Clifford Geertz as a Cultural System

Clifford Geertz was among the relatively few academics and even fewer anthropologists who attained the status of public intellectual. (How many anthropologists have been received by the pope?) Among his peers in an age when obscurantism is likely to be taken for professionality, he brought intelligence into the living room. There were rewards as well as punishments for this accomplishment. He was more influential among scholars and intellectuals generally than in anthropology, although he certainly had a devoted following within a field he considered elusive if not evasive. Indeed, he rarely engaged with anthropologists directly on their own terms, although he could, on occasion, make acerbic remarks about some of them. As an anthropologist, it is difficult to know whom to compare him with. A possible candidate only in relation to the profession because her approaches were quite opposite to his, although their subject matter at times overlapped, was perhaps Mary Douglas. She was very much her own kind of structuralist, where one might argue that Geertz was his own kind of hermeneutician. Both viewed the world as sufficiently idiosyncratic to require somewhat idiosyncratic ideas for its examination.2KeywordsCultural SystemSocial LifeCultural AnthropologyPublic IntellectualHistorical SociologistThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Epistemology · Pedagogy · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subject matter · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Philosophy · Psychology

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