the interpretation of cultures by clifford geertz summary

He cobbled together arguments from different, disparate sources. Despite his deep-dyed Weberianism and the years spent under Talcott Parsons, Geertz had no interest in combining propositions into a systematic structure. The long, baroque sentences with their parentheses, piled-up adjectives, and convoluted syntax defied imitation. Indeed, Geertz's literary flare got in the way of systematizing.

If he could have been anyone in the 20th century, he once told me, he would have chosenJames Joyce. Yet Geertz never tried to found a school. Fired by Geertz's notions of symbolism and cultural systems, they attempted to do ethnography in the archives. Among historians, he left his mark on the generation that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s and who had had their fill of statistical models, functionalist explanations, structures and conjunctures, and dialectical materialism. Like a tiny number of other masters-Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu-he inspired general readers and ordinary scholars operating at lower frequencies throughout the human sciences. Anthropology, History, and Clifford Geertz Robert Darnton Clifford Geertz belonged to that rare species known as maîtres àpenser. Shortly afterhis death in October, we askedseveral historians to comment briefly on Geert^s influence on historicalinquiry. Over his distinguished career, thirty-sixyears of which were spent on thefaculty of the InstituteforAdvancedStudy, he made majorcontributions to socialand cultural theory.

March/April 2007 Historically Speaking 33 The Legacy of Clifford Geertz: A Roundtable CUFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006) WAS ONE OF THE LEADING cultural anthropologists of his time. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The interpretation of cultures by clifford geertz summary