[Kabar-indonesia] WP: Clifford Geertz; Altered Foundation of Anthropology

[Joyo at aol.com]

The Washington Post
November 2, 2006

Clifford Geertz; Altered Foundation of Anthropology

Matt Schudel, Washington Post Staff Writer

Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist whose imaginative studies
of cultural groups from other countries changed the
intellectual underpinnings of anthropology and other social
sciences, died Oct. 30 at the Hospital of the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from complications of heart
surgery. He was 80.

Since 1970, he had been a resident scholar at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

With early ambitions of being a novelist, Dr. Geertz brought
a distinctly literary sensibility to the study of
anthropology with his sophisticated prose and vivid
descriptions of social customs abroad. While at the
University of Chicago in the 1960s, Dr. Geertz (pronounced
"Gurts") was the leader of the "symbolic anthropology"
movement, which departed from the idea of relying on
established, hard-and-fast facts.

He saw anthropology as more of an imaginative undertaking
than a science. All an anthropologist could hope to do, he
believed, was to understand the rituals, myths, language and
art that govern a society's day-to-day actions.

In his most influential book, "The Interpretation of
Cultures" (1973), Dr. Geertz described culture as "a system
of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by
means of which people communicate, perpetuate and develop
their knowledge about and attitudes toward life."

This aesthetic understanding of culture gained currency
across various disciplines, including sociology, political
science, history and literary studies. Dr. Geertz's ornate,
allusive accounts of other cultures came to define a new
field of study called ethnography. He deliberately chose not
to expound grand, universal theories, seeking instead to
find meaning in small-scale observations of simple human
interaction -- what he called "local knowledge," which was
the title of one of his 17 books.

Unlike most other anthropologists of his time, Dr. Geertz
did not focus on isolated, culturally primitive groups.
Instead, he studied complex societies, first in Indonesia
and later in Morocco, that had maintained their traditions
for centuries. In his 1968 book, "Islam Observed," he
described the cultural influences of Islam on economics,
shopping, politics and family structures in those cultures.

He might be best known for the essay "Deep Play: Notes on
the Balinese Cockfight," which appeared in "The
Interpretation of Cultures." More than a description of a
cockfight and the betting that accompanied it, "Deep Play"
was a wide-ranging metaphorical interpretation of how the
people of Bali saw themselves in relation to violence,
social status, morality and belief.
"Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of
violence," Dr. Geertz wrote. "The cockfight is the Balinese
reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its force, its
fascination."

Clifford James Geertz was born Aug. 23, 1926, in San
Francisco and served in the Navy during World War II. He
graduated from Antioch College in Ohio with a bachelor's
degree in English in 1950, then went to Harvard University,
where he received a PhD in anthropology in 1956.

After first visiting Indonesia in 1952, he and his wife were
caught on Sumatra during a political uprising in 1958. Sick
with malaria, they fled through a jungle until they were
rescued by paratroopers "dropping soundlessly from the
morning sky," as Dr. Geertz wrote in his autobiographical
"After the Fact" in 1995.

In his early jobs in the 1950s at Harvard and the University
of California at Berkeley, Dr. Geertz began to borrow from
the study of literature, philosophy and history. By the time
he was at the University of Chicago, from 1960 to 1970, he
no longer saw anthropology as an objective, measurable
science. His ideas have been linked to the notion of
cultural relativism, which has become a point of contention
in recent battles over the direction of the nation's
universities.

Other critics took exception to the literary license Dr.
Geertz used in his first-person anthropological studies. As
one opponent wrote, "Cockfights are surely cockfights for
the Balinese -- and not images, fictions, models and
metaphors."

In addition to his influential books, which have been
translated into 21 languages, Dr. Geertz often wrote for the
New York Review of Books and the New Republic. His 1988
book, "Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author," won
first prize in criticism from the National Book Critics
Circle.

His marriage to Hildred Storey ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife of 19 years, Karen Blu of
Princeton; two children from his first marriage, Erika
Reading of Princeton and Benjamin Geertz of Kirkland, Wash.;
and two grandchildren.

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