The Interpretation Of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)

The Interpretation Of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)

By: Clifford Geertz  

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Publisher: Basic Books

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
highly recommended - Besides the great price on the book, they kept me informed as to when my book had shipped and the time-line in which I would be seeing it on my doorstep. Great service. I would buy from them anytime.

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
not received - I have not received this book yet despite that Amazon wrote to me that the book was ready to be shipped by April 27. Upon contacting the seller, I was told that she never received the order from Amazon, and in fact, she did not have the book in stock either. The case has been under review by the seller and Amazon since last week. I have been waiting to hear the result. I need this book for my research work and would appreciate your advice on how to get this.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Anthropological classic, though not the easiest reads - I purchased this one as it was a part of course requirements at my major. Geertz' effort in the field of anthropology is undeniable. His contributions in understanding symbols of culture and how important interpreting them in the study of culture is, these things were discussed in my class. So for that, all students of Anthropology, especially Cultural/Social should read this one somewhere along their studies. However, it has to be said that the book is a demanding read. His sentence structures are complex, long-winded and hard-to-tackle academic reading. Parts of the book deal with New Nations (born after WW2) which are not that interesting, and which don't seem all that relevant.

Still, Geertz' examples from the cultures of Bali, Trinidad and Indonesia make the book more understandable and all-in-all a good read.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Thirty-five Years Later, still the Best Book in the Field - 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.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Dated and irritating in places - Geertz has done much to enrich our understanding of societies, and the role ideas and beliefs play within them. But shouldn't an anthopologist, of all people, also be evaluated for how fairly s/he looks at other cultures? And here I think work like some contained in this book is indefensible.

How can essentializing, stereotyping garbage like this be sold by anyone as great anthropology? From the last essay in the collection, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight":

"The villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there."

Easy, pal, didn't occur to you that perhaps they just didn't like you and you?

"To anyone who has been in Bali the identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable"

C'mon, I mean, don't y'all just see how they identify?

"The Balinese revulsion against any behavior regarded as animal-like can hardly be overstressed. Babies are not allowed to crawl for that reason. Incest, though hardly approved, is a much less horrifying crime than bestiality."

Find me a culture to which most of this doesn't apply.

"The Balinese never do anything in a simple way that they can contrive to do in a complicated one."

Is it the great anthropologist speaking here, or my grandma Grace upon returning from her ten-day vacation to the island?

In sum, while I can certainly see why so many find some of Geertz's work valuable and inspiring, I'm shocked that so few are bugged by his patronizing, essentializing, and plain bellicose mode of looking at other cultures in some other. I think this is an important point, that has to be on this page, no matter how many "unhelpful" votes I get.

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