Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist. He is best known for his advocacy of symbolic anthropology, an anthropological methodology that focuses on symbols as vehicles for cultural interpretation.
Geertz was born in San Francisco in 1926 and served in the United States Navy during the Second World War. He attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio where he received a bachelor of arts in philosophy. Geertz went on to earn a doctor of philosophy in anthropology from Harvard University in 1956. The first long-term fieldwork Geertz conducted was in Java, Indonesia with his first wife Hildred. He later returned to Indonesia to conduct fieldwork in Bali and Sumatra.
From 1960 to...
