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35 Counting Clifford Geertz's Influence William H. Sewell, Jr. In the late 1 970s or early 1 980s, when history's cultural turn was getting underway, the influence of Clifford Geertz's work seemed absolutely pervasive. This was particularly true of certain essays in The Interpretation of Cultures, especially "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" and "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture." Yet by the end of the 1 980s cultural historians had found so many other theoretical guides—among others, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Michel de Certeau, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stuart Hall, andJoan Scott— that Geertz's specific influence was becoming harder to discern. When I sat down to write this piece, I found myself wondering whether his influence had actually been confined primarily to a single formative moment around the turn of the 1980s, or whether it had been sustained over the long term. In the end, I decided that the question could not be answered without empirical evidence. Hence I spent a few days in a tedious and rather un-Geertzian task: counting citations to his work in the World of Science's Citation Indexes. The short answer is that his influence on historians has been sustained. The Interpretation of Cultures (published in 1973) is one of the most frequendy cited works in the humanities and social sciences. As of January 2006 it had accumulated 6,524 citations in journals tabulated by the Social Science and Humanities Citation Indexes. (To get a sense of comparison , The Making of the English Working Class has accumulated 2,734 citations since 1 963 and Roll, Jordan , Roll 1,218 since 1974. A moderately successful book like my own Work and Revolution in France has 382 citations.) Historians, according to my count, have cited The Interpretation of Cultures 324 times, accounting for about 5 % of all citations. (This is, of course, a serious undercount of total citation by historians , since it includes only those in scholarly journals , not in books—-a particular problem for a book-based discipline like ours. Total citations by historians might be—I'm guessing—something like three or four times this number.) In any case, historians ' interest in The Interpretation of Cultures shows little sign of fading over time. Citations began at three per year in the 1 970s, rose to eleven per year in both the 1980s and the 1990s, and remain at nine per year so far in the 2000s. It is clear, in addition, that historians have ventured beyond this most famous and influential of Geertz's publications. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali has garnered eighty historians' citations since its publication in 1980, accounting for 17 % of 467 total citations. And Agricultural Involution, Geertz's brilliant analysis of Javanese agrarian and ecological history, has gained seventy citations by historians, out of a total of 744, since its publication in 1 963. Historians' citations of both of these books have once again held up very well over the years. There is no doubt diat Geertz was a major inspiration for historians like myself who were making the cultural turn in the late 1 97Os. But it is a tribute both to his work and to the intellectual seriousness of historians that interest in Geertz has not flagged over time. To judge from the citation figures, his ideas have become part of the permanent intellectual furniture of contemporary historical thought. William H. Sewell, Jr. is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005). ...

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