The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology is dedicated to the proposition that deep meanings make a profound difference in social life. Culture is not simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for the weak, or a mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just practical knowledge, dry schemas, or know-how. The series demonstrates how shared and circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapably penetrate the social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons, and rituals and representations, these cultural structures drive human action, inspire social movements, direct and build institutions, and so come to shape history.

In his famous essays from the mid-1960s on ideology and religion as “cultural systems,” Geertz suggested that culture was about more than normative patterns of behavior generalized into values, about papering over tensions with reassuring ideals. Culture was something more mysterious, fluid, and deeply contradictory that could affect the entire repertoire of actions. The trick was to capture this vaporous cultural force without moving back toward Parsonian or Hegelian abstraction.

a call for a deep interpretation, premised on the understanding that, while culture was everywhere, it was elusive and fragmentary, dependent on performance and crystallized by aesthetic form. The task of the social scientist becomes that of the worldly hermeneut, reconstructing the implicit text behind every contingency, the symbolic gesture that frames every action, and the aesthetic envelope that expresses and shapes feeling, belief, and moral conviction.

Geertz had argued for a textual, hermeneutic model of social life and, not least through his own example, had pointed to the centrality of writing to this task. He had pushed against the abstraction of theory by insisting on locality, and against naturalistic positivism by promoting the subjectivity of interpretation

By the mid-1980s, Geertz had been cast out. Universally admired as a sensitive interpreter and gifted prose stylist, and safely installed at Princeton in the Institute for Advanced Studies, he was seen as something of a has-been, someone still working in the humanist and pragmatist traditions (Apter, this volume) who had been decisively wrong-footed by continental theory. Anthropology turned its back on its prophet, and Geertz, assuming the role of a low-key public ironist, appeared at times, almost willingly, to accept his fate. In his late work, he all but joined the deconstructionist pranksters who deemed anthropological writing to be as worthy of investigation as anthropological reality.

Some did read him carefully, and found in his words the mandate for an entirely new way of grounding inquiry in the Geisteswissenschaften tradition.

Thanks to Boas in the United States and the great structural functionalists in England, cultural and social anthropology had long been about the expert reading of cultural codes that drove expressive social life.

His concern for the lived textures of meaning could be easily transplanted into diverse research agendas, from historical accounts of political and social conflicts, 5 to reconstructions of social dramas, 6 and through to literary criticism,

The reaction against normative explanation set in during the 1960s and consolidated during the 1970s in American sociology.

By rejecting generalizable theory in favor of locality and “thick description,” Geertz had made himself vulnerable to the relativistic and yet arch-theoretical incursions of poststructuralism.

the Geertzian rejection of heavy theory allowed him to be easily used as an adjunct to more layered and more general claims, the kind usually found in sociology. He could be varnished on the parts of an account that hovered close to the phenomenon, for descriptions of settings, moods and gestures, ambiguities and performances, and for subtle wordplay and analogy.

Like all great theorists, Geertz has accumulated his own repertoire of sound bites and images, all of which appear as if by magic in the papers in this volume. There are those turtles all the way down, incomplete interpretations that become more incomplete as we investigate more, the malarial and diffident investigator, the police raid, deep play, the cerebral savage, the wink, the sheep raid, thick description, the Rashomon effect, and many more.

Geertz legitimized that very project of an interpretive human science itself. As Geertz became an intellectual giant of late-twentieth-century cultural theory—conjoined with his through-the-looking-glass counterpart Foucault—so the symbolic analysis of shared meaning became a respectable, if highly contested, endeavor in sociology, history, and political science.

Geertz set loose his pen and with it his wizardry. He made interpretation look deceptively easy. He showed as much as he told us that we should not think of culture as a thing, a field, a subsystem, or a domain, but as a dimension that is omnipresent in every traditional object of social science. There is nowhere that meaning is not present, no domain or field in which reconstructing the relatively independent forces of meaning cannot, and should not, be done.

efforts to reach across the sometimes unhelpful chasm opened up by Geertz’s insistence on the local, situational, provisional, and antitheoretical.

we can see Geertz chiefly as a methodologist, as a theorist not of social process but of interpretation whose profound and (again) universal insights can and should be made more systematic

Geertz’s own take on reality as elusive, fragmentary, ambivalent, only partly systemic, and hybrid