To do this, he proposed that the social sciences be pursued more like an ongoing seminar: the point would be to improve everyone’s mutual understanding. Instead he sought alternative approaches. Geertz’s work of the late 1960s and 70s addressed the great failure of universal theories to account for human behavior. 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.” “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. 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. One of Geertz’s best-known essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” which appeared in his 1973 book, The Interpretation of Cultures, was a wide-ranging interpretation of how the people of Bali saw themselves in relation to violence, social status, morality, and belief (Schudel, 2006). Rather, he studied complex, syncretic societies in Indonesia (Java, Bali, Celebes, Sumatra) and in Morocco. Unlike other anthropological scholars, Geertz did not focus on so-called primitive groups.
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