This remains one of the seminal works in not just Anthropology, but also in the field of social science, written by a brilliant Social Scientist.
When it was first written in 1973, it was not just "leading-edge," but utterly revolutionary. Today however, in the era of full-fledged "cultural and ethnographic relativity," and in the interim, where symbols have earned a more prominent if not wholly respected cross-disciplinary cachet and place in social science scholarship, many of Professor Geertz's seminal ideas now seem strangely "quaint," but have in any case become as much a part of the mainstream as they have become controversial.
For my money, I prefer to judge this brilliant scholarship, on its own merits as well as against the standards of the times in which it emerged. I have yet to read a first chapter in an English book that is as well constructed and as informatively exciting as that in this book. Geertz, in drawing a bright line between what is universal and constant about man -- versus what is local, ever changing, and merely parochial about him -- attempts to answer the question: Just how important are human differences, and especially differences between cultures?
To answer it, the author moves with seamless facility across, between and well beyond the ossified boundaries of "normal" Anthropology, into myriad related and not so related, fields: such as sociology, philosophy, and the philosophy of science, linguistics, psychology and evolutionary biology, among several others. From their intellectual intersection, Geertz builds up a beautiful theory that culture is a system of shared symbols that allows its members to give shape and meaning to their respective experiences. In 1973, making the full connection between the significance of man's ability to weave meaning from webs of symbols and symbolisms, was not fully appreciated by most social scientists, and certainly (and curiously) even less appreciated by most Anthropologists, who arguably were "pulling up the rear" in developing interpretative theories upon which to base their mostly ethnographic practices.
More than anything else, Professor Greetz "changed the game" and arguably brought the field of Anthropology out of the "theoretical backwaters" and "dark ages" into a more updated and respected place in the academic sun. With his philosophy of science and general philosophy bent, he gave the field of Anthropology a new more exciting cachet and a deeper more meaningful theoretical resonance, mandate and motive: If one was to fully understand culture, he had to first be able to unravel, and then decipher the web of intertwined meanings of symbolic actions and interactions: that is to say he had to be able to understand the full meaning of the whole panoply of culturally determined symbols, totems, events, customs, rituals, rites, politics, etc. Even so, there was only a limited amount that an "outsider" could expect to learn, as culture remains mostly an enigmatic "interior" enterprise. At root, studying culture is about trying to formulate a basis upon which groups imagine.
To Geertz, (and this book is full of vivid and penetrating examples), cultural analysis thus reduces to that of sorting out the structures of significance discovered in ethnographic observations. And to him ethnography was about "thick description." (A term he borrowed from Gilbert Rile, but then went on to make famous). "Thick description" is about the nested relationships of interpretations: It is about "the interpretation of interpretation, ... of interpretation," ... ad infinitum.
Most of his critics argued that there was nothing inherently new about this approach. However, the way Geertz proposed to go about it was indeed new: The Anthropologist could no longer remain aloof and stand detached "at a distance" as an innocent observer in the ethnographic experiment. He had to, as it were, "be on the inside looking out," rather than "on the outside looking in." He had to not just "stick his head under the tent," but get inside the "bone marrow" of the culture and become an integral and interactive part of its practices. Doing this, of course raised it's own risks and a host of ancillary problems, which ever since have been the subject of much criticism. The least of these was not suffering the debilitating backlash of what is referred to as the "Heisenberg effect of social measurements." This effect arises whenever one attempts to judge or gauge the meanings of cultural symbolisms by interacting with them. In doing so, one runs the risk of contaminating the very experiment he is attempting to study.
But these concerns aside, Geertz's main contribution was not just in changing the way Anthropology was done, and the effect he had on shaping its theoretical outlook, but he also changed the way cultural habits were viewed, as well as the way theoretical language and concepts were formulated and used to describe them. For once human behavior is seen as symbolic action, questions of whether it is then just patterns of conduct or frames of mind or some mixture of the two, ceases to make sense. One is no longer able to reify culture as for instance, power, or a set of sociological mechanisms, or something from which behavior can be inferred and attributed, but as a context in which "thick description" takes place.
100 stars.