Clifford Geertz (1926--2006) Don Gardner University of Lucerne/Australian National University Geertz was one of the most important

anthropologists of the twentieth century. Moreover, his persuasive vision and strikingly stylish essays gave him a unique influence in neighboring disciplines, including philosophy, political science, history, sociology, and literary theory; many scholars see him as having played a decisive role in shaping the intellectual climate of his era. Geertz consistently argued, in effect, that the proper understanding of local action and the meanings it embodied was a necessary condition of adequate generalisation in any social science; accordingly, an adequately finegrained description of cultural life just is a form of analysis. While humans always face the hard surfaces life, he held, these are always embedded in and moulded by cultural meanings. Although Geertzs vision was always contested by sections of the anthropological community, especially those who thought it downplayed the political realities of social existence, it also came in for sustained discussion and critique by scholars who associated with the postmodern turn in the humanities (notwithstanding their acknowledgement of Geertzs role in bringing it about). Nevertheless, Geertzs role in shaping anthropological thought is acknowledged on all sides, while his standing in the interdisciplinary contexts in which he was most at home seemingly continues to grow. Geertz initially studied English and philosophy and completed his Ph.D in anthropology at Harvard, in the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, which Talcott Parsons and like-minded others had established to bring together anthropology, sociology and psychology, and which recruited as graduate students many leaders of their fields in the second half of the century. As Geertz often remarked, this unusual trajectory permanently affected his intellectual reflexes and inclined him to distrust essentialist views of disciplines. His academic friendships (Isaiah Berlin, Quentin Skinner, Michael Walzer, Richard Rorty, for example), no less than his writings, indicated his

commitment to the importance of connections across traditional disciplinary boundaries: towards the end of his life, he claimed that he was never properly socialised into the discipline he loved and added that the only real advice he would offer budding professionals is that anthropology is too important to be left to anthropologists (2005:111). He also suggested that his anthropological outlook owed much to having been forged not in an isolated tribal culture but a two-thousand-year-old civilization fully in the throes of revolutionary change (1995:103). And although his initial associations were with some of social sciences most ambitious theorists, his mature view was that social sciences deepest calling was to put us in touch with the concrete characteristics of the range of human lives and to reveal the fundamental role of cultural forms, which are always local and historical, in the constitution of the human species. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Geertz conducted extended field research in Java, Bali and Morocco, the results of which appeared in important monographs and articles that did much to establish his reputation. He was initially attracted by Parsons vision of a layered but articulated theoretical edifice that could integrate the logico-meaningful and the causal-functional dimensions of social life to produce a coherent explanatory basis both for historical trajectories and the values that thematise the life of real human beings (through the personality system). Thus, Geertzs early work suggested a revisionary, supplementary ambition, in which he sought to show that a better grasp of culture as a realm ordered by symbols and meanings would make a more dynamic functionalism available. At this point, Weber (whose work Geertz came to through Parsons rather Durkheimized reading of it) was a focal point of his thought, but his philosophical training nevertheless gave his interest in cultural processes a particular edge. The final sentence of a 1957 article (reprinted in The interpretation of cultures) reads: The role of such a special science as anthropology in the analysis of values is not to replace philosophical investigation, but to make it relevant (1973:141). Pursuit of his vision of anthropology drew Geertz to Susanne Langer and Gilbert Ryle and thenmost decisivelyto Wittgenstein, whom he was more than happy to

acknowledgeas a master (2000:xi). He also engaged and used the work of such literary critics as Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye. In 1972, Geertz published Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight that became indissolubly linked with his name. A year later, that essay reappeared as the final chapter of a volume that reprinted some of his earlier articles; it opened with an introduction that is now no less closely associated with his name, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. Among many significant claism in that volume, perhaps the most important is that anthropologys true vocation lies in the setting forth of the specificities forms of life (Wittgensteins phrase) through thick description (Ryles) that captures the said (Ricoeurs phrase) of human social action by placing it in relation to its proximal and the relevant distal cultural context. What anthropologists do, or should do, is ethnography, looking at and then rendering in texts the strange, irregular, and inexplicit meanings of other ways of being. By the time he wrote the introduction to this volume, it seems Geertz had become concerned almost exclusively with the logico-meaningful and was prepared to allow the causal-structural to remain in his texts only as evidence of the 15 year evolution of his ideas: The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said (1973: 30). Through the 1970s, the interpretive turn in anthropology and cognate disciplines grew apace; by 1983, with the publication of a new collection of essays, and a new introduction, Geertz was confident that the blurred genres of modern thought had ensured the death of laws-and-causes social physics (1983:3). The intellectually ecumenical spirit that Geertz found so congenial had resulted from the uptake, by the social sciences, of the philosophical ideas (of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Kuhn, Habermas and Foucault, to cite but a few of those he lists); and while one still came across those with one big idea, those who called for social science to develop a general theory sounded increasingly hollow, if not megalomanic (1983:4). Later, and despite having published four essays with as a cultural system, Geertz claimed to have no interest in systems.

In this context, it is worth stressing that Geertz always held it to be a mistake to insist that understanding cultural life always depends upon charting the lines of forces that power sets up or tracking the ceaseless search for it. He argued, in effect, that while one cannot ignore the politics in culture it is a fatal mistake to ignore the culture in politics. His acclaimed but controversial study of the nineteenth century Balinese state (1980) is intended to be a detailed demonstration that the idea that politics is, finally, about mastery, (which is the rock to which most of Western political thought is anchored) is simply one view, produced by its local context (134-5). In Bali, other conceptions of political power thematized life. Although he characterized himself as a nervous thinker, at times evasive in the face of difficult issues, Geertz was loud and clear about the importance of interpretive anthropology to the globalised world; its office, like good literature, was to nurture the sort of moral imagination necessary to a robust liberal democratic polity.

Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Geertz, Clifford. (1980). Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Geertz, Clifford. (1983). Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Geertz, Clifford. (1995). After the Fact. Cambrdge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Geertz, Clifford. (2000). Available Light. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Geertz, Clifford. (2005). Commentary. In Shweder, R. A. & Good, B. (Eds.), Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

A comprehensive website, HyperGeertz WorldCatalogue (last updated March 15th, 2008), containing references to all Geertzs published works and interviews (including those published in languages other than English), is maintained (in six languages) by Ingo Mrth & Gerhard Frhlich at the University of Linz (http://www.iwp.uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/sektktf/GG/HyperGeertz.html).