[Kabar-indonesia] Obituary: Clifford Geertz 1926-2006

[Joyo at aol.com]

Princeton University
November 1, 2006

CLIFFORD GEERTZ 1926-2006

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Clifford Geertz, an eminent scholar in
the field of cultural anthropology known for his extensive
research in Indonesia and Morocco, died at the age of 80
early yesterday morning of complications following heart
surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Geertz was Professor Emeritus in the School of Social
Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has
served on the Faculty since 1970. Dr. Geertz's appointment
thirty-six years ago was significant not only for the
distinguished leadership it would bring to the Institute,
but also because it marked the initiation of the School of
Social Science, which in 1973 formally became the fourth
School at the Institute.

Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural
theory have been influential not only among anthropologists,
but also among geographers, ecologists, political
scientists, humanists, and historians. He worked on
religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on economic
development; on traditional political structures; and on
village and family life. A prolific author since the 1950s,
Dr. Geertz's many books include The Religion of Java (1960);
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and
Indonesia (1968); The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth
Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of Culture, Asian
Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of his
death, Dr. Geertz was working on the general question of
ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.

Peter Goddard, Director of the Institute, said, "Clifford
Geertz was one of the major intellectual figures of the
twentieth century whose presence at the Institute played a
crucial role in its development and in determining its
present shape. He remained a vital force, contributing to
the life of the Institute right up to his death. We have all
lost a much loved friend."

"Cliff was the founder of the School of Social Science and
its continuing inspiration," stated Joan Wallach Scott,
Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science
at the Institute. "His influence on generations of scholars
was powerful and lasting. He changed the direction of
thinking in many fields by pointing to the importance and
complexity of culture and the need for its interpretation.
We will miss his critical intelligence, his great sense of
irony, and his friendship."

Dr. Geertz's deeply reflective and eloquent writings often
provided profound and cogent insights on the scope of
culture, the nature of anthropology and on the understanding
of the social sciences in general. Noting that human beings
are "symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals,"
Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate desire of
humanity to "make sense out of experience, to give it form
and order." In Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
(1988), Geertz stated, "The next necessary thing...is
neither the construction of a universal Esperanto-like
culture...nor the invention of some vast technology of human
management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible
discourse between people quite different from one another in
interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a
world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it
is increasingly difficult to get out of each other's way."

Dr. Geertz was born in San Francisco, California, on August
23, 1926. After serving in the Navy from 1943 through 1945,
he studied under the G.I. Bill at Antioch College in Yellow
Springs, Ohio, where he majored in English. His internship
as a copyboy for The New York Post dissuaded him from
becoming a newspaper man. "It was fun but it wasn't
practical," he said in an interview with Gary A. Olson
("Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction,"
1991), so he switched to philosophy, partly because of the
influence of philosophy professor George Geiger, "the
greatest teacher I have known."

"I never had any undergraduate training in anthropology
[Antioch didn't offer it at the time] and, indeed, very
little social science outside of economics," Geertz told
Olson. "Finally, one of my professors said, 'Why don't you
think about anthropology?'"

After receiving his A.B. in philosophy in 1950, Geertz went
on to study anthropology at Harvard University and received
a Ph.D. from the Department of Social Relations in 1956. It
was a heady time, according to Geertz. "Multi- (or 'inter-'
or 'cross-') disciplinary work, team projects, and concern
with the immediate problems of the contemporary world, were
combined with boldness, inventiveness, and a sense that
things were, finally and certainly, on the move."

Geertz recounted that he was exposed to a form of
anthropology "then called, rather awkwardly, 'pattern
theory' or configurationalism.' In this dispensation,
stemming from work before and during the war by the
comparative linguist Edward Sapir at Yale and the cultural
holist Ruth Benedict at Columbia, it was the interrelation
of elements, the gestalt they formed, not their particular
atomistic character that was taken to be the heart of the
matter."

At this point, Geertz became involved in a project
spearheaded by cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who
headed Harvard's Russian Research Center. Geertz was one of
five anthropologists assigned to the Modjokuto Project in
Indonesia, sponsored by the Center for International Studies
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it was one
of the earliest efforts to send a team of anthropologists to
study large-scale societies with written histories,
established governments, and composite cultures.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropology was torn
apart by questions about its colonial past and the
possibility of objective knowledge in the human sciences.
"For the next fifteen years or so," Geertz wrote, "proposals
for new directions in anthropological theory and method
appeared almost by the month, the one more clamorous than
the next. I contributed to the merriment with 'interpretive
anthropology,' an extension of my concern with the systems
of meaning, beliefs, values, world views, forms of feeling,
styles of thought, in terms of which particular peoples
construct their existence."
Dr. Geertz began his academic career as a Research Assistant
(1952-56) and a Research Associate (1957-58) in the Center
for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and also served as an Instructor in Social
Relations and as a Research Associate in Harvard
University's Laboratory of Social Relations (1956-57). In
1958-59, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.

>From 1958 to 1960, he was Assistant Professor of
Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley,
after which time he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology
at the University of Chicago (1960-61), and was subsequently
promoted to Associate Professor (1962), and then Professor
(1964). He was later named Divisional Professor in the
Social Sciences (1968-70). At Chicago, Dr. Geertz was a
member of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New
Nations (1962-70), its Executive Secretary (1964-66), and
its Chairman (1968-70). Geertz was also a Senior Research
Career Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health
from 1964 to 1970.

Consultant to the Ford Foundation on Social Sciences in
Indonesia in 1971, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford
University from 1978 to 1979, and held an appointment as
Visiting Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Department
of History at Princeton University from 1975 to 2000.

In 1970, Geertz joined the permanent faculty of the School
of Social Science at the Institute, and was named Harold F.
Linder Professor of Social Science in 1982. He transferred
to emeritus status in 2000.

Dr. Geertz is the author and co-author of important volumes
that have been translated into over twenty languages and is
the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and scholarly
awards. He received the National Book Critics Circle Prize
in Criticism in 1988 for Works and Lives: The Anthropologist
as Author, and was also the recipient of the Fukuoka Asian
Cultural Prize (1992) and the Bintang Jasa Utama (First
Class Merit Star) of the Republic of Indonesia (2002). Over
the years, he received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton universities, from Antioch, Swarthmore, and
Williams colleges, and from the University of Cambridge,
among other institutions.

He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American
Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and
the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a
corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; and an Honorary
Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland. Dr. Geertz was a frequent contributor
to The New York Review of Books.

Dr. Geertz's fieldwork was concentrated in Java, Bali,
Celebes, and Sumatra in Indonesia, as well as in Morocco. In
May 2000, he was honored at "Cultures, Sociétiés, et
Territoires: Hommage à Clifford Geertz," a conference held
in Sefrou, Morocco, where he had conducted work for a
decade. It was particularly gratifying, commented Geertz,
because "Anthropologists are not always welcomed back to the
site of their field studies."
Dr. Geertz is survived by his wife, Dr. Karen Blu, an
anthropologist retired from the Department of Anthropology
at New York University; his children, Erika Reading of
Princeton, NJ, and Benjamin Geertz of Kirkland, WA; and his
grandchildren, Andrea and Elena Martinez of Princeton, NJ.
He is also survived by his former wife, Dr. Hildred Geertz,
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at
Princeton University.

A Memorial will be held at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Details will be announced at a future date.

------------------------------------------
Joyo Indonesia News Service
------------------------------------------