`To Locate in the Tenor of Their Setting the Sources of Their Spell': Clifford Geertz and the `Strong Program' in Cultural Sociology

Abstract

In their formulation of a `strong program' in cultural sociology, Jeffrey C.Alexander and Philip Smith argue that sociology is suffering from a `numbness toward meaning' due to `cultural unmusical scholars'. Clifford Geertz embodied this demanded musicality on, in Geertz's own words, `particular ways of being in the world'. He knew how to do a cultural sociology of symbolic structures, meaning making and performances, but did not found a school and had no party line. He even came to reject theory, which in the mid-1980s forced Alexander to conclude that `we must reluctantly turn away from Geertz'.The aim of this article is to reconcile Geertz with Alexander and the`strong program'. While Alexander rightly criticized Geertz from his turn away from theory, Alexander, at the very same time, missed out on the multidimensional cultural analysis that Geertz kept on doing so well. This is what is being demonstrated.

Keywords

Alexander cultural sociology culture Geertz meaning performance sociology of the arts

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