Abstract
What did Clifford Geertz mean? What was his significance? What did he signify, crystallize, and make possible? These are contentious questions, have been, and will continue to be. There have been decades already of fighting about “Geertz.” Such interpretive disputes are the lot of every exemplary figure. Interpreting is a way of positioning, of saying who we are, in relationship to an intellectual icon, placing ourselves alongside him, against him, or somewhere in between. Lack of agreement, not only about propositions but also about presuppositions, is the reality of intellectual life in the human sciences.
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Notes
Geertz, C. 1983. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, p. 5.
For an account of Richard Rorty’s work that interweaves the philosophical with the intellectual-biographical in an exemplary way, see Gross, N. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, p. 9.
For this perspective on Dilthey, and an earlier discussion of his relationship to Geertz, see Jeffrey C. Alexander 1987. Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press.
Geertz, C. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 140.
Peter Brooks. 1976. The Melodramatic Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ibid.; in my own recent work on “iconic consciousness,” I conceptualize this as a relationship between surface form and moral depth; Alexander. 2008. “Iconic Consciousness in Art and Life: Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti ‘s Standing Woman,’” Theory, Culture, and Society 2008: 25 (5): 1–19 and “Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning” Thesis Eleven 2010: 103 (1): 10–25.
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© 2011 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Philip Smith, and Matthew Norton
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Alexander, J.C. (2011). Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program: The Human Sciences and Cultural Sociology. In: Alexander, J.C., Smith, P., Norton, M. (eds) Interpreting Clifford Geertz. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118980_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118980_6
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