What is Clifford Geertz famous for?

What is Clifford Geertz famous for?

Clifford Geertz, in full Clifford James Geertz, (born Aug. 23, 1926, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.—died Oct. 30, 2006, Philadelphia, Pa.), American cultural anthropologist, a leading rhetorician and proponent of symbolic anthropology and interpretive anthropology.

What is the contribution of Clifford Geertz in anthropology?

Geertz contributed to social and cultural theory and is still influential in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live their lives. He reflected on the basic core notions of anthropology, such as culture and ethnography.

In what way Clifford Geertz explain religion?

According to Geertz, the interpretative approach aims to capture meaning in social relationships, using method of thick description. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1993) offers a theory of religion which describes religion as a language or map providing guidance on both what is (reality) and how to act (morality).

What did Clifford Geertz believe?

He argued that culture is made up of the meanings people find to make sense of their lives and to guide their actions. Interpretive social science is an attempt to engage those meanings. Unlike other anthropological scholars, Geertz did not focus on so-called primitive groups.

What does Clifford Geertz mean by thick description?

To aid anthropologists in the task of defining their cultural object of study, Geertz introduced the concept of thick description into the parlance of the discipline; this term can be described as “the detailed account of field experiences in which the researcher makes explicit the patterns of cultural and social …

How religion is a system of symbols?

A religion is: (1) a system of symbols, which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely …

What does Geertz say about rituals?

According to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, political rituals actually construct power; that is, in his analysis of the Balinese state, he argued that rituals are not an ornament of political power, but that the power of political actors depends upon their ability to create rituals and the cosmic framework within …

What is an example of thick description?

Thick description includes voices, feelings, actions and meanings (Ponterotto, 2006). The example most commonly used to explain ‘Thick description’ comes from Ryle. He argued that if someone winks at us without a context, we don’t know what it means. We can report on the wink (thin description).

What is ethnography and thick description?

Thick description is a social sciences qualitative research technique that gives detailed descriptions and interpretations of situations observed by a researcher. It is a ethnographic and qualitative research technique. The term was invented by social anthropologists Gilbert Ryle and Clifford Geertz.