Clifford Geertz (August 2nd, 1926 with San Francisco - October 30th, 2006 with Philadelphia) was an American anthropologist. He is presented like a postmodern anthropologist , but he preferred to be presented in the form of a reformer of the American Culturalisme, which it wished to remove from any form of causal explanation, that it is psychological, structural or social.

Life

Clifford Geertz is high in rural environment during the Great Depression. At seventeen years, whereas he is stock-broker with the college, Geertz is engaged in the US Navy. It is demobilized in 1946 and profits from the GI Bill , which gives access to the university. At this time, he does not think of the Anthropologie but dream to be a writer with success.

The chances of the life and the councils advised lead it to Antioch College, in the Ohio, where he studies philosophy, then anthropology with Harvard.

In 1952, it leaves with his Hildred wife, also anthropologist, in Indonesia on its first ground. Over there, he studies the companies Bali is born and Javanese during many stays, until the violence of the political disturbances definitively prevent it from continuing its work.

From 1963 to 1969, it makes several stays with Sefrou, in the Moyen Moroccan Atlas, where it is interested in microcosm of the Souk.

He teaches with Berkeley (California), then with Chicago. He is until his professor emeritus death of School off Social Science which he contributed to found in 1970 with the Institute for Advanced Study of the university of Princeto N.

Work

Geertz notes that anthropology developed around a concept, that of Culture, that it seems necessary to delimit and specify. He considers that this concept is eclectic, and takes the party to choose a semiotic definition of the culture. Putting itself in the wake of max Weber, which according to him sees in the man “an animal suspended in fabrics of significance that it itself wove”, Geertz considers that these are the “fabrics” which constitute the culture. All in all for Geertz, the culture is a system of direction.

Consequently, the analysis of the culture could not be an applied science in the search of laws, but a interpretative science in the search of direction. He thus insists on the need for a dense description of the facts and ground observed, taking account of the point of view of various actors. He underlines also the interpretative nature of any natural description implying a Ethnocentrisme relative but inevitable. For Geertz, the observer (the ethnographer) can only try “to read over the shoulder” of the studied population.

Lastly, the Relativisme of Geertz pushes it to read again the works of some classic authors of anthropology under the angle of their own strategies of writing.

See too

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