What is culture according to Clifford Geertz?
Culture, according to Geertz, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” The function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable.
What is the interpretive theory of culture?
The Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropologists view culture as a mental phenomenon and reject the idea that culture can be modeled like mathematics or logic. When they study symbolic action in cultures, they use a variety of analytical tools from psychology, history, and literature.
Which book marks the decisive influence of Clifford Geertz in the ethnographical study of cultures?
In 1973, he published The Interpretation of Cultures, which collected essays Geertz had published throughout the 1960s. That became Geertz’s best-known book and established him not just as an Indonesianist but also as an anthropological theorist.
What is thick description According to Geertz?
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 …
What approach did Clifford Geertz use?
The American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (born 1926) did ethnographic field work in Indonesia and Morocco, wrote influential essays on central theoretical issues in the social sciences, and advocated a distinctive “interpretive” approach to anthropology.
Why is culture public Geertz?
Geertz argues that culture is “public because meaning is”–systems of meaning are necessarily the collective property of a group.
What did Geertz believe in?
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 understand by thick description How important is it in qualitative research?
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.