Charles.
Thought and works At the University of Chicago, Geertz became a "champion of symbolic anthropology", which gives prime attention to the role of thought ("symbols") in society. Symbols guide action. Culture, outlined by Geertz in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), is "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (1973:89). The function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. The role of anthropologists is to try (though complete success is not possible) to interpret the guiding symbols of each culture (see thick description). His oft-cited essay, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," included in The Interpretation of Cultures, is the classic example of thick description at work. Geertz was quite innovative in this regard, as he was one of the first to see that the insights provided by common language philosophy and literary analysis could have major explanatory force in the social sciences.
He conducted extensive ethnographical research in Southeast Asia and North Africa. He also contributed to social and cultural theory and is still very influential in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live out their lives. He worked on religion, most particularly Islam, on bazaar trade, on economic development, on traditional political structures, and on village and family life. At the time of his death he was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.
Geertz's career worked through, over time, a variety of phases and schools of thought. Gradually he came to see the limitations of each, and moved on. His final position was to take a strong view about objective reality of the complex social system of order. But he also recognised the difficulties that research has in getting at an adequate description of that objective reality: caused by the fact that people tell ethnographers what they believe to be their own motivations, but those people's actions then often seem to contradict their statements to the researcher. This effect is partly due to: the problems that people have in verbalising aspects of their life that they usually take for granted; partly due to how ethnographers structure their research approaches and frameworks; and partly due to the inherent complexity of the social order.
Harvard professor and literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt identifies him as a strong influence, and Geertz acknowledged Greenblatt as a faithful interpreter of his work.
Symbolic anthropology
Jump to: navigation, search Symbolic anthropology (or more broadly, symbolic and interpretive anthropology) is a diverse set of approaches within cultural anthropology that view culture as a symbolic system that arises primarily from human interpretations of the world. It is often viewed in contrast to more empirically oriented approaches in anthropology such as cultural materialism. Prominent symbolic anthropologists include Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, Victor Turner, and Mary Douglas.