23 Facts About Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz served in the US Navy in World War II from 1943 to 1945.

Clifford Geertz received a bachelor of arts in philosophy from Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1950 and a doctor of philosophy in anthropology from Harvard University in 1956.

Clifford Geertz worked with Parsons, as well as Clyde Kluckhohn, and was trained as an anthropologist.

Clifford Geertz conducted his first long-term fieldwork together with his wife, Hildred, in Java, Indonesia, a project funded by the Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Clifford Geertz studied the religious life of a small, upcountry town for two-and-a-half years, living with a railroad laborer's family.

Clifford Geertz was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Clifford Geertz taught or held fellowships at a number of schools before joining the faculty of the anthropology department at the University of Chicago in 1960.

In 1970, Clifford Geertz left Chicago to become professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1970 to 2000, then as emeritus professor.

In 1973, he published The Interpretation of Cultures, which collected essays Clifford Geertz had published throughout the 1960s.

Clifford Geertz produced ethnographic pieces in this period, such as Kinship in Bali, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society and Negara.

Clifford Geertz produced a series of short essays on the stylistics of ethnography in Works and Lives, while other works include the autobiographical After The Fact.

Clifford Geertz conducted extensive ethnographic research in Southeast Asia and North Africa.

Clifford Geertz contributed to social and cultural theory and is still influential in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live their lives.

Clifford Geertz reflected on the basic core notions of anthropology, such as culture and ethnography.

Clifford Geertz died of complications following heart surgery on October 30,2006.

At the time of his death, Clifford Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.

Clifford Geertz's often-cited essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is a classic example of thick description, a concept adopted from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle which comes from ordinary language philosophy.

Many human actions can mean many different things, and Clifford Geertz insisted that the anthropologist needs to be aware of this.

At the University of Chicago, Clifford Geertz became a champion of symbolic anthropology, a framework which gives prime attention to the role of symbols in constructing public meaning.

Clifford Geertz was one of the earliest scholars to see that the insights provided by common language, philosophy and literary analysis could have major explanatory force in the social sciences.

Clifford Geertz produced theory that had implications for other social sciences; for example, Geertz asserted that culture was essentially semiotic in nature, and this theory has implications for comparative political sciences.

Clifford Geertz argues that to interpret a culture's web of symbols, scholars must first isolate its elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements and characterize the whole system in some general way according to the core symbols around which it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological principles upon which it is based.

Clifford Geertz would criticize Geertz for ascribing an authorizing discourse around conversations of comparative religion that, Asad argues, does not really exist.