Clifford Geertz Essay

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Anthropology 101 September 5th, 2012 Anthropologist: Clifford Geertz Clifford Geertz was born on August 23rd in the year of 1926. He grew up in the city of San Francisco, and when he was three years old his parents divorced and was raised by a distant relative in California. Once Geertz turned seventeen he joined the U.S. navy and served from 1943-1945. After World War II, he attended Antioch College where he wanted to major in English and become a writer. Geertz believed that English limited his abilities and instead majored in philosophy. He then attended graduate school at Harvard University and earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Department of Social Relations in 1956. Clifford Geertz was greatly influenced by two thinkers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Max Weber. This led to his theory of understanding of others’ understandings and his methodology examining public meanings, and symbols. Max Weber’s use of culture, religion and ideals to explain modernization was strongly present in Clifford Geertz’s earliest anthropological work such as Agricultural Involution and Peddlers and Princes (Geertz). Both of Geertz work made an effort to examine cultural factors of economic development through an examination of entrepreneurs in two Indonesian towns. He attempted to generalize the cultural factors that explained the conditions before rapid economic development. Ritual and Social Change was also one of Geertz’s first articles, where he argued against a static functionalist approach and a dynamic approach that took into account the symbolic cultural forms as well as social structure (Geertz). By the 1960’s, Geertz theoretical contributions began with his definitions and descriptions of culture. For Geertz, culture was “a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by

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