“Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of') a manuscript foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour.” - Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) Introduction At the end of the fifty years of his career, though Clifford Geertz remains a highly influential Cultural Anthropologist, especially in the United States, he has found his fair share of critics as well. While his contributions to the field are undeniable, they were however “(sic.) Fundamentally unfortunate in the social sciences. He was a major contributor to the wilfully fuzzy logic which continues to plague the social sciences” (Tiger, 2006). …show more content…
He believed that understanding a culture is based on the act of interpretation, that is, it is only by placing any given cultural act—a ritual, a game, a political campaign, and so on—into the specific and local contexts in which the act is meaningful, can it truly be understood. This take on culture was the catalyst for debates in American anthropology that turned on key issues such as, what is the nature of culture? how is it understood? what is the relationship between observer and observed?,