Anthropology, History, and Clifford Geertz

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. Over his distinguished career, thirty-sixyears of which were spent on thefaculty of the InstituteforAdvancedStudy, he made majorcontributions to socialand cultural theory. Shortly afterhis death in October, we askedseveral historians to comment briefly on Geert^s influence on historicalinquiry. Anthropology, History, and Clifford Geertz Robert Darnton Clifford Geertz belonged to that rare species known as maîtres àpenser. 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. 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. Fired by Geertz's notions of symbolism and cultural systems , they attempted to do ethnography in the archives. Yet Geertz never tried to found a school. If he could have been anyone in the 20th century, he once told me, he would have chosenJames Joyce. Indeed, Geertz's literary flare got in the way of systematizing. The long, baroque sentences with their parentheses, piled-up adjectives, and convoluted syntax defied imitation . Despite his deep-dyed Weberianism and the years spent under Talcott Parsons, Geertz had no interest in combining propositions into a systematic structure. He cobbled together arguments from different , disparate sources. He was a bricoleur. Not that he lacked rigor when it came to confronting theoretical issues. His harshest comment after sitting out a disappointing paper at the Institute for Advanced Study was usually "underconceptualized ." But he did not invent many concepts of his own. He borrowed them from linguistic philosophy , semiotics, Weberian sociology, and any other field likely to be helpful for the task at hand. Then he set to work, using the tools most suited for prying open a foreign way of thinking and exploring an alien mental world. This approach lent itself to what emerged in France during die 1960s as "the history of mentalities ." It appealed to anyone who felt inspired by the work of Robert Mandrou, Georges Duby, Philippe Aries, and Michel Vovelle. It also provided something that they lacked: a concept of symbolism grounded in semiotics and an understanding of culture as a system of meaning. The old seminars on the history of mentalities in the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales have now been replaced Clifford Geertz. Photo by Randall Hagadorn. Courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study. by seminars on history and anthropology. Geertz did more than anyone to promote the mutual reinforcement of history and anthropology, but he did not initiate it. It developed over many years from the convergence of "elective affinities," as he might have put it—that is, a growing awareness of mutual interest in common problems. Anthropologists like Bernard Cohn and historians like Keith Thomas had crossed over the boundaries of their disciplines long before the publication of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), the book by Geertz that had the most influence on historical writing. True, Geertz had demonstrated the possibilities of ethnographic history much earlier in The Social History of an Indonesian Town (1 965), but that book probably was the least read of all his works. Although a great deal of historical reflection went into Islam Observed : Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968), it was primarily an essay in the comparative sociology of religion inspired by the example of Max Weber. And Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth -Century Bali (1980), the most historical of his books, aroused the most skepticism among historians . What then was Geertz's peculiar contribution to anthropological history and historical anthropology? Most historians probably would reply, "thick description ." The concept fits Geertz's way of working , but it has been badly misunderstood. When historians try to apply it in their own work, they sometimes choose a subject that seems suitably anthropological —rites of passage, witchcraft, religious rituals, charivaris—and then pile on die descriptive details. As an ethnographer, Geertz certainly believed in empirical rigor, but as a theorist, he insisted on the...