About Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Geertz conducted his first long-term fieldwork together with his wife, Hildred, in Java, Indonesia, in a project funded by the Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the University of Chicago, Geertz became a champion of symbolic anthropology, a framework which gives prime attention to the role of symbols in constructing public meaning. That became Geertz's best-known book and established him not just as an Indonesianist but also as an anthropological theorist.
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