Geertz, Clifford (1926—2006) American cultural anthropologist. Born in San Francisco, Geertz served in the Navy during World War II, and then studied for a BA at Antioch College on the ‘GI Bill’. This was followed by a PhD at Harvard, for which he did extensive fieldwork in Java (in Indonesia). Most of Geertz’s fieldwork was done in Indonesia, but he also spent a considerable period of time in Morocco. He held appointments at the University of Chicago and at Princeton. It was Geertz’s fifth book, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), that brought him international attention, and more importantly won him a large readership outside of professional anthropological circles. He proposed a new method of thinking about anthropological research, which he called ‘thick description’, borrowing the term from British analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Describing culture as an ‘acted document’, Geertz argues that the object of anthropology, i.e. what it is anthropologists actually study, is a ‘thick description’ in itself, because it is a multi-coded ‘text’ that is simultaneously constructed and interpreted by the anthropologist. All human behaviour is, he argues, symbolic action, so anthropological fieldwork consists in learning the various ways in which symbols are manipulated in culture, without at the same time falling into the trap of thinking these symbols are fixed or immutable. Anthropological interpretations are thus fictions, he argues, not in the sense of being false, but rather (as in the original meaning of the term) made up or constructed, and therefore cannot be schematized. He developed this thesis further in the subsequent work Local Knowledge (1983). Geertz’s method chimed well with the shift toward relativism and pragmatism which postmodernism heralded and his work was enormously influential in a wide variety of fields, notably literary studies and Cultural Studies. New Historicism’s leading scholar Greenblatt, Stephen has openly acknowledged a theoretical debt to Geertz. In the latter part of his career, Geertz’s work took a more biographical and ultimately autobiographical turn: first, he wrote a short book on the lives of four key anthropologists, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), then a book about his own life in the field, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (1995). Further Reading: F. Inglis Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics (2000).