Remembering Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz, 1926–2006

In the summer of 2006 a history periodical asked me to write a review essay on a book published in the 1970s that had most influenced my thought in the next decades. I chose Clifford Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures, published in 1973. Cliff was in the hospital as I wrote, and though we all kept hoping he would recover, he died a few days after I finished my account of how much his work had meant to historians. The Interpretation of Cultures came into my life not long after I had begun to work on charivaris and other festivals of inversion. Geertz’s essays widened the canvas beyond those instances to provide a whole way of looking at symbolic behaviour, at all those ‘irrational’ features of early modern life that we historians often ignored or dismissed as ‘superstitious’. Not long after I read the book, I attended a conference on ‘popular religion’, at which participants were noting the elite pretensions of both Catholic and Protestant reformers, but were accepting those reformers’ evaluation of peasant ritual as ‘superstition’. I used Geertz’s ‘Balinese Cockfight’ to show how one could draw meaning from ritual behaviour and to give us ideas on how to approach peasant practices.

My favourite essay in the book, however, was ‘Religion as a Cultural System’. I liked the breadth of its definition of religion as ‘a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations’. The system rested on ‘conceptions of a general order of existence’, which were made compelling to believers by what Geertz called somewhat allusively ‘an aura of factuality’. Especially helpful to historians, who might be struggling with the relation between material structure and superstructure or between economy and ideology or society and culture or other such dualities, Geertz portrayed religion with a double image. Religion is both a symbolic model of ‘reality’, say, of social hierarchy, and a model for reality, shaping the way hierarchies are created. Whenever I gave a graduate seminar on Religion and Society in Sixteenth-Century France, I had the students read ‘Religion as a Cultural System’ the first week. Geertz’s examples were drawn from a different time and place, but they gave us new questions to ask about, say, the performance of the Eucharist and the Lord’s Supper during the transformative times of the sixteenth century.

I finally got the chance to see Clifford Geertz in place when I moved to Princeton in 1978. He had founded the School for Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1973. At the lunch table he was always surrounded by the anthropologists and other scholars he had invited as annual fellows. He would sit there with his hair and beard bushing out around his head, his eyes sometimes seeming to suggest that his thoughts were elsewhere, and then, in his gravelly voice and with an emphatic gesture, make an absolutely incisive interjection into the conversation. One day I had the luck of hearing him talk about his student years after his time in the US Navy: he had gone to Antioch, then a very free-wheeling experimental college, on the advice of his left-wing high-school English teacher; he had majored in philosophy while hoping to become a novelist; and then at the urging of a maverick professor, he had suddenly found himself at Harvard doing graduate work in cultural anthropology. This was my first encounter with Cliff’s way of describing his ‘improvised life’, full of surprises and unexpected turns, which often became windfalls.

Cliff stirred up much cross-disciplinary excitement at the Institute for Advanced Study. He invited younger historians like William Sewell and Quentin Skinner to be part of the School of Social Science for several years. He brought Joan Scott in as a professor in the School, introducing thereby the cultural study of gender into the intellectual life of the Institute and the first woman into its group of permanent members. Shelly and Renato Rosaldo visited from time to time (these were...