Clifford Geertz

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Clifford James Geertz (born August 23, 1926 in San Francisco , † October 30, 2006 in Philadelphia ) was an American ethnologist . He is considered the most important representative of interpretive ethnology .

Life

Clifford Geertz took part in the Second World War from 1943 to 1945. He studied among others at the Harvard University , first philosophy and turned by chance of Ethnology to. At Harvard he was particularly influenced by Talcott Parsons . Geertz married in the late 1940s. Together with his wife Hildred Geertz , he undertook research, for example in Asia and North Africa . After receiving his doctorate , he taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1958–1960), then for several years at the University of Chicago . In 1966 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1973 to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1991 as a corresponding member of the British Academy . From 1970 he taught at Princeton . There he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study , a scientific think tank . Geertz is one of the most important representatives of ethnology, religious studies and anthropology.

Clifford Geertz died on October 30, 2006 after heart surgery in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital .

Ethnological field research and theory of culture

Geertz carried out ethnological field research on the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali . An important research work related to the bloody ritual of the Balinese cockfight , which, according to Geertz, is an important factor for society in Bali in order to create coherence.

From 1963 to 1986 Geertz stayed several times with his wife Hildred Geertz in the small Moroccan town of Sefrou . Here he invited several ethnologists who carried out their own research projects. They included Paul Rabinow , who described a popular Islamic Sufi brotherhood near the city , and Dale Eickelman, who carried out a study on Boujad from 1968-70 . In addition to Geertz's group, a number of other ethnologists researched Islam and society in Morocco in the 1970s: Ernest Gellner among the Berbers in the High Atlas and Vincent Crapanzano on the Hamadscha brotherhood in Meknes . There were sometimes heated arguments among colleagues about the methods and models. Geertz was in Sefrou for the last time in 2000, when the city administration organized an international conference Hommage à Clifford Geertz in his honor, which was attended by several hundred social scientists.

In his description of cultural systems, the quality of the interpretation was important to him. The result of a scientific study of a foreign culture is what he calls the “ dense description ”, a theorem that he took over from Gilbert Ryle and that has also found its way into historical studies .

As early as the 1970s he represented post-structuralist, culturally relativist positions. He understands nature and knowledge as “local knowledge”. Universalistic moral concepts, such as the concept of human rights, take a back seat to the ethics of different cultures. People have to learn to find their way between cultures, science should see through complex contradicting structures and in particular work out the "turns". In his work Welt in Stücken , he describes how the unified, communal, concept of culture of modernity, conceived without contradictions, broke at the end of the 20th century. He asks questions about countries that are no longer nations and cultures that are not based on the conformity of their members.

In particular, his definition of culture is popular today in cultural studies. Since 1973 he has been using a “semiotic”, ie a concept of culture based on symbolic meanings. Geertz represents an open, flexible concept of culture, referring to Max Weber's concept of culture and creating the image of a "self-spun web of meaning" in which people are entangled: Culture is the web that is constantly being created and changed and can be reinterpreted at any time. “Culture” is constantly subject to new interpretations and meanings, is never objective and shows itself in people's everyday activities. Culture is everywhere, but the culture of interpretation is essential to the existence of the definition of “culture”. Geertz also speaks of a code whose symbolic content must be deciphered.

The culture should function as text, the anthropology becomes a kind of hermeneutics : the human being can be viewed and "read" as text.

Works (selection)

  • The Religion of Java . 1960
  • Agricultural Involution . 1963
  • Interpretation of Culture. Selected essays . 1973. This includes:
  • Kinship in Bali . 1974
  • Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. 1980
  • Works and lives . 1988
    • German: The artificial savages: anthropologists as writers. Hanser, Munich 1990. ISBN 978-3446153240
  • After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Harvard University Press, 1996 (Reprint edition). ISBN 978-0-674-00872-4
    • German: Reading traces: the ethnologist and the slip of the facts. [Comparison of cities Sefrou in Morocco and Pare in Indonesia over four decades]. CH Beck, Munich 1997. ISBN 978-3-406-41902-7
  • World in pieces. Culture and Politics at the End of the 20th Century. (Translated by Herwig Engelmann), Passagen, Vienna, 2nd edition 2007, ISBN 978-3-85165-785-2

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Radim Tobolka: Gellner and Geertz in Morocco: a segmentary Debate. Social Evolution & History. Vol. 2, No. 2, September 2003
personal data
SURNAME Geertz, Clifford
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Geertz, Clifford James (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco
DATE OF DEATH October 30, 2006
Place of death Philadelphia