1. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 29.Google Scholar

2. See, for example, Higham, John and Conkin, Paul, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979)Google Scholar. In his introduction, Higham calls Geertz “virtually the patron saint” of that collection. See also Beeman, Richard, “The New Social History and the Search for ‘Community’ in Colonial America,” American Quarterly, 29 (1977), 428–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stannard, David, “Death and Dying in Puritan New England,” American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 1306CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Breen, T. H., “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling Among the Gentry of Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 34 (1977), 239–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a thorough and excellent discussion of Geertz's use of, and influence on, historians, see Walters, Ronald, “Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and Historians,” Social Research, 47 (1980), 537–56Google Scholar. Walters has many more examples of historical works that make use of Geertz. Swidler, Ann, “Interpretive Versus Explanatory Approaches to the Sociology of Culture,” paper delivered before the American Sociological Association Meeting, Boston, 08 1979Google Scholar, and Tuchman, Gaye, “Women's Depiction by the Mass Media,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4 (1979), 540CrossRefGoogle Scholar, are just two examples of the many uses to which Geertz has been put in humanities and socialscience writing.

3. Six of the essays were published in journals such as Antioch Review, Daedalus, and Encounter. Eight of the essays were written for edited collections on specific themes.

4. Geertz unfolds the story of the raid on the cockfight he attended while just beginning fieldwork in a small Balinese village, with consummate skill, narrating this vignette with a fine-tuned attention to the details of setting, mood, pace, and, most important, perspective. As with any good storyteller, we can actually “see” Geertz and his wife running undecorously down the road and plunging headlong into a strange courtyard, only in the next moment to be calmly poised, teacup in hand, “playing possum” for the local police. This is my favorite story in Interpretation; but, of course, there are many others, including the rather infamous Javanese funeral of Paidjan, the episode of the winks and the sheep raid, and the turtles that go all the way down. See Interpretation, pp. 412–17, 153–62, 6–10, 28–29.Google Scholar

5. Geertz, Clifford, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. vii.Google Scholar

6. Berkhofer, Robert, “Clio and the Culture Concept: Some Impressions of a Changing Relationship in American Historiography,” Social Science Quarterly, 1972, pp. 297–320Google Scholar, and Keesing, Roger, “Theories of Culture,” in Siegel, Bernard et al. , eds., Annual Review of Anthropology (Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Review Press, 1974), p. 73Google Scholar. Keesing's review of current thinking on the culture concept is an incisive and comprehensive summary of the literature to date. See also Harris, Marvin, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968).Google Scholar

7. See Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 6–7, 57–59, 89, 91, 92, 102–3, 111, 121, 141, 171–74, 208, 210–16, 364–65Google Scholar, for examples of his use of these thinkers.

8. Ibid., pp. 89, 92, 144–46, 171, 203, 216–17, 249–51, 254, 361.

9. See Parsons, Talcott, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 1–30Google Scholar. This is the clearest, most concise account of Parsons's action system by Parsons himself. It should be noted that Geertz uses the late Parsons as his starting point, but his culture theory is uniquely his own and not strictly Parsonsian.

10. Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 43–51, 79–83, 91–94, 99, 216–17.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., p. 145.

12. Geertz is not an idealist, even though his sense of culture may beconsidered ideational in the broadest sense of the term. Geertz does not conceptualize culture as the only cause or factor in human action. The cultural environment may be the one on which he concentrates, but in his framework it is only one of five analytically independent causal factors in human experience.

13. Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 45–51, 217–18Google Scholar. For another interpretation, see Fox, Robin, “The Cultural Animal,” in Eisenbe, J. F. et al. , eds., Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), pp. 275–96Google Scholar. Fox takes the same view of the overlap of cultural and biological evolution as Geertz but comes to some different conclusions despite a similar biological-cultural starting point.

14. Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 50.

16. Ibid., pp. 92–94, 216–17, 250.

17. Ibid., p. 91. Geertz credits Susanne Langer with this conception of the symbol.

18. Ibid., pp. 92–93.

19. Ibid., p. 94.

20. Ibid., p. 94.

21. Geertz, , “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,”Google Scholar in ibid., pp. 412–53.

22. For a brilliant analysis of the doubleness of symbolic ritual, see Delattre, Roland A., “The Rituals of Humanity and the Rhythms of Reality,” in Salzman, Jack, ed., Prospects, 5 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1979), 35–49.Google Scholar

23. See Tate, Cecil, The Search for a Method in American Studies (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955)Google Scholar, and Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964)Google Scholar, are two of the most prominent examples in the American Studies corpus.

24. Letter to the author from Oral Roberts, September 17, 1979.

25. Ibid.

26. This is a common criticism of culture studies. See, for example, Rutman, Darrett, American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), pp. 32–35.Google Scholar

27. Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 91–92, 9–13Google Scholar. This decision to locate culture in social action solves some problems while it creates others. When culture is located in the “text” of social action and not in individual minds, individual variability is blurred. Each individual in a complex society has a unique cultural “set” or repertoire, which must find a place in cultural understanding. Geertz weakens the psychological-cultural connections dramatically by placing his basic cultural text “out there.” In fact, culture can be “read” in multiple texts: artifacts, social action, and individual biography.

28. Geertz, , “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,”Google Scholar in ibid. Geertz hints at this distinction instead of actually developing it. In understanding the artifact, one must understand the flow of social discourse that produced it, the discourse it freezes, and the way it is used in subsequent social action.

29. Geertz, Clifford, “Art as a Cultural System,” Modern Language Notes, 91 (1976), pp. 1473–99.Google Scholar

30. Culture also resides, on a second level, in artifacts, but Geertz does not give artifacts much of his attention.

31. Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 10–13, 17, 44–45, 52, 142–46, 249–50.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., pp. 3–5. See also Keesing, , “Theories of Culture,”Google Scholar for a review of efforts by Geertz and others to narrow the culture concept and thus strengthen it as an analytical tool. See Tate, , The Search for Method, pp. 3–24Google Scholar, on cultural holism in American Studies, and Spradley, James and McCurdy, David, eds., The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1972), pp. 7–8Google Scholar, on holism in anthropology.

33. Keesing, , pp. 74–76Google Scholar, and Harris, , Rise of Anthropological Theory.Google Scholar

34. The California American Studies Association held an excellent workshop on “Clifford Geertz and the Interpretation of American Culture,” 10 3–4, 1981Google Scholar, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. During two days of discussion, there were two frequent criticisms of Geertz's work: First, his analytical tools cannot adequately explain cultural change over time or rapid social processes; second, he fails to take enough account of social class and the realities of class power and cultural hegemony. The first criticism can be answered by a closer reading of Geertz, and I address myself to it in the text. The second criticism may be more accurate, although I am undecided. Ronald Walters, in his fine essay on Geertz and historians, discusses the issue of Geertz's treatment of power. See Walters, , “Signs of the Times,” pp. 553–56Google Scholar. I do not address the issue of class and power in this essay, but neo-Marxists such as Raymond Williams are working in a similar vein to Geertz's with respect to the analytic equality of culture and social structure. See Williams, Raymond, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review, 82 (1973), 3–16Google Scholar. (I am indebted to my colleague Wayne Hobson for his insight on this issue.)

35. Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 143–44Google Scholar. The argument that culture is a dependent variable or can be treated as a mirror image of social structure is sometimes used in the application of quantitative methodologies to problems of historical research. See Berkhofer, , pp. 318–19Google Scholar, and Jensen, Richard, “Quantitative American Studies: The State of the Art,” American Quarterly, 26 (1974), 226CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A sophisticated social historian, Samuel P. Hays, argues against collapsing the analytic distinction between culture and social structure. See his “A Systematic Social History,” in Billias, George and Grob, Gerald, eds., American History: Retrospect and Prospect (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 315–66Google Scholar. See also Sklar, Robert, “The Problem of an American Studies ‘Philosophy’: A Bibliography of New Directions,” American Quarterly, 27 (1975), 246–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sklar has consistently taken a position against collapsing social structure into culture or vice versa in all his published essays on American Studies scholarship.

36. Geertz, , Interpretation, p. 144, 406Google Scholar. Geertz pays particular attention to the conflict between cultural and social structural environments and develops an extended application of this disjunction in a case study of the tensions that surround a Javanese funeral. See “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example,” in Interpretation, pp. 142–69.Google Scholar

37. Hannerz, Ulf, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), esp. pp. 177–200Google Scholar, and Geertz, , Interpretation, p. 145.Google Scholar

38. On the problem of cognitive diversity, see Mechling, Jay, “In Search of an American Ethnophysics,” in Luther Luedtke, The Study of American Culture: Contemporary Conflicts (DeLand, Fla.: Everett-Edwards, 1977), pp. 241–77Google Scholar. Geertz's attack on cognitive anthropology (esp. pp. 10–13) fails to come to grips with the fact that the cognitivists have much more interpretative skill in the area of cultural variability, perhaps because they have located culture in people's minds. Geertz, in locating culture in a public intersubjective world, does not offer much theoretical guidance in understanding the massive cultural diversity of individuals, as well as groups, in a complex society such as the United States.

39. The best conceptual work on individual cultural variability in the anthropological literature is Goodenough, Ward's Culture, Language, and Society, Addison-Wesley Module in Anthropology, No. 7 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1971)Google Scholar. In conceptualizing subculture, I have found the most helpful text to be Hannerz, , SoulsideGoogle Scholar. See also Murphey, Murray, “The Place of Beliefs in Modern Culture,”Google Scholar in Higham, and Conkin, , eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979), pp. 151–65Google Scholar, and Pelto, Pertti and Pelto, Gretel, “Intra-cultural Diversity: Some Theoretical Issues,” American Ethnologist, 2 (1975), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Geertz, , Interpretation, pp. 10, 14, 18.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., pp. 13–24, esp. 18. The following discussion on technique is not meant to imply that technique should be discarded in culture studies. Quite the contrary—it can often prove crucial for cultural understanding. It is a question of means and ends: Technique should always be a means to a clearer, more thorough understanding of the cultural experience under scrutiny. When the technique becomes the end of a culture study, problems begin.

42. Ibid., p. 20.

43. Ibid., p. 16.

44. This is not the nature of sound social structural analysis, which rightfully must emphasize objective methodologies. Analytic confusion of the two has led to untold misunderstanding and unnecessary competition between structural and cultural methodologies.

45. Geertz, , Interpretation, p. 196.Google Scholar