Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist who did fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco and spent much of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He championed interpretive anthropology, treating culture as a web of public meanings to be read rather than a set of causal laws. His idea of 'thick description', borrowed from Gilbert Ryle, became influential far beyond anthropology.

Key ideas

• Culture is a system of public, shared symbols through which people make sense of their lives.
• Thick description interprets actions in the layered context of meaning that makes them what they are.
• The study of culture is interpretive, a search for meaning rather than for laws.
• Religion can be analysed as a cultural system of symbols.

Major works

• The Religion of Java (1960)
• Islam Observed (1968)
• The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
• Local Knowledge (1983)

In the conversation

• Question If I try to understand a practice from the inside first, have I signed up to relativism? Aroha Tipene · 5 replies
• Reading group Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays Johanna Reinhardt · 6 replies