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The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays is a 1973 book by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz.The book is a foundational text in cultural anthropology and represents Geertz’s vision of how culture should be studied and understood.
Clifford James Geertz (/ ɡ ɜːr t s / ⓘ; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States."
Geertz's thick-description approach, along with the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, has become increasingly recognized as a method of symbolic anthropology, [9] [5] enlisted as a working antidote to overly technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures, organizations, and historical settings.
As Geertz explained, "In Bali, to be teased is to be accepted. It was the turning point so far as our relationship to the community was concerned, and we were quite literally 'in.'" [2] As a result, Geertz was able to perform the interviews and observation which make up The Interpretation of Cultures. The couple stayed in the village for a year ...
The purpose of symbolic and interpretive anthropology can be described through a term used often by Geertz that originated from Gilbert Ryle, "Thick Description."By this what is conveyed, is that since culture and behavior can only be studied as a unit, studying culture and its smaller sections of the structure, thick description is what details the interpretation of those belonging to a ...
Clifford Geertz, considered a founding member of postmodernist anthropology, [1] advocates that, “anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot” [2] In the 21st century, some anthropologists use a form of standpoint theory; a person's perspective in writing and cultural interpretation of ...
Influenced by Hermeneutic tradition, Clifford Geertz developed an interpretive anthropology of understanding the meaning of the society. The hermeneutic approach allows Geertz to close the distance between an ethnographer and a given culture similar to reader and text relationship. The reader reads a text and generates his/her own meaning.
The term primordialism is associated with sociologist Edward Shils and anthropologist Clifford Geertz.Shils was the first one who used this term in 1957 to describe the bonds between family members.