WORK OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ IN HISTORY    1500w

What Does The Work Of Clifford Geertz Have To Offer Research Into History?

With the publishing of his book, ‘The Interpretation of Cultures' in 1973, Geertz has often been hailed as the ‘champion of symbolic anthropology'. Geertz outlined culture as ‘a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life' He believed the role of anthropologists was to try and understand the underlying symbols of the culture in question, a term he describes as ‘Thick Description'. Geertz also conducted extensive work on religion, particularly on Islam, in both Southeast Asia and North Africa. His most famous use of thick description is portrayed in the essay ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight', and his theories still influence anthropology to this day.

But how does the work of an anthropologist, concerned with analysing modern societies, apply to historians whose work concerns cultures from the past?

In this essay I will examine how both anthropologists and historians attempt to examine humanity ‘in the mist', and how cultural historians in this endeavour have attempted to use an anthropological model to answer historical questions in order to do so. With the development of cultural history historian's creation of the past as an ‘other', a place completely different from our own, they attempt to view history through an anthropological lens.

But despite differences between historical and anthropological research there has been much interdisciplinary study between the two, with social and cultural historians attempting to use synchronic analysis as a way of viewing the past they are studying. History becomes a view of time and space all within a single plane that stays unmoving and none changing under the cultural historians gaze, just as the Bayeux tapestry shows the history and context of the Norman Conquest of England.

Even with the rise of synchronic analysis, historians have not abandoned diachronic analysis as an analytical tool. Historians still feel they need to explain the context of the subjects they are studying in order for their research to be viewed as ‘complete'.