[Kabar-indonesia] NYT: Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80

[Joyo at aol.com]

The New York Times
November 1, 2006

Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80

By ANDREW L. YARROW

Clifford Geertz, the eminent cultural anthropologist whose
work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give
meaning and order to people's lives, died on Monday in
Philadelphia. He was 80 and lived in Princeton, N.J.

The cause was complications after heart surgery, according
to an announcement by the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, where he had been on the faculty since 1970.

Best known for his theories of culture and cultural
interpretation, Mr. Geertz was considered a founder of
interpretive, or symbolic, anthropology. But his influence
extended far beyond anthropology to many of the social
sciences, and his writing had a literary flair that
distinguished him from most theorists and ethnographers.

He won a National Book Critics Circle Award for ''Works and
Lives: The Anthropologist as Author'' (1988), which examined
four of his discipline's forebears: Bronislaw Malinowski,
Ruth Benedict, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Claude Levi-
Strauss.

Drawing on history, psychology, philosophy and literary
criticism, Mr. Geertz analyzed and decoded the meanings of
rituals, art, belief systems, institutions and other
''symbols,'' as he defined them.

''Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended
in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture
to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not
an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive
one in search of meaning,'' he wrote in his 1973 book, ''The
Interpretation of Cultures'' (Basic Books). The Times
Literary Supplement called the book one of the 100 most
important since World War II.

Mr. Geertz also wrote voluminously on his fieldwork in
Indonesia and Morocco. In one of his most widely cited
essays, ''Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,''
included in ''The Interpretation of Cultures,'' he analyzed
the kinship and social ties that are constructed, emphasized
and maintained in this form of ritual ''deep play'' as if
they were ''an assemblage of texts.''

In his writings, Mr. Geertz drew a careful distinction
between culture and social structure, differentiating
himself from functionalists like Levi-Strauss, who believed
that rituals, institutions and other aspects of a culture
could be best understood by the purposes they serve.

Whereas social structure embraces economic, political and
social life and its institutional forms, Mr. Geertz said,
culture is ''a system of meanings embodied in symbols'' that
provide people with a frame of reference to understand
reality and animate their behavior. Culture, he argued,
fills the gap between those things that are biological
givens for our species and those we need to function in a
complex, interdependent and changing world.

In short, in the Geertz formulation, the question to ask
about cultural phenomena is not what they do, but what they
mean. Mr. Geertz also argued against the idea that one could
define the essence of humanity across all cultures.

''The notion that the essence of what it means to be human
is most clearly revealed in those features of human culture
that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive
to this people or that is a prejudice that we are not
obliged to share,'' he wrote in 1966. ''It may be in the
cultural particularities of people -- in their oddities --
that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is
to be generically human are to be found.''

Mr. Geertz was also deeply concerned about the
anthropologist's role and the discipline's methodology.
Recognizing the colonialist and Western heritage of
anthropology, he believed that it was difficult for anyone
from one culture to represent another accurately and
meaningfully. He noted that anthropologists were hardly
passive, objective observers, but rather individual creators
of narratives, with their own voice.

Arguing that ethnographic reality does not exist apart from
anthropologists' written versions of it, he said that
cultures and peoples should speak for themselves, with
anthropologists learning to ''converse with them'' and
interpret them.

In his book ''Local Knowledge: Further Essays in
Interpretive Anthropology'' (Basic Books, 1983), Mr. Geertz
also addressed the question of whether someone from one
culture can objectively understand another.

For him, the anthropologist's task is to use what he called
thick description to interpret symbols by observing them in
use. Therefore the anthropologist must be both empirically
rigorous and a savvy interpreter, akin to a psychoanalyst.
In 1972 he wrote that ''cultural analysis is (or should be)
guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses and drawing
explanatory conclusions from the better guesses.''

Mr. Geertz's elaborate theorizing and his later doubts about
the limits of anthropological knowledge left some scholars
nonplussed. As Jonathan Benthall, writing in The New
Statesman in 1995, said: ''He disappoints some colleagues
because he comes up with no overarching theories.''

Clifford Geertz was born on Aug. 23, 1926, in San Francisco,
the son of Clifford and Lois Geertz. During World War II, he
served in the Navy.

He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1950 from
Antioch College, where a professor urged him to pursue his
interests in values by studying anthropology. He went on to
the social relations department at Harvard, where he studied
with the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn and the sociologist
Talcott Parsons, receiving his Ph.D. in 1956.

Around this time, he did the first of a half dozen fieldwork
stints in Indonesia, spending 1952 to 1954 in the central
Javanese village of Pare. His early work on Indonesia
combined aspects of more conventional ethnography and
history with concerns about economic and political
development in the wake of decolonization.

''The Religion of Java'' (1960), his first major work, is an
ethnographic description of Javanese religion.
''Agricultural Involution'' (1963) takes a big-picture view
of modernization and economic development in the wake of
Indonesian independence, while ''Peddlers and Princes''
(1963) focuses on development from the more microscopic
level of the towns of Modjokuto in Java and Tabanan in Bali.
A century of social development in Modjokuto is the subject
of ''The Social History of an Indonesian Town'' (1965).

''Kinship in Bali'' (1975), written with his first wife, the
anthropologist Hildred Storey, posited ''an underlying order
in Balinese kinship practices'' in the cultural realm of
symbols, patterns and ideas, despite differences in
practices, or social structure, in different parts of the
island.

''Negara: The Theater State in 19th Century Bali'' (1981)
examined the nature of royal families in tiny pre-colonial
south Balinese kingdoms, while challenging the ''power-
centered tradition of political theory from Machiavelli and
Hobbes to Marx.

Mr. Geertz's marriage to Ms. Storey, who accompanied him on
some of his early fieldwork, ended in divorce in 1982. She
is a professor emeritus in the department of anthropology at
Princeton. He is survived by his wife, Karen Blu, an
anthropologist whom he married in 1987; his children from
his first marriage, Erika Reading of Princeton, and
Benjamin, of Kirkland, Wash.; and two grandchildren.

After beginning his academic career as a research associate
and instructor at Harvard, Mr. Geertz spent two years in
California. From 1958 to 1959, he was a fellow at the Center
for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo
Alto; he was later an assistant professor of anthropology at
the University of California, Berkeley. From 1960 until
1970, Mr. Geertz taught at the University of Chicago,
becoming a full professor in 1964. He joined the Institute
for Advanced Study in 1970 as its first Professor of the
Social Sciences and from 1978 to '79 taught at Oxford
University.

Because of political turmoil in Indonesia, Mr. Geertz later
turned his attention to Morocco, where he began doing
fieldwork in the ancient village of Sefrou in 1963,
returning five more times over the course of his career.

Profoundly influenced by his fieldwork there, he honed his
comparative and historical approach in ''Islam Observed''
(1968), which the anthropologist Edmund Leach praised as ''a
highly insightful comparison between Islam as interpreted by
Indonesians and Islam interpreted by Moroccans.''

By the end of his career, Mr. Geertz had grown discouraged
about the ability of social science to generalize or develop
sweeping theories, concluding that circumstances are too
different among cultures, across time, and within societies.
At the same time, he was heartened by the what he called the
deprovincialization of anthropology, as the profession came
to embrace ever more Asian, Middle Eastern and other non-
Western scholars.

In his 1995 memoir, ''After the Fact: Two Countries, Four
Decades, One Anthropologist,'' Mr. Geertz eloquently
meditated on his field work and academic career, concluding
that anthropology is ''an excellent way, interesting,
dismaying, useful and amusing, to expend a life.''

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