Clifford Geertz - Geertzian Theory

Geertzian Theory

At the University of Chicago, Geertz became a champion of symbolic anthropology, a framework which gives prime attention to the role of symbols in constructing public meaning. In his seminal work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Geertz outlined culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (1973:89).

Geertz believed that the role of anthropologists was to try to interpret the guiding symbols of each culture. He was considered quite innovative in this regard, as he was one of the earliest scholars to see that the insights provided by common language, philosophy and literary analysis could have major explanatory force in the social sciences.

Geertz aims to provide social science with and understanding and appreciation of “thick description.” While Geertz applies thick description in the direction of anthropological study (specifically his own ‘interpretive anthropology’), his theory that asserts the essentially semiotic nature of culture has implications for the social sciences in general and, in our case, political science (and comparative political science) in particular.

Essentially, there is no standard and it will eventually be “necessary to choose.” Geertz himself argues for a “semiotic” concept of culture: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun," he states “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical.”

Geertz states that we must proceed interpreting a culture’s web of symbols by isolating its elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements and characterize the whole system in some general way—according to the core symbols around which it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological principles upon which it is based. Culture is public because “meaning is,” and systems of meanings are what produce culture, they are the collective property of a particular people. We cannot discover the culture’s import or understand its systems of meaning when, as Wittgenstein noted, “We cannot find our feet with them.” Geertz wants society to appreciate that social actions are larger than themselves; they speak to larger issues, and vice versa, because “they are made to.”

“It is not against a body of uninterrupted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.”

In seeking to converse with subjects in foreign cultures and gain access to their conceptual world; this is the goal of the semiotic approach to culture. Cultural theory is not its own master. At the end of the day, we must appreciate that the generality “thick description” contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstraction. The essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them.

His often cited essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is the classic example of thick description, a concept adopted from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Thick description is an anthropological method of explaining with as much detail as possible the reason behind human actions. For example one could say a man winked. However, this would not explain why he winked: was he flirting, did he have something in his eye, was he trying to communicate irony in what he had just said...these are the questions an anthropologist must answer.

During Geertz's long career, he worked through a variety of theoretical phases and schools of thought. In 1957, Geertz wrote that "The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs...", a statement which reflects an early leaning toward functionalism. Accordingly, in his early career Geertz considered anthropology a kind of science. This is in contrast to Geertz's later enthusiasm for an interpretive approach. In his later work, Geertz spoke particularly of the difficulties that ethnographic research has in getting at an adequate description of objective reality. Geertz attributed this to the fact that people tell ethnographers what they believe to be their own motivations, but those people's actions then often seem to contradict their statements to the researcher. Geertz believed this effect occurred partly due to the problems that people have in verbalizing aspects of their life that they usually take for granted, partly due to how ethnographers structure their research approaches and frameworks, and partly due to the inherent complexity of the social order.