Journal ArticleDOI
Clifford Geertz, intellectual autonomy, and interpretive social science
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
The authors argue that there is a common thread in Geertz's early work and that it addressed the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s.Abstract:
Clifford Geertz was a key protagonist in the development of “interpretive social science,” but much of our understanding of his position as an intellectual neglects the crucial years before the publication of The Interpretation of Cultures. In this article, I argue that there is a common thread in Geertz’s early work and that it addressed, quite sophisticatedly, the reworking of the concept of cultural system, which he wrote on from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. This research program was first developed in the context of the “basic social science” that characterized Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, and it had the support of key figures in that network. Geertz’s position in that intellectual debate was as a contributor to the development of a theory of culture that could address issues left unsolved by structural-functionalism and action theory. In that process, Geertz gradually developed a more interpretivist reading of the cultural system, while maintaining the support of his original network. The article offers some conclusions about the role of support within attention spaces in cases in which emergent intellectual positions can lead to the definition of new research programs.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Grudging Modernizer: A Trip to the Middle East and Cold War Social Science
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used the episode of the 1959 Middle East scholarly trip of a Harvard sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, to highlight the complexity and the ambivalence of individual trajectories, as well as the adumbrations of critical ideas and themes in the work of an intellectual who was a recognized, if peripheral, member of some of the most influential Cold War Social Science circles.
Journal ArticleDOI
How Intellectuals Perform: Meaning Making and Community in the Czechoslovak Philosophical Underground
TL;DR: The authors argue that intellectuals' situated performances have both social and cultural impact through disseminating ideas, facilitating the emergence of social ties and the production of new social selves in intellectuals' audiences.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cultural Ritual as Local Activity and Cultural Learning: Society of Padepokan Girijaya Village Girijaya
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors used a descriptive method with a qualitative approach to describe the seren year culture in society and found that the level of cooperation and high cultural traditions is closely related to how much value and trust norms are formed between the parties involved.
References
More filters
Book
The Interpretation of Cultures
Richard Fenn,Clifford Geertz +1 more
TL;DR: The INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES CLIFFORD GEERTZ Books files are available at the online library of the University of Southern California as mentioned in this paper, where they can be used to find any kind of Books for reading.
Book
The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays
TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of the concept of culture on the concepts of man and the evolution of mind in Bali has been discussed in the context of an interpretive theory of culture.
Book
The Social System
TL;DR: In the history of sociological theory, Talcott Parsons holds a very special place. as discussed by the authors presents a major scientific and intellectual advance towards the theory of action first outlined in his earlier work.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Social System.
Ellsworth Faris,Talcott Parsons +1 more
TL;DR: In the history of sociological theory, Talcott Parsons holds a very special place. as mentioned in this paper presents a major scientific and intellectual advance towards the theory of action first outlined in his earlier work.
Book
Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology
TL;DR: In this paper, Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought, Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination, and From the Natives Point of View: on the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.