Introduction to Clifford Geertz

 Clifford Geertz rejected the causal determinism that so often passed for explanation and instead embraced hermeneutics. He argued that culture is made up of the meanings people find to make sense of their lives and to guide their actions. Interpretive social science is an attempt to engage those meanings.

Unlike other anthropological scholars, Geertz did not focus on so-called primitive groups. Rather, he studied complex, syncretic societies in Indonesia (Java, Bali, Celebes, Sumatra) and in Morocco. One of Geertz’s best-known essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” which appeared in his 1973 book, The Interpretation of Cultures, was a wide-ranging interpretation of how the people of Bali saw themselves in relation to violence, social status, morality, and belief.

“I contributed to the merriment with ‘interpretive anthropology,’ an extension of my concern with the systems of meaning, beliefs, values, world views, forms of feeling, styles of thought, in terms of which particular peoples construct their existence.”

Geertz’s work of the late 1960s and 70s addressed the great failure of universal theories to account for human behavior. Instead he sought alternative approaches. To do this, he proposed that the social sciences be pursued more like an ongoing seminar: the point would be to improve everyone’s mutual understanding.

“I think in general there is a belief that the social sciences are a machine that produces answers for politicians to listen to,” says sociologist Wolf Lepenies, former director of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. “Instead, they should be seen as a process. Cliff was a pathbreaker in that regard”

His Works:

1.     The Religion of Java 1960;

2.     Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns  1963

3.      Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia 1968

4.     Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia 1963

5.     The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973

6.      Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali, 1980

7.     Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology 1983

8.     Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author 1988

9.     After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist 1995 (His memoir)

10.  Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics  2000

At the time of his death, Geertz was returning to the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.

Noting that human beings are “symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals,” Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate need of humanity to “make sense out of experience, to give it form and order.”

“The next necessary thing…is neither the construction of a universal (/ˌɛspəˈrantəʊ/) Esperanto-like culture…nor the invention of some vast technology of human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way.”

Geertz from Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988)

 

“Interpretive explanation—and it is a form of explanation, not just exalted glossography—trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs, all the usual objects of social-scientific interest, mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are. As a result, it issues not in laws like Boyle’s, or forces like Volta’s, or mechanisms like Darwin’s, but in constructions like Burckhardt’s, Weber’s, or Freud’s: systematic unpackings of the conceptual world in which condottiere, Calvinists, or paranoids live.”

(“Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” an article Local Knowledge, 1983).

Glossography means A Complete Dictionary of the English Language

Summary: In his article “Blurred Genres,” Geertz explains that interpretive explanation focuses on understanding what various social phenomena (like institutions, actions, and customs) mean to the people involved. Unlike scientific laws or forces, this approach results in detailed interpretations of the conceptual worlds people inhabit, similar to the works of Burckhardt, Weber, or Freud.

In other words, Geertz argues that understanding social phenomena like customs or actions involves interpreting their meaning to the people involved. Instead of seeking scientific laws or formulas, social scientists should aim to understand the worldviews of the people they study, similar to how historians like Burckhardt or philosophers like Weber and Freud analyzed their subjects’ perspectives.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun

Clifford Geertz

To understand people you have to understand webs

For him “culture is an intersubjective map of meanings that helps guide actions of its actors”

“Culture is historically transmitted pattern of embodied symbols”

Culture is semiotic system of signs, systems, symbols, linguistic, performative, pictorial, gestures, norms that create meaning between them. It is not an overarching universal idea to understand any culture you have to get inside it.

Disclaimer: This article is in the making.