Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program: The Human Sciences and Cultural Sociology

Abstract

In his massively influential work, Clifford Geertz crystallized core methodological and theoretical elements of a strong program in cultural sociology, a program that argues for a meaning-centered social science. If meaning is to be so central, then the theoretical tools that the humanities have developed to investigate art and language must become central to the human sciences more generally. The `thick descriptions' Geertz proposes for social science are powerful reconstructions of the empirical, not simply detailed observations. Likewise, the local knowledge Geertz valorized is inevitably rooted in more encompassing, global meaning-structures, even while every global theme becomes not enriched but different as it emerges locally. Interests can never be objective, and extra-individual structures are both cultural and social at the same time.Yet, while structures are central, they take form only through contingent process, and intertwining them is what Geertz's turn to performance was about.