Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)

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Clifford Geertz Wikipedia

I've had a long engagement with Geertz's eloquent writing, and even wrote a Library School paper: Who Cites Geertz? (1991), analyzing his influence beyond the anthropological literature. I find him much more personally congenial than Marvin Harris, and have many of his books on the library shelves. It may have been himself who characterized the PhD in Anthropology as "an academic license to poach", a characterization by which I've lived myself. (see Ward S Albro's review of Davod Frye's Indians into Mexicans)

Yesterday I chanced upon Interpreting Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences Jeffrey C Alexander and Philip Smith (2011) and got it on Kindle. My Kindle Notebook re: the Introduction captures some of the provocations in that text. And that led me to acquiring the Audible version of Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (the original was published in 1973, and has been on my shelves for almost 50 years...). Listening to the (familiar but not recently attempted) text was ...a revelation that continues to unreel.