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Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential figures in 20thcentury cultural anthropology, died on October 30, 2006, in Philadelphia. He once invoked Michel Foucault's distinction between authors who merely write books and those whose writing establishes entire frames of reference:
between those authors (most of us) "to whom the production of a text, a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed" and those rather more consequential figures who "author... much more than a book"; they author "... a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in rum find a place." [Geertz 1988:1718].
Note that little "most of us" dropped in the sentence. With either modesty or mischievousness, or perhaps a little of both, Geertz placed himself in the first category: those who merely write books. But virtually anyone who knows his work will agree that he belongs in the second: writers who, as he put it, "set the terms of discourse in which others thereafter move" (1988:19).
Clifford James Geertz was born in San Francisco on August 23, 1926, to a city engineer named Clifford Geertz and Lois Brieger, a semiprofessional tennis player. His parents divorced when he was very young, and he was sent to live with, essentially, a foster mother in Marin County. By his own account, he had a loveless childhood and escaped first to the navy, then to Antioch College. At Antioch he met his future wife, Hildred Storey, with whom he collaborated in much of his early work and with whom he had two children, Erika and Benjamin. A second marriage, in 1987, was to anthropologist Karen Blu.
Although he majored in philosophy in college, when it came time to go to graduate school, Geertz felt he wanted something that would "ground [his] thought more directly ... in the world's variety" (2000a:x). On the advice of a professor, he went off to the newly founded interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard, where he studied with Talcott Parsons and Clyde Kluckhohn, among others.
Geertz did his first fieldwork in Java in 1952-54, together with Hildred (Storey) Geertz, and he received his Ph.D. in 1956. He taught for a year as an instructor at Harvard (1956-57), went back to Indonesia (to Bali) with Hildred (1957-58), and...