geertz clifford the interpretation of cultures

After a postdoctorate stint at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1958-1959) and a year teaching at the University of California at Berkeley (1959-1960), Geertz joined the University of Chicago where he taught for a decade (1960-1970) and participated in the Committee for Comparative Studies of New Nations. Geertz pursued graduate studies in the 1950s in Harvard University ’s interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations and conducted ethnographic research in Java, receiving his Ph.D. ” While sharing the American anthropologist Franz Boas ’s goal of viewing cultures within their specific contexts, Geertz specifically focused on the cultural creation of symbolic meaning. Geertz emphasized the particularistic nature of cultural experience, highlighting the explanatory priority of symbols and attending to “local knowledge. This search, Geertz noted thirty years later, involved “ferreting out the singularities of other peoples ’ ways of life.

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 ” (p. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco, Geertz ’s theory of “interpretive anthropology ” was articulated in his 1973 collection, The Interpretation of Cultures, in which he stated, “The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one.

The American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz was known for contending that culture is the enacted and public creation of meaning and that therefore ethnographic inquiry requires interpretation.

Geertz clifford the interpretation of cultures