Clifford Geertz, who died last month at the age of 80 of complications following heart surgery, was perhaps the most celebrated anthropologist of a distinguished generation that included Ernest Gellner and Mary Douglas. However, Gellner and Douglas always regarded themselves as social scientists. Geertz switched sides and became the prophet of a radical new humanism.
Geertz began his professional career as a graduate student in an interdisciplinary social science programme that Talcott Parsons had set up at Harvard. Parsons elected anthropology to be the handmaiden of sociology. It should treat the collective ideas and values that Parsons called culture. After all, people often behaved irrationally, to the despair of economists and policymakers. The job of anthropologists was to decode their symbolic statements, find out what they believed and so explain why they made irrational choices. This was particularly relevant to the study of the new states that emerged after the second world war, where culture seemed to be the main roadblock to rational political modernisation and economic "take-off" (a rocket-ship metaphor much in vogue at the time).
This optimism was soon dispelled. Sukarno's Indonesia was plunged into a chaotic and violent revolution. Geertz moved on. Shortly before the bloody massacres of 1965 in Java, he shifted his field site to Morocco. He now undertook a comparative study of Islam in Morocco and Indonesia—the antipodes of the Muslim world—which he saw as undergoing, in different ways, another necessary cultural change, as they came to terms with the inevitable process of secularisation. Events, once again, were soon to put this conclusion in doubt. (Ernest Gellner, studying Islam in Morocco at much the same time, foresaw the development of fundamentalism as a reaction to forces of modernisation.)
In 1970 Geertz moved from the University of Chicago to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and here he issued a manifesto for a new anthropology, a collection of essays entitled The Interpretation of Cultures. Anthropologists were not the partners of sociologists after all. Their business was not with action but with culture, a stand-alone system of meanings expressed in symbols. From the early 1970s, Geertz's essays—increasingly literary, even flowery—explored the symbolic meanings of exotic and often marginal activities, from pre-colonial ceremonies in Bali to cock-fights in Java.
This new programme had a huge impact. In his memoir After the Fact, Geertz claimed that "the move toward meaning" had "proved a proper revolution: sweeping, durable, turbulent and consequential." Sweeping it certainly was, at least in the US, and not only in anthropology. Geertz's models were now drawn from literary theory and philosophy, and he was read more and more by scholars in the humanities. According to Robert Darnton, Geertz's anthropology "offered the historian what the study of mentalité has failed to provide, a coherent conception of culture."
Within anthropology Geertz became a hugely influential figure, but there were two broad critical responses to his intellectual trajectory. European scholars typically regretted that he had abandoned his earlier concern with social history, economic change and political revolution. The other reaction, which worried him more, was that of a younger, more radical generation of American anthropologists, who believed that his ambitious project was fatally flawed, because there could be no authoritative translation of meanings between two cultures. Geertz flirted with a radical relativism for a while, but towards the end of his life he seemed to be moving back to a more robust view of the complexity, and objective reality, of the social order, and to a recognition that the choices people make may have little to do with what they tell ethnographers that they believe.
