著名美国文化人类学家克里福德。格尔兹因心脏病于10月30日在宾大医院去世， 享年80岁。他对几代人类学家的深远影响是不可磨灭的。深表悼念！
Clifford Geertz (August 23, 1926-October 30, 2006)
PRINCETON, N.J., October 31, 2006 -- Clifford Geertz, an eminent
scholar
in the field of cultural anthropology known for his extensive research
in
Indonesia and Morocco, died at the age of 80 early yesterday morning of
complications following heart surgery at the Hospital of the University
of Pennsylvania. Dr. Geertz was Professor Emeritus in the School of
Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has served
on the Faculty since 1970.
Dr. Geertz's appointment thirty-six years ago was significant not only
for the distinguished leadership it would bring to the Institute, but
also because it marked the initiation of the School of Social Science,
which in 1973 formally became the fourth School at the Institute.
Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have
been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among
geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and
historians.
He worked on religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on economic
development; on traditional political structures; and on village and
family life. A prolific author since the 1950s, Dr. Geertz's many books
include The Religion of Java (1960); Islam Observed: Religious
Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968); The Interpretation of
Cultures: Selected Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The Theatre State in
Nineteenth Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of Culture, Asian
Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of his death, Dr.
Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its
implications in the modern world.
Peter Goddard, Director of the Institute, said, "Clifford Geertz was
one
of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century whose
presence
at the Institute played a crucial role in its development and in
determining its present shape. He remained a vital force, contributing
to
the life of the Institute right up to his death. We have all lost a
much
loved friend."
"Cliff was the founder of the School of Social Science and its
continuing
inspiration," stated Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder Professor in
the
\School of Social Science at the Institute. "His influence on
generations
of scholars was powerful and lasting. He changed the direction of
thinking in many fields by pointing to the importance and complexity of
culture and the need for its interpretation. We will miss his critical
intelligence, his great sense of irony, and his friendship."
Dr. Geertz's deeply reflective and eloquent writings often provided
profound and cogent insights on the scope of culture, the nature of
anthropology and on the understanding of the social sciences in
general.
Noting that human beings are "symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-
seeking animals," Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate desire of
humanity to "make sense out of experience, to give it form and order."
In
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), Geertz stated,
"The
next necessary thing...is neither the construction of a universal
Esperanto-like culture...nor the invention of some vast technology of
human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible
discourse between people quite different from one another in interest,
outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled
as
they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get
out
of each other's way."
Dr. Geertz was born in San Francisco, California, on August 23, 1926.
After serving in the Navy from 1943 through 1945, he studied under the
G.I. Bill at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he majored
in
English. His internship as a copyboy for The New York Post dissuaded
him
from becoming a newspaper man. "It was fun but it wasn't practical," he
said in an interview with Gary A. Olson ("Clifford Geertz on
Ethnography
and Social Construction,"1991), so he switched to philosophy, partly
because of the influence of philosophy professor George Geiger, "the
greatest teacher I have known."
"I never had any undergraduate training in anthropology [Antioch didn't
offer it at the time] and, indeed, very little social science outside
of
economics," Geertz told Olson. "Finally, one of my professors said,
'Why
don't you think about anthropology?'"
After receiving his A.B. in philosophy in 1950, Geertz went on to study
anthropology at Harvard University and received a Ph.D. from the
Department of Social Relations in 1956. It was a heady time, according
to
Geertz. "Multi- (or 'inter-' or 'cross-') disciplinary work, team
projects, and concern with the immediate problems of the contemporary
world, were combined with boldness, inventiveness, and a sense that
things were, finally and certainly, on the move."
Geertz recounted that he was exposed to a form of anthropology "then
called, rather awkwardly, 'pattern theory' or configurationalism.' In
this dispensation, stemming from work before and during the war by the
comparative linguist Edward Sapir at Yale and the cultural holist Ruth
Benedict at Columbia, it was the interrelation of elements, the gestalt
they formed, not their particular atomistic character that was taken to
be the heart of the matter."
At this point, Geertz became involved in a project spearheaded by
cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who headed Harvard's Russian
Research Center. Geertz was one of five anthropologists assigned to the
Modjokuto Project in Indonesia, sponsored by the Center for
International
Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it was one of
the earliest efforts to send a team of anthropologists to study
large-scale societies with written histories, established governments,
and composite cultures.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropology was torn apart by
questions about its colonial past and the possibility of objective
knowledge in the human sciences. "For the next fifteen years or so,"
Geertz wrote, "proposals for new directions in anthropological theory
and
method appeared almost by the month, the one more clamorous than the
next. I contributed to the merriment with 'interpretive anthropology,'
an
extension of my concern with the systems of meaning, beliefs, values,
world views, forms of feeling, styles of thought, in terms of which
particular peoples construct their existence."
Dr. Geertz began his academic career as a research assistant (1952-56)
and
a research associate (1957-58) in the Center for International Studies
at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also served as an
instructor in social relations and as a research associate in Harvard
University's Laboratory of Social Relations (1956-57). In 1958-59, he
was
a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
Stanford, California.
>From 1958 to 1960, he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California at Berkeley, after which time he was assistant
professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago (1960-61), and
was
subsequently promoted to associate professor (1962), and then professor
(1964). He was later named Divisional Professor in the Social Sciences
(1968-70). At Chicago, Dr. Geertz was a member of the Committee for the
Comparative Study of New Nations (1962-70), its executive secretary
(1964-66), and its chairman (1968-70). Geertz was also a Senior
Research
Career Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1964 to
1970.
Consultant to the Ford Foundation on Social Sciences in Indonesia in
1971, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford University from 1978 to 1979,
and held an appointment as Visiting Lecturer with Rank of Professor in
the Department of History at Princeton University from 1975 to 2000.
In 1970, Geertz joined the permanent faculty of the School of Social
Science at the Institute, and was named Harold F. Linder Professor of
Social Science in 1982. He transferred to emeritus status in 2000.
Dr. Geertz is the author and co-author of important volumes that have
been translated into over twenty languages and is the recipient of
numerous honorary degrees and scholarly awards. He received the
National
Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism in 1988 for Works and Lives: The
Anthropologist as Author, and was also the recipient of the Fukuoka
Asian
Cultural Prize (1992) and the Bintang Jasa Utama (First Class Merit
Star)
of the Republic of Indonesia (2002). Over the years, he received
honorary
degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities, from Antioch,
Swarthmore, and Williams colleges, and from the University of
Cambridge,
among other institutions.
He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
Council
on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the National
Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement
of
Science; a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; and an Honorary
Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and
Ireland. Dr. Geertz was a frequent contributor to The New York Review
of
Books.
Dr. Geertz's fieldwork was concentrated in Java, Bali, Celebes, and
Sumatra in Indonesia, as well as in Morocco. In May 2000, he was
honored
at "Cultures, Sociétiés, et Territoires: Hommage à Clifford Geertz," a
conference held in Sefrou, Morocco, where he had conducted work for a
decade. It was particularly gratifying, commented Geertz, because
"Anthropologists are not always welcomed back to the site of their
field
studies."
Dr. Geertz is survived by his wife, Dr. Karen Blu, an anthropologist
retired from the Department of Anthropology at New York University; his
children, Erika Reading of Princeton, NJ, and Benjamin Geertz of
Kirkland, WA; and his grandchildren, Andrea and Elena Martinez of
Princeton, NJ. He is also survived by his former wife, Dr. Hildred
Geertz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at
Princeton
University.
A Memorial will be held at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Details will be announced at a future date.
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