Clifford Geertz

I interviewed Dr. Geertz in the early 1990s at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was a shy man but by far one of the most important intellectuals of the 20^th Century. He died last week at age 80.  I particularly liked him because we agreed on anthropology and social thought.

Geertz was the main person who brought social thought to anthropology. 

He showed two things: we can not have much understanding across cultures and each culture is separately organized around concepts, metaphors and images.

Geertz showed the first in a book on the subject of what natives told him when they were doing anthropological work on America.  From this shocking way of looking at anthropology he concluded that the best we could do was to write “thick descriptions” of other cultures to convey the real depth of differences.

Geertz’s writings on cock fighting in Bali showed the convincing relationship between the fights, the betting, the training of animals and its relationship to the organization of the whole society. Pure and powerful social thought.

After interviewing Clifford Geertz I was able to show my own insight that chess is a battle of attrition like all European wars, while Go is face-off-count the troops form of war like all wars in Japan.

Thank you for your insights Dr. Geertz.