Geertz, Clifford (James)

(born Aug. 23, 1926, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.—died Oct. 30, 2006, Philadelphia, Pa.) U.S. cultural anthropologist, a leading proponent of a form of anthropology that stresses the importance of symbols and interpretation in human social life. Culture, according to Geertz, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms”—forms that serve to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. Geertz's writings have been influential both within and outside of anthropology; they include The Religion of Java (1960), The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Local Knowledge (1983), and Works and Lives (1988). He referred to his ethnographic methodology as “thick description.” Geertz taught at the University of Chicago (1960–70), among other institutions, and in 1970 joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., becoming an emeritus professor in 2000. See also cultural anthropology.

Geertz, Clifford (James) (1923– ) cultural anthropologist; born in San Francisco. He studied at Antioch College and Harvard, taught anthropology at the Universities of California (1958–60) and Chicago (1960–70), and became a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. (1970). His expeditions to Java (1953–54) and Bali (1957–58) resulted in a series of works on environment and economy, social change, and religion, including The Religion of Java (1960), Agricultural Involution (1963), Peddlers and Princes (1963), and Person, Time and Conflict in Bali (1966). In the 1960s and 1970s he made several field trips to Morocco, from which he developed a comparative approach to religion, as outlined in Islam Observed (1968), and to processes of social change. His theoretical essays on themes ranging from art and ideology to politics and nationalism were collected in Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and Local Knowledge (1983). In those works he advocated an interpretive approach, in which cultures could be compared to literary texts.