures:

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to
demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an
animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those
webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law
but an interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz 1973, 5)
The other, less quoted, definition of culture that he gives, is found later in the book:

[Culture is] 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)

Both definitions give a great deal of power to the idea of symbols, and what their role is in
shaping human behavior. It is not surprise that interpretative anthropology is often called
semiotic or symbolic anthropology. Semiotics is the study of symbols, and symbols are things
that stand for or represent another by cultural or social construct (Bowie 2006, 36). According to
Geertz and other interpretative or semiotic anthropologists, “a culture” is characterized by a
unified body of symbols that a society shares. For instance, Geertz would say that American
culture in the 1950’s was characterized by the symbols of patriotism (flag, bald eagle, etc),
family (embodied in the picture of the household), Christianity, the “blue collar worker”, and
others. This emphasis on symbols is crucial to semiotic anthropology because it gives the
researcher a fundamental task: finding the meaning of symbols.

“It is explication I am after”, Geertz wrote after defining culture in Thick Description in what
could very well have been his epitaph. It was explication, and not categorization that was the
main purpose of his work. It would have been impossible for Geertz to look for explication if he
understood culture to be a grouping of practices or objects that only need recording or counting.
It is the semiotic concept of culture that made his work possible, and it is this model that persists
among his intellectual descendants until today.

Thick Description

As stated here before, probably the most important essay in Geertz’ literature is the first
chapter of The Interpretation of Cultures, titled Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory
of Culture. Thick description is not only central to understand Geertz’ ideas, but it also
encapsulates the essence of the more humanistic side of anthropology. The term itself “thick
description” has its origin in Gilbert Ryle use of it to describe what Le penseur –the thinker- is
doing when he “thinks”. Geertz used this term not to describe what “the thinker” does, but to
describe what the ethnographer does. According to Geertz, ethnography –the recording and
analysis of information gathered by the anthropologist in the field- is “an elaborate venture in
‘thick description’”(Geertz 1973, 6), where the ethnographer records his or her own
interpretation of a certain event, or gathers someone else’s interpretation of a certain behavior,
to then sort out “the structures of signification”, more or less the same way a literary critic tries to
read a manuscript, only that this time the manuscript is “foreign, faded, full of ellipses,
incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries… written not in
conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior”(Geertz 1973,
10).

In Thick Description, Geertz developed his argument against cognitive anthropology,

which claims that culture is “composed of psychological structures by means of which
individuals or groups of individuals guide their behavior” (Geertz 1973, 11). Geertz believed that
this “fallacy” is drawn from the mistaken assumption that you can understand culture by simply
knowing its parts, and that you can measure them with the methods similar to those of
mathematics and logic (Geertz 1973, 10-11). Geertz’ approach, on the other hand, understands
culture to be public, and behavior to be meaningless until it is contextualized by its culture. In
other words, he rejected behaviorism (culture as a collection of behaviors), and idealism
(ethnography as an effort to understand what the “natives really think”), to favor thick
description, which in this context could be described as the understanding of culture as “webs of
meaning” and ethnography as interpretation of those webs.

As part of Thick Description, Geertz also attacks the previous notion that ethnography is
an attempt to see the world from “the native’s point of view”. Even though interpretative
anthropology is much more emic (insider) than functionalist or structural approaches, Geertz
understood that an ethnographic account “does not rest on its author’s ability to capture
primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home”, but to “reduce the puzzlement ... to
which unfamiliar acts emerging out of unknown backgrounds naturally give rise” (Geertz 1973,
16). This, naturally, gives anthropological literature an element of narrative about what the
ethnographer saw, heard, smelled or touched during his or her fieldwork. Thus, thinking of
anthropology as “native discourse”, to say the least, becomes naïve.

Thick Description is, to sum up, an exercise of distancing anthropology from the
systematization of the hard sciences and making it an interpretative approach, where a
multitude of researchers study the same topics and with similar “data” to come up with readings
that build up one on top of another (Geertz 1973, 25). However, Geertz also rejected
subjectivism, arguing that ethnography should always be tied to concrete social discourse and
organized around theoretical formulations. According to Geertz, “cultural analysis is (or should
be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from
the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless
landscape” (Geertz 1973, 20).

In 1975, surprisingly only two years after The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford and his
wife Hildred went back to Indonesia to finish the work that she started while he was working on
The Religion of Java. This time, the outcome was Kinship in Bali, published the same year,
where they discuss family ties and meaningful relationships in Bali’s society. For the next four
years, the couple joined forces with the anthropologist Lawrence Rosen to analyze different
aspects of Moroccan society. In 1979, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society was published,
which turned out to be a groundbreaking effort in applying interpretative anthropology to the
field. Geertz’ section, Suq: the bazaar economy in Sefrou, analyzed the street markets in
Morocco and the many cultural systems that interplay in their formation (Geertz 1979). This
work showed that interpretative anthropology could still be empirical and objective.

In 1980, Geertz published Negara: the Theatre State in 19th Century Bali, his last book
about Indonesia. This book marks the end of another era, as Geertz would not publish any other
major publications with his own ethnographic effort, and starts a new –more reflective and
scholarly- period of intellectual outup dedicated mainly to discussing theory. The Seventies,
however, would be remembered as the decade when he published his most important work and
gained the renown that he retained until his death.

Later Works
Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Geertz continued to work in Princeton, mentoring
graduate students, giving and attending lectures on all sorts of anthropological issues as well as
Indonesian an Islamic studies, and of course enjoying the benefits of international recognition
for his scholarly work. In 1983, he published what he considered to be the continuation of The
Interpretation of Cultures, titled Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology.
In this essays no new ideas were presented, but we can find supplementary examples and
theoretical reflections on a variety of anthropological topics. Local Knowledge was described by
Geertz as a “dialectical movement between looking at things in a lawyer’s terms and
anthropological terms”(Geertz 1983, 15), as he approached abstract concepts such as art,
common sense, “modern” as well as “social” thought, and others in their cultural context. More
importantly, he continued the “cultural system” series, by contextualizing certain aspects of
society and make them available in anthropological terms.
 In 1984, Geertz published a distinguished lecture in American Anthropologist titled Anti
Anti-Relativism. In this classic, Geertz got away with attacking the anti-relativists, those who
believe that anthropology is nihilist and use “relativism” as an scapegoat for their absolutism,
without embracing relativism per se. “We are being offered a choice of worries” Cliff points out,
“[the relativists] want us to worry about provincialism –the danger that our perceptions will be
dulled .. by the over learned and overvalued acceptance of our society. What the anti-relativists,
self declared, want us to worry about is a kind of spiritual entropy.. in which everything is.
insignificant. I find myself provincialism altogether the more real concern so far as what actually
goes on in the world” (Geertz 1984, 265)

It would not be until 1995 that Clifford Geertz published a major work again. On that
year, he reflected on his career in After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One
Anthropologist .While “not an autobiographical book, and not a memoir” (Handler 1991, 612),
Geertz wanted to reflect on what being an anthropologist had meant for him.

Geertz on Anthropology as a Discipline

“Becoming an anthropologist is not.. an induction into an established profession” (Geertz
1995, 133) Geertz wrote in After the Fact. Geertz not only announced that anthropology was not
an established profession, but that it is “in fact rather more something one picks up as one goes
along.. than something one has instilled through ‘a systematic method to obtain obedience’ or
formalized ‘training by instruction and control’”. Clearly, Geertz had no intention on unifying the
multiple paths that we recognize as anthropology today; instead, he described anthropology as
“a sprawling consortium of dissimilar scholars held together largely by will and convenience”. In
his 1991 interview, Geertz speculated that in the next fifty years, anthropology would probably
take a very different structure (Handler 1991, 611-612).

Evidently, Geertz did not believe in anthropology as a unified discipline, and encouraged
its atomization. However, as someone who spent most of his life doing anthropology, it seems
like Geertz did not want anthropology to be disjointed, but that he preferred it to be in constant
flux so that the researcher is not constrained to expand into different fields of knowledge. After
all, the last lines of After the Fact offer a charming reflection upon his career:

[In anthropology] there is not much assurance or sense of closure, not even much of a
sense of knowing what it is one precisely is after, in so indefinite a quest, amid such
various people, over such a diversity of times. But it is an excellent way, interesting,
dismaying, useful, and amusing, to expend a life (Geertz 1995, 168).
 In the year 2000, his memoir and philosophical manifesto Available Light: Philosophical
Reflections on Anthropological Topics is published. This last publication is a further example
and summary of his personality and style, as he recounts his involvement with anthropology and
reflects upon the themes of scientific methodology and the search for truth in anthropology. In
2006, after a heart surgery, Clifford Geertz passed away in a hospital in Pennsylvania.

Conclusion
Clifford Geertz lived an extraordinarily productive life. He spent a life trying to capture
something that escapes the radar of society all too often: knowledge. It was that drive for
knowledge that took him from Antioch to Harvard, from Harvard to Java, from Java to Chicago,
from Chicago to Morocco, etc. His most important contribution, the one for which he will always
be remembered, “interpretative social science” was in many ways a statement that no matter
how many times you look at something, there will always be something to say about it. If Clifford
Geertz would have lived for another hundred years, my guess is that he would still be an
interpretative anthropologist trying to find new understanding in things we all find either too
familiar or too obsolete.

Throughout this paper, I have discussed a variety of Geertz’ works and mentioned all of
them with the purpose of giving context to the eclectic influence that he has had in the social
sciences. He not only rejected and proposed theoretical frameworks, but also influenced heavily
Islamic studies and pioneered the philosophical implications of anthropology. Obviously, I have
not covered everything that could be covered about Geertz, but I believe that I have been true to
Geertz’ in presenting more than one side of his story.

If Geertz himself was to finish up this pape, he would probably introduce an exotic story
or poem that he heard while doing fieldwork (or he read somewhere) and attempt to show us
something about the topic in relation to it.I will finish this paper by quoting a rather
underappreciated statement that Geertz makes at the end of the introduction of Local
Knowledge. This is a “very long epitaph” after all, and Geertz deserves the last word:

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a

nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult
achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms
human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the
largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self congratulation and tolerance a sham,
comes. If interpretive anthropology has any general office in the world is to keep
reteaching this fugitive truth (Geertz 1983, 16)
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