national academy of sciences

clifford James Geertz

1926–2006

A Biographical Memoir by
richard a. shweder

Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author

and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Biographical Memoir

Copyright 2010
national academy of sciences
washington, d.c.
Photo by Mary Cross.
 CLIFFORD J AMES G EERTZ
August 23, 1926–October 30, 2006

B Y RICHARD A . SHWEDER 1

c lifford geertz , professor emeritus and the original

founding member of the School of Social Sciences at
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey,
died on October 30, 2006, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as
a result of complications following heart surgery. He became
a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1973.
Clifford Geertz was arguably the most influential American
cultural anthropologist of the second half of the 20th
century. He was an heir to a research tradition in American
cultural anthropology that can be traced to Franz Boas, the
founder of American anthropology, who was arguably the
most influential cultural anthropologist of the first half of
the 20th century. It is a research tradition grounded in long-
term fieldwork in non-Western civilizations and small-scale
societies. It is a research agenda focused on documenting
and understanding diversity in local group-based customary
behaviors and in the beliefs, values, symbols, and meanings
associated with the “native point of view.” Through his writ-
ings on Indonesia, Morocco, religion, ideology, ritual, Islam,
politics, the process of discerning the meanings of symbolic
actions, and cultural pluralism Clifford Geertz gave defini-
tion to the more humanistic side of his discipline’s scholarly
agenda. Indeed, his scholarly life might be viewed as an

 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

evolving interpretive dance with the central epistemological

and moral challenge faced by all cultural anthropologists. As
he put it: how to penetrate a form of life not merely different
from but incompatible with one’s own.
Despite his obvious brilliance, literary skills, and intellec-
tual energy, Clifford Geertz was a private man who became
a public intellectual. He was a frequent contributor to the
New York Review of Books where for three decades he was the
voice of cultural anthropology to a cosmopolitan reader-
ship; his first essay, “Under the Mosquito Net,” published
on September 14, 1967, was not only a critical evaluation of
the astonishing personal diary kept by the near legendary
anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the years 1914-1918
during several years of fieldwork in New Guinea and the
Trobriand Islands but also a glimpse of Cliff’s epistemological
interests, and ironical turn of mind. On the evidence of the
diary Geertz judged the famous Polish ethnographer to be “a
crabbed, self-preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose
fellow-feeling for the people he lived with was limited in the
extreme.” Yet, as he noted, Malinowski was “a great ethnog-
rapher, and, when one considers his place in time, one of
the most accomplished that has yet appeared. That he was
also apparently a disagreeable man thus poses something of
a problem.” How did Malinowski (detached, wishing he was
in England, often contemptuous of the locals) manage to
penetrate and achieve an insider’s understanding of a form
of life so apparently different from his own? “Does one ever
really manage to do it?” and “How should one try to go about
doing it?” were underlying philosophical and methodological
questions for Cliff Geertz throughout his career. Clearly, as
he noted in the first of his more than 20 essays in the New
York Review of Books, you did not have to “go native,” or even
like the natives, to do it.
 clifford james geertz


Clifford Geertz, himself the anthropologist who sought

to understand different others, was an unpretentious, even
somewhat introverted man, who was skittish and halting yet
also riveting and dazzling in interpersonal encounters and
whose company it was great fun to keep. Those who encoun-
tered him with any depth or frequency came to realize that
he abhorred the use of theory-laden abstractions, disliked
labels, and would have liked nothing better than to defy clas-
sification by colleagues and friends. Even as he (like Boas and
Malinowski) became legendary in academic circles, in this
instance for his verbal intelligence as well as for his research
skills, he would surely never have thought of himself as a
conversationalist. Nevertheless his capacity to produce spon-
taneous yet meticulously wrought and penetrating commen-
taries on almost any conceivable cultural theme, high or low,
was widely acknowledged and delighted in throughout his
many academic networks. And then, of course, there was
his dexterity with dethroning witticisms (“relax and enjoy it
ethnocentrism”) and entertaining deposing sallies (“If you
want a good rule-of-thumb generalization from anthropology
I would suggest the following: Any sentence that begins ‘All
societies have…’ is either baseless or banal”) which was in
evidence not only in his writings but also in informal conver-
sation. I suspect he not only relished a good quip but also
believed in the wisdom of a well-timed wise crack.
I recall a crack I once made about his literary style, which
Cliff amusingly and wisely put to good use. On November
23, 2003, on the occasion of the celebration of the 100th
anniversary of the American Anthropological Association, its
Executive Board sponsored a presidential session honoring
“The Work and Life of Clifford Geertz.” Over the course of a
full afternoon Cliff patiently and attentively listened to former
students and colleagues from around the world appraise his
influence and critique his theories; then he rose to offer a
 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

response. Aware that many readers of his work fixate upon

or get sidetracked by his writing style (the labyrinthine clause
embeddings, high-strung hedges, elaborate digressions, and
subtle qualifications, all part of the rhetorical apparatus
expressive of his fondness for the cerebral equivalent of
interpretive dancing, both with and around a topic), I had
playfully likened his writing style to Cyrano de Bergerac’s
nose: “It is conspicuous, it is spectacular, but it is best to
just ignore it, for sake of getting on with a discussion of his
ideas.” Cliff responded,
[L]et me extend this notion that much of the “judgin” that takes place in my
work comes less in terms of explicit verdicts than through passing comments,
insinuate phrases, over-the-shoulder, curve-ball tones of voice and the like,
by taking issue with his recommendation that the best thing to do about my
writing style is to “to ignore it for the sake of getting on with a discussion
of his ideas”…I do this not to defend my style (or styles) as such. Having
toiled over it for so many years, I am quite aware of its deficiencies, and if I
am not there is always a reviewer to remind me…I do it to question whether
style and substance are so easily separable in such matters. Cyrano without
his nose is, after all, not Cyrano, but just another hapless fop orating to a
balcony. It is his style, and the pain that inhabits it, that makes him into a
great romantic figure. I do not claim to be that, at least not in public. But
I do think that much of what I have to say inheres in how I say it, and that
this is especially true when it comes to deciding about issues of judgment.
To make up a Yogi Berra-ism: you can say a lot just by writing.

Cliff fully developed that rhetorical theme (or substantive

theory of rhetoric) in his book Works and Lives: The Anthropolo-
gist as Author (1988). There he analyzed the literary forms
of several anthropological notables (Bronislaw Malinowski,
Ruth Benedict, Claude Levi-Strauss, E. E. Evans-Pritchard
and others), writing stylishly (in defense of style) that ‘’the
way of saying’’ is ‘’the what of saying.’’ As always he built
up his case by example, revealing the literary devices used
by successful anthropological authors to portray or depict
their native realities.
 clifford james geertz


Nevertheless, with due respect for Cliff’s love of over-the-

shoulder commentary and irresolution, fully cognizant of his
desire not to be pinned down, and braving all the objections
I can imagine him launching against any attempt to place
his work and life into academic pigeonholes, I am going to
undertake a discussion of his ideas. I think it is fair to say
that he was a robust cultural pluralist who was suspicious
of all grand and sweeping theories of human behavior. He
believed that cultural diversity was inherent in the human
condition and that the ecumenical or missionary impulse to
value uniformity over variety and to overlook, devalue, or
even eradicate difference was not a good thing. Based on his
reading of history and his ethnographic knowledge of the
current global multicultural scene he viewed it as evident that
cultural differences between groups—sustained by powerful
origin stories, historical narratives, religious symbols, and
imagined primordial ties to one’s own ancestral spirits—are
ever present, robust, and resilient.
He was not inclined to interpret the fact of a “differenced
world” as a measure of the error, ignorance, or confusion
of “others” (the heathens, the savages, the barbarians, the
underdeveloped or primitive peoples of the world). He was
far more inclined to view the diversity of ideas, ideals, and
practices of the many peoples of the world as an expression
of the creative imagination of cultural communities in the
face of the limits of reason and the demands of the human
existential condition for answers to such questions as what is
me and what is not me, what is female and what is male, what
is our way and what is not our way, how should burdens and
benefits be distributed among members of our group, etc. In a
famous Distinguished Lecture, “Anti Anti-Relativism” delivered
in 1983 to the members of the American Anthropological
Association, Cliff offers this quote from Montaigne: “Each
man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice…for
 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

we have no other criterion of reason than the example and

idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.”
Cliff goes on to remark: “That notion, whatever its problems,
and however more delicately expressed, is not likely to go
entirely away unless anthropology does.”
Although Clifford Geertz described himself as an “anti
anti-relativist,” he was not himself a radical relativist, although
despite the care and fastidiousness with which he articulated
his views, he was often mistakenly labeled as such. Quite the
contrary, he believed that “relativism disables judgment,”
just as he believed that “absolutism” removes judgment from
history. He believed in critical judgment, but only when it
did not pretend to be context free. He was however quite
wary of the hazards of parochialism and ethnocentrism, for
as he put it, he did not want our perceptions to be dulled,
our intellects constricted, or our sympathies narrowed “by
the overlearned and overvalued acceptances of our own
society.”
Indeed, when Clifford Geertz took the measure of primor-
dial group identities, anxieties, hostilities, and fears in the
contemporary world, and the associated political disorder, his
assessment of various extant multicultural realties (domestic
and global) was not pretty. His words (and critical judgment)
on this matter are haunting: “The image of a world full of
people so passionately fond of each other’s cultures that
they aspire only to celebrate one another does not seem to
me a clear and present danger,” he wrote. “The image of
one full of people happily apotheosizing their heroes and
diabolizing their enemies alas does.”
He was mindful that we live in an age when political and
marketplace transactions (including competition for jobs,
land, natural resources), both domestic and international,
produce fateful (and sometimes destructive) encounters
between members of ancestrally distinct groups, resulting in
 clifford james geertz


the mutual demonizing of the “other.” “Positioning Muslims

in France, whites in South Africa, Arabs in Israel, or Koreans
in Japan are not altogether the same sort of thing,” he noted,
“but if political theory is going to be of any relevance at all
in the splintered world, it will have to have something cogent
to say about how, in the face of a drive towards a destructive
integrity, such structures can be brought into being, how they
can be sustained, and how they can be made to work.”
These are many well-known facts about Cliff’s career.
His collection of essays Available Light (2000) opens with an
autobiographical address, “Passage and Accident: A Life of
Learning,” delivered to the American Council of Learned
Societies in 1999. The GI bill (which he refers to, with char-
acteristic wit, as the “degreeing of America”) launched him
into academia where, as he puts it, he just kept catching the
right wave. He went from Antioch College (“the reigning
attitude, Jewish, all irony, impatience and auto-critique”), to
the Department of Social Relations at Harvard (“a gathering
of fugitives from traditional departments”), to the University
of Chicago where he became a major voice of the symbolic
or interpretive anthropology movement of the 1960s. For
an instructive collection of his essays in symbolic or inter-
pretive anthropology, which stands as the culmination of
his Chicago era thinking, and where he first made use of
the expression “thick description” with which his style of
ethnographic writing is associated, one need only read his
book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). He intended that
title as an allusion to Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of
Dreams. He later published further essays in interpretative
anthropology under the title Local Knowledge (1983).
In the discourse of symbolic or interpretive anthropology a
symbol is anything—an action, a practice, an object, a pattern
of sounds, a cremation ceremony, the gathering together of
people to share a meal—that is a vehicle of meaning. The
10 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

goal of interpretive analysis is to spell out the implicit or

unstated presuppositions, implications, or “meanings” (the
goals, values, and pictures of the world) that make this or
that action, practice, object, or pattern of sounds intelligible
to members of some culture or interpretive community in
some specified context. “Thick description” is the process
of spelling out the context-dependent meanings of, for
example, a specific action or activity such as the Balinese
cockfight. (One of Cliff’s most famous essays is “Deep Play:
Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” [1971]). In other words, for
Geertz, human beings not only do things with words they
also say things with their actions; and that is what makes the
(particular) lives they led symbolic. His symbolic anthro-
pology is thus about the interpretative analysis of behavior by
reference to ideas or concepts made manifest or expressed
through action.
Always a fugitive from every academic pigeonhole, Cliff
felt most at home during his University of Chicago years in
the interdisciplinary Committee on the Comparative Study
of New Nations, which he helped put on the map during the
1960s. Several of his most seminal papers, including “Religion
as a Cultural System” (1966), “The Impact of the Concept of
Culture on the Concept of Man” (1966), and “The Integra-
tive Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in
the New States” (1963) were written during this time.
The next and final wave he caught was to the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where in 1970
he helped found the School of Social Sciences and became
the cultural anthropologist in residence. During several
productive decades at the institute, he engaged with histo-
rians, philosophers, legal scholars, and literary critics. And
he wrote many influential books, including Islam Observed:
Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968), Negara:
The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. (1980), and Works
 clifford james geertz
11

and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988). He retired as

professor emeritus at the institute in 2000 and remained in
situ until his death.
In a commentary published not long before his death Cliff
gives an account of his life more personal (and more revealing
of his youthful years) than the one in his autobiographical
address to the American Council of Learned Societies. He
portrays his work and life as “a looking for small bits of order
to hang onto in the midst of chaos.” He writes:
So it is hardly to wonder that my work looks like a grasping for patterns in a
swirl of change: I was preadapted. My parents were divorced when I was three,
and I was dispatched (the verb is appropriate) to live alone with an older
woman, a nonrelative, amid the sylvan beauties of the Northern California
countryside (a “nonvillage” of three or four hundred farmers, shopkeep-
ers, and summer visitors) [he is speaking of an area in Marin County] in
the plumb depths of the Great Depression. I was well cared for, and that’s
about it, and I was pretty much left to put my life together (not without real
help from schoolteachers responding to a bright kid, and, later on, the U.S.
Navy, responding to a callow klutz) by myself. Without going on . . . all this
predisposed me to becoming, in both life and work, the seeker after a pat-
tern, however fragmentary, amid a swirl of accident, however pervasive. . .
It has never occurred to me, not really being a deep thinker, just a nervous
one, to try to resolve this “binary.” I have just sought to live with it. Pitched
early into things, I assumed, and I still assume, that what you are supposed
to do is keep going with whatever you can find lying about to keep going
with: to get from yesterday to today without foreclosing tomorrow.

In some of his most well-known work Cliff Geertz searched

for patterns by conducting field work in Indonesia (at sites
in Bali, Java, and Sumatra) and in Morocco. Early in his
career and again during the last decade of his life, he tried
to make sense out of the complex and chaotic relationships
between globalization and the revitalization of local “primor-
dial” identities in a world “growing both more global and
more divided, more thoroughly interconnected and more
intricately partitioned, at the same time.”
12 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

What he accomplished in this regard was concrete and

substantial. He helped us imagine how it is possible for
morally sensitive and intellectually reasonable members of
the divergent cultural lineages in the human family to live
their lives guided by goals, values, and pictures of the world
very different from our own. His writings sought to show
us how it is possible for normal members of other cultural
worlds or nations to live their lives piloted by different
conceptions of the self, of gender, of morality, of emotions,
of religion, of political and legal authority, of property, of
kinship, even different conceptions of time, space, causation,
and the good life.
One of his most provocative (or at least one of his most
controversial) propositions appeared in an essay titled “On
the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” (1975, p.
48), in which he suggested that
the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less
integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of aware-
ness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and
set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and
natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather
peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.

Thirty-five years later the extent to which that conception

of the person is or is not corrigible (and hence is or is not
capable of cross-cultural variation) continues to be debated
in the social science literature.
Clifford Geertz’s version of cultural pluralism was one
in which he sought to understand others as coequal moral
subjects (rather than as defective moral subjects or as mere
objects); and to do so without assuming that if two cultural
traditions are moral equals then their goals, values, pictures
of the world, and ways of life must be uniform or essentially
the same. He sought to do this while fully recognizing there
may be times when tolerance comes to an end. His work thus
 clifford james geertz
13

stands in contrast to those traditions of scholarship that either

view the variety of human societies as a developmental story
about the ultimate universal ascendancy of Western civiliza-
tion or else have little interest in the cultural and historical
variety in the first place, and try instead to induce essential
laws of human nature that hold across all of history and all
known societies.
But Clifford Geertz was not only a robust cultural pluralist.
He was also a political liberal, although a nervous one, who
was aware that a major cause of what he called the “drive
towards a destructive integrity” in the modern world was
the ethno-nationalist impulse to disaggregate or dismantle
multicultural states and resolve them into a world of political
communities in which nation, people, state, and country—
culture and politics—are made to coincide. Exercising his
critical judgment he once described resistance to ethno-
nationalism as a “moral imperative.” Not very far from the
surface of his writings on this subject was his clear and
considered judgment about the worthiness of a distinctively
American political conception of nationality: a conception of
the nation as a “civil political community.” In that concep-
tion all people—regardless of their ethnic, racial, or religious
origins—who are citizens of the state and are willing to live
their lives constrained by a basic set of liberal democratic
principles (what Geertz described as the “law, government
and public comportment”) are part of the nation.
Geertz, however, was acutely aware that critics of polit-
ical liberalism around the world often argue that liberals
(including Geertz himself) are prevented precisely because
of their liberal commitments (for example, to the ideals of
autonomy, equal life chances, and the freedoms of expres-
sion, association, and choice) from celebrating (or from even
tolerating) cultural differences, especially when those cultural
divides or separations are sustained by means of primordial
14 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

ties to ancestral groups. As a robust cultural pluralist and a

dedicated political liberal he found it troubling to see such
critics argue, as he put it in one brief but effective summary
of their views, that political liberals are barred by their own
liberal principles “from recognizing the force and durability of
ties of religion, language, custom, locality, race, and descent
in human affairs, or from regarding the entry of such consid-
erations into civic life as other than pathological—primitive,
backward, regressive, and irrational.”
So he offered up a challenge: Can anthropologists,
political philosophers, and globalization theorists develop a
version of liberalism with both the courage and the capacity
to engage itself with “a differenced world”? And can they
do so with regard to, and respect for, a multicultural world
in which at least some of that diversity has its source in the
primordial ties of individuals to kith and kin and particular
ancestral histories, and not in some original autobiographical
act of free choice or expressive liberty?
Cliff Geertz died before he was able to fully spell out his
own affirmative response to his own questions. Nevertheless,
in some ways his most significant legacy is his invitation to
those of us for whom his voice was resonant to rethink the
implications of political liberalism. It is a summons to search
for a practical philosophical antidote to the “diabolizing”
of others and, thus, to develop a way of thinking about
the reality and organization of ethnic, religious, and racial
differences in the contemporary world which, even though
it might fall short of getting us to actually celebrate diversity,
might at the very least support an attitude of cooperative
mutual sufferance among culturally distinct groups. I have
no doubt that Cliff would critically judge that attitude of
mutual sufferance to be a great achievement.
Clifford Geertz is survived by his wife, Karen Blu, a cultural
anthropologist he married in 1987. He is survived as well
 clifford james geertz
15

by his first wife, Hildred Geertz, (also a well-known anthro-

pologist) who is professor emeritus in the Department of
Anthropology at Princeton University and collaborated with
him in his work on Indonesia; and by two children from his
first marriage, Erika Reading of Princeton, and Benjamin,
of Kirkland, Washington; and two grandchildren.
An engaging autobiographical interview with Clifford
Geertz conducted on May 6, 2004, is available at http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dQDx3axrDs. Clifford Geertz’s
curriculum vitae, including a list of his publications as of
August 2002, is available at http://www.infoamerica.org/
documentos_pdf/geertz02.pdf. For a complete bibliography
together with translations and reprints, see Mörth, I. and G.
Fröhlich, HyperGeertz World Catalogue, http://www.iwp.
uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/sektktf/gg/HyperGeertz.html.
CHRONOLOGY

1926 Born August 23 in San Francisco, California

1950 B.A. in philosophy from Antioch College
1952-1956 Research assistant, Center for International Studies,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1956 Ph.D. in social relations (anthropology) from Harvard
University
1956-1957 Instructor in social relations and research associate in
the Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard
University
1957-1958 Research associate, Center for International Studies,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1958-1959 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford, California
1958-1960 Assistant professor of anthropology, University
of California, Berkeley
1960-1970 Assistant professor of anthropology, University
of Chicago, 1960-1961; Associate professor, 1962-
1964; Professor 1964-1968; Divisional professor in the
social sciences, 1968-1970.
16 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

1962-1970 Member of the Committee for the Comparative

Study of New Nations, University of Chicago, 1962-
1970; Executive Secretary, 1964-1966; Chairman,
1968-1970.
1964-1970 Senior research career fellow, National Institute
of Mental Health
1971 Consultant to the Ford Foundation on social sciences
in Indonesia
1970-2006 Professor of social science, Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, New Jersey (Harold F. Linder
Professor of Social Science, 1982-2000);
Professor emeritus, 2000-2008
1978-1979 Eastman Professor, Oxford University
1975- Visiting lecturer with rank of professor, Department
of History, Princeton University

FIELDWORK

Java, Indonesia 1952-1954; Apr. 1984; Mar.-Aug. 1986. Nov.-Dec.

1999
Bali, Indonesia 1957-1958
Morocco Jun.-Jul. 1963; Jun.-Dec. 1964; Jun. 1965-Sept. 1966; Jun. 1968-
Apr. 1969; Jun.-Jul. 1972; Jun.-Jul. 1976; Nov. 1985-Mar. 1986
Java, Bali, Celebes, Sumatra Apr.-Sept. 1971

HONORARY DEGREES

Honorary Doctor of Law, Harvard University, 1974

Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters: Northern Michigan University,
1975; University of Chicago, 1979; Bates College, 1980; Knox
College (Illinois), 1982; Brandeis University, 1984; Swarthmore
College, 1984; New School for Social Research, 1987; Princeton
University, 1995
Honorary Doctor of Social Science, Yale University, 1987
Honorary Doctor of Letters, Williams College, 1991; University of
Cambridge, 1997; Georgetown University, 1998; Antioch College
1999
 clifford james geertz
17
SCHOLARLY AWARDS

Social Science Prize (Talcott Parsons Prize), American Academy of

Arts and Sciences, 1974
Sorokin Prize, American Sociological Association, 1974
Distinguished Lecturer, American Anthropological Association,
1983
Huxley Memorial Lecturer and Medallist, Royal Anthropological
Institute, 1983
Distinguished Scholar Award, Association for Asian Studies, 1987
National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism, 1988
Horace Mann Distinguished Alumnus Award, Antioch College,
1992
Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prize (Academic, International), 1992

SCHOLARLY MEMBERSHIPS

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1966

Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, 1970
Fellow, American Philosophical Society, 1972
Member, The National Academy of Sciences, 1973
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science,
1980
Corresponding Fellow, The British Academy, 1991
Honorary Fellow, The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain
and Ireland, 1995

LECTURESHIPS

Terry Lecturer, Yale University, 1967

Harry F. Camp Memorial Lecturer, Stanford University, 1972
John Dewey Lecturer, Antioch College, 1973
Lionel Trilling Lecturer, Columbia University, 1977
Storrs Lecturer, Yale Law School, 1981
Bicentennial Lecturer, American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1981
Harry F. Camp Memorial Lecturer, Stanford University, 1983
Obert C. Tanner Lecturer, University of Michigan, 1985
Lindesmith Lecturer, Carleton College, 1990
Hitchcock Lecturer, University of California, 1990
Harvard-Jerusalem Lecturer, 1990
18 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

Hardy Lecturer, Hartwick College, 1992

Fukuoka Five-Year Anniversary Lecturer, Tokyo and Fukuoka, 1995
Lecturer in Modern Philosophy, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom
Menschen, Vienna, 1995
William James Lecturer, Harvard Divinity School, 1998
Wells Lecturer, University of Indiana, 1998
Charles Homer Haskins Lecturer, American Council of Learned
Societies, 1999
Master’s Seminar, University of Konstanz, 2000
Sabbagh Lecturer, University of Arizona, 2001

OTHER HONORS

Council of Scholars, Library of Congress, 1982-1993

Fellow, Intellectual Interchange Program, Japan Society, 1984
Visiting Fellow, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National
University, 1987
Rector’s Visitor, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany, 1993
Visiting Professor, European University Institute, Florence, Italy,
1994
Visiting Scholar, L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales
(EHESS), Paris, 1994
Visiting Scholar, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and
the Humanities, 1998
 clifford james geertz
19

SELECTED B I B LIO G RA P HY

1956
Capital-intensive agriculture in peasant society: A case study. Soc.
Res. winter, pp. 433-449.
Religious belief and economic behavior in a central Javanese town:
Some preliminary considerations. Econ. Dev. Cult. Change 2:134-
158.

1957
Ritual and social change: A Javanese example. Am. Anthropol. 59:32-
54.

1958
Ethos, world view and the analysis of sacred symbols. Antioch Rev.
winter, pp. 421-437.

1959
Form and variation in Balinese village structure. Am. Anthropol.
61:991-1012.

1960
The Javanese kijaji: The changing role of a cultural broker. Comp.
Stud. Soc. Hist. 2:228-249.
The Religion of Java, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
1961
Studies in peasant life: Community and society. In Biennial Review of
Anthropology, ed. B. J. Siegel, pp. 1-41. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.

1962
Social change and economic modernization in two Indonesian towns:
A case in point. In On the Theory of Social Change, ed. E. Hagen,
pp. 385-410. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey.
The growth of culture and the evolution of mind. In Theories of the
Mind, ed. J. Sher, pp. 713-740: New York: Free Press.
The rotating credit association: A ‘middle rung’ in development.
Econ. Dev. Cult. Change 10:241-263.
20 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

1963
The integrative revolution: Primordial sentiments and civil politics
in the new states. In Old Societies and New States, ed. C. Geertz, pp.
105-517. New York: Free Press.
The socio-cultural context of policy in Southeast Asia. In Southeast
Asia, Problems of Policy, ed. W. Henderson, pp. 54-70. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Ed. Old Societies and New States. New York: Free Press.
Agricultural Involution, the Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Peddlers and Princes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1964
Ideology as a cultural system. In Ideology and Discontent, ed. D. Apter,
pp. 47-76. New York: Free Press.
With H. Geertz. Teknonymy in Bali: Parenthood, age-grading and
genealogical amnesia, J. R. Anthropol. Inst. 94(pt 2):94-108.

1965
The Social History of an Indonesian Town. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.

1966
Modernization in a Muslim society: The Indonesian case. In Religion
and Progress in Modern Asia, ed. R. N. Bellah, pp. 93-108. New York:
Free Press.
Religion as a cultural system. In Anthropological Approaches to the Study
of Religion, ed. M. Banton, pp. 1-46. London: Tavistock.
The impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man. In
New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. J. Platt, pp. 93-118. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Person, Time and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis. Yale
Southeast Asia Program Cultural Report Series No. 14.

1967
The cerebral savage: The structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-
Strauss. Encounter 28(4):25-32.
 clifford james geertz
21

1968
Thinking as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of anthropological field
work in the new states. Antioch Rev. 27:134-159.
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. New
Haven: Yale University Press.

1969
Myrdal’s mythology. Encounter, Jul., pp. 26-34.

1971
After the revolution: The fate of nationalism in the new states. In
Stability and Social Change, eds. A. Inkeles and B. Barber, pp. 357-
376. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Afterword: The politics of meaning. In Culture and Politics in Indonesia,
ed. C. Holt, pp. 319-336. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight. Daedalus, winter, pp.
1-38.
Religious change and social order in Suharto’s Indonesia. Asia
27:62-84.

1973
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

1974
Ed. Myth, Symbol and Culture. New York: Norton.

1975
Common sense as a cultural system. Antioch Rev. 33:47-53.
On the nature of anthropological understanding. Am. Sci. 63:47-
53.
With H. Geertz. Kinship in Bali. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

1976
Art as a cultural system. MLN 91:1473-1499.
22 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

1977
Centers, kings and charisma: Reflections on the symbolics of power.
In Culture and Its Creators, eds. J. Ben-David and T. N. Clark, pp.
150-171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Found in translation: On the social history of the moral imagination.
Georgia Rev. 21:787-810.

1979
With H. Geertz and L. Rosen. Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society.
New York: Cambridge University Press.

1980
Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. Am. Scholar,
49(2):165-179.
Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Princeton: Princ-
eton University Press.

1982
The way we think now: Toward an ethnography of modern thought.
Bull. Am. Acad. Arts Sci. 35(5):14-34.

1983
Bali, interprétation d’une culture. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York:
Basic Books.

1984
Anti anti-relativism. Am. Anthropol. 86(2):263-28.
Culture and social change: The Indonesian case. Man 19:511-532.

1986
The uses of diversity. Mich. Q. Rev. 25(1):105-123.

1988
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

1990
History and anthropology. New Literary Hist. 21:321-335.
 clifford james geertz
23

1995
After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.

1997
Cultural tourism: Tradition, identity and heritage construction.
In Tourism and Heritage Management, ed. W. Nuryanti, pp. 14-24.
Yogyakarta, Indonesia: Gadjah Mada University Press.
The legacy of Thomas Kuhn: The right text at the right time. Common
Knowl. 6(1):1-5.
What is a country if it is not a nation? Brown J. World Affairs 4(2):235-
247.

1998
The world in pieces. FOCAAL no. 32, pp. 91-117.

1999
A life of learning. American Council of Learned Societies Occasional
Paper No. 45. ACLS Publications.
“The Pinch of Destiny”: Religion as experience, meaning, identity,
power. Raritan, winter, pp. 1-19.

2000
Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press.

2002
Inconstant Profession, The Anthropological Life in Interesting Times,”
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 31:1-19.
The Politics of Culture, Asian Identities in a Splintered World (Japanese).
Misuzu Shobo.

2004
What is a state if it is not a sovereign: Reflections on politics in
complicated places. Curr. Anthropol. 45:577-593.
2005
Commentary. In Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues, eds. R. A. Shweder
and B. Good. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
24 B IO G RA P HICAL MEMOIRS

Notes

1. This biographical memoir selectively expands upon, revisits and

recapitulates themes, memories and descriptions of the life and
work of Cliff Geertz that have appeared in two other memorial
essays, one titled “The Resolute Irresolution of Clifford Geertz”
written for the journal of Common Knowledge (2007) and the other
prepared for the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
(2010).