Clifford Geertz meninggal.
manneke
> CLIFFORD GEERTZ 1926-2006
>
> PRINCETON, N.J., October 31, 2006 -- Clifford Geertz, an eminent scholar
> in the field of cultural anthropology known for his extensive research
> in Indonesia and Morocco, died at the age of 80 early yesterday morning
> of complications following heart surgery at the Hospital of the
> University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Geertz was Professor Emeritus in the
> School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he
> has served on the Faculty since 1970. Dr. Geertz's appointment
> thirty-six years ago was significant not only for the distinguished
> leadership it would bring to the Institute, but also because it marked
> the initiation of the School of Social Science, which in 1973 formally
> became the fourth School at the Institute.
>
> Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have
> been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among
> geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and
> historians. He worked on religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on
> economic development; on traditional political structures; and on
> village and family life. A prolific author since the 1950s, Dr. Geertz's
> many books include The Religion of Java (1960); Islam Observed:
> Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968); The
> Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The
> Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of
> Culture, Asian Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of
> his death, Dr. Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic
> diversity and its implications in the modern world.
>
> Peter Goddard, Director of the Institute, said, "Clifford Geertz was one
> of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century whose
> presence at the Institute played a crucial role in its development and
> in determining its present shape. He remained a vital force,
> contributing to the life of the Institute right up to his death. We have
> all lost a much loved friend."
>
> "Cliff was the founder of the School of Social Science and its
> continuing inspiration," stated Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder
> Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute. "His
> influence on generations of scholars was powerful and lasting. He
> changed the direction of thinking in many fields by pointing to the
> importance and complexity of culture and the need for its
> interpretation. We will miss his critical intelligence, his great sense
> of irony, and his friendship."
>
> Dr. Geertz's deeply reflective and eloquent writings often provided
> profound and cogent insights on the scope of culture, the nature of
> anthropology and on the understanding of the social sciences in general.
> Noting that human beings are "symbolizing, conceptualizing,
> meaning-seeking animals," Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate
> desire of humanity to "make sense out of experience, to give it form and
> order." In Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), Geertz
> stated, "The next necessary thing...is neither the construction of a
> universal Esperanto-like culture...nor the invention of some vast
> technology of human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of
> intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another
> in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world
> where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly
> difficult to get out of each other's way."
>
> Dr. Geertz was born in San Francisco, California, on August 23, 1926.
> After serving in the Navy from 1943 through 1945, he studied under the
> G.I. Bill at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he majored
> in English. His internship as a copyboy for The New York Post dissuaded
> him from becoming a newspaper man. "It was fun but it wasn't practical,"
> he said in an interview with Gary A. Olson ("Clifford Geertz on
> Ethnography and Social Construction," 1991), so he switched to
> philosophy, partly because of the influence of philosophy professor
> George Geiger, "the greatest teacher I have known."
>
> "I never had any undergraduate training in anthropology [Antioch didn't
> offer it at the time] and, indeed, very little social science outside of
> economics," Geertz told Olson. "Finally, one of my professors said, 'Why
> don't you think about anthropology?'"
>
> After receiving his A.B. in philosophy in 1950, Geertz went on to study
> anthropology at Harvard University and received a Ph.D. from the
> Department of Social Relations in 1956. It was a heady time, according
> to Geertz. "Multi- (or 'inter-' or 'cross-') disciplinary work, team
> projects, and concern with the immediate problems of the contemporary
> world, were combined with boldness, inventiveness, and a sense that
> things were, finally and certainly, on the move."
>
> Geertz recounted that he was exposed to a form of anthropology "then
> called, rather awkwardly, 'pattern theory' or configurationalism.' In
> this dispensation, stemming from work before and during the war by the
> comparative linguist Edward Sapir at Yale and the cultural holist Ruth
> Benedict at Columbia, it was the interrelation of elements, the gestalt
> they formed, not their particular atomistic character that was taken to
> be the heart of the matter."
>
> At this point, Geertz became involved in a project spearheaded by
> cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who headed Harvard's Russian
> Research Center. Geertz was one of five anthropologists assigned to the
> Modjokuto Project in Indonesia, sponsored by the Center for
> International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
> it was one of the earliest efforts to send a team of anthropologists to
> study large-scale societies with written histories, established
> governments, and composite cultures.
>
> In the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropology was torn apart by
> questions about its colonial past and the possibility of objective
> knowledge in the human sciences. "For the next fifteen years or so,"
> Geertz wrote, "proposals for new directions in anthropological theory
> and method appeared almost by the month, the one more clamorous than the
> next. I contributed to the merriment with 'interpretive anthropology,'
> an extension of my concern with the systems of meaning, beliefs, values,
> world views, forms of feeling, styles of thought, in terms of which
> particular peoples construct their existence."
>
> Dr. Geertz began his academic career as a Research Assistant (1952-56)
> and a Research Associate (1957-58) in the Center for International
> Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also served as
> an Instructor in Social Relations and as a Research Associate in Harvard
> University's Laboratory of Social Relations (1956-57). In 1958-59, he
> was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
> in Stanford, California.
>
> From 1958 to 1960, he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the
> University of California at Berkeley, after which time he was Assistant
> Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago (1960-61), and
> was subsequently promoted to Associate Professor (1962), and then
> Professor (1964). He was later named Divisional Professor in the Social
> Sciences (1968-70). At Chicago, Dr. Geertz was a member of the Committee
> for the Comparative Study of New Nations (1962-70), its Executive
> Secretary (1964-66), and its Chairman (1968-70). Geertz was also a
> Senior Research Career Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health
> from 1964 to 1970.
>
> Consultant to the Ford Foundation on Social Sciences in Indonesia in
> 1971, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford University from 1978 to 1979,
> and held an appointment as Visiting Lecturer with Rank of Professor in
> the Department of History at Princeton University from 1975 to 2000.
>
> In 1970, Geertz joined the permanent faculty of the School of Social
> Science at the Institute, and was named Harold F. Linder Professor of
> Social Science in 1982. He transferred to emeritus status in 2000.
>
> Dr. Geertz is the author and co-author of important volumes that have
> been translated into over twenty languages and is the recipient of
> numerous honorary degrees and scholarly awards. He received the National
> Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism in 1988 for Works and Lives: The
> Anthropologist as Author, and was also the recipient of the Fukuoka
> Asian Cultural Prize (1992) and the Bintang Jasa Utama (First Class
> Merit Star) of the Republic of Indonesia (2002). Over the years, he
> received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
> universities, from Antioch, Swarthmore, and Williams colleges, and from
> the University of Cambridge, among other institutions.
>
> He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
> Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the
> National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the
> Advancement of Science; a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy;
> and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
> Britain and Ireland. Dr. Geertz was a frequent contributor to The New
> York Review of Books.
>
> Dr. Geertz's fieldwork was concentrated in Java, Bali, Celebes, and
> Sumatra in Indonesia, as well as in Morocco. In May 2000, he was honored
> at "Cultures, Soci???ti???s, et Territoires: Hommage ??? Clifford
> Geertz," a conference held in Sefrou, Morocco, where he had conducted
> work for a decade. It was particularly gratifying, commented Geertz,
> because "Anthropologists are not always welcomed back to the site of
> their field studies."
>
> Dr. Geertz is survived by his wife, Dr. Karen Blu, an anthropologist
> retired from the Department of Anthropology at New York University; his
> children, Erika Reading of Princeton, NJ, and Benjamin Geertz of
> Kirkland, WA; and his grandchildren, Andrea and Elena Martinez of
> Princeton, NJ. He is also survived by his former wife, Dr. Hildred
> Geertz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at
> Princeton University.
>
> A Memorial will be held at the Institute for Advanced Study. Details
> will be announced at a future date.
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
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