Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80

Clifford Geertz, the eminent cultural anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people’s lives, died on Monday in Philadelphia. He was 80 and lived in Princeton, N.J.
The cause was complications after heart surgery, according to an announcement by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had been on the faculty since 1970.
Best known for his theories of culture and cultural interpretation, Mr. Geertz was considered a founder of interpretive, or symbolic, anthropology. But his influence extended far beyond anthropology to many of the social sciences, and his writing had a literary flair that distinguished him from most theorists and ethnographers.
He won a National Book Critics Circle Award for “Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author” (1988), which examined four of his discipline’s forebears: Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Drawing on history, psychology, philosophy and literary criticism, Mr. Geertz analyzed and decoded the meanings of rituals, art, belief systems, institutions and other “symbols,” as he defined them.
“Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning,” he wrote in his 1973 book, “The Interpretation of Cultures” (Basic Books). The Times Literary Supplement called the book one of the 100 most important since World War II.
Mr. Geertz also wrote voluminously on his fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco. In one of his most widely cited essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” included in “The Interpretation of Cultures,” he analyzed the kinship and social ties that are constructed, emphasized and maintained in this form of ritual “deep play” as if they were “an assemblage of texts.”
In his writings, Mr. Geertz drew a careful distinction between culture and social structure, differentiating himself from functionalists like Lévi-Strauss, who believed that rituals, institutions and other aspects of a culture could be best understood by the purposes they serve.
Whereas social structure embraces economic, political and social life and its institutional forms, Mr. Geertz said, culture is “a system of meanings embodied in symbols” that provide people with a frame of reference to understand reality and animate their behavior. Culture, he argued, fills the gap between those things that are biological givens for our species and those we need to function in a complex, interdependent and changing world.
In short, in the Geertz formulation, the question to ask about cultural phenomena is not what they do, but what they mean. Mr. Geertz also argued against the idea that one could define the essence of humanity across all cultures.
“The notion that the essence of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those features of human culture that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive to this people or that is a prejudice that we are not obliged to share,” he wrote in 1966. “It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.”
Mr. Geertz was also deeply concerned about the anthropologist’s role and the discipline’s methodology. Recognizing the colonialist and Western heritage of anthropology, he believed that it was difficult for anyone from one culture to represent another accurately and meaningfully. He noted that anthropologists were hardly passive, objective observers, but rather individual creators of narratives, with their own voice.
Arguing that ethnographic reality does not exist apart from anthropologists’ written versions of it, he said that cultures and peoples should speak for themselves, with anthropologists learning to “converse with them” and interpret them.
In his book “Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology” (Basic Books, 1983), Mr. Geertz also addressed the question of whether someone from one culture can objectively understand another.