Geertz emphasized the particularistic nature of cultural experience, highlighting the explanatory priority of symbols and attending to “local knowledge. This search, Geertz noted thirty years later, involved “ferreting out the singularities of other peoples ’ ways of life.
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning ” (p. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco, Geertz ’s theory of “interpretive anthropology ” was articulated in his 1973 collection, The Interpretation of Cultures, in which he stated, “The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one. The American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz was known for contending that culture is the enacted and public creation of meaning and that therefore ethnographic inquiry requires interpretation.
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