On Rereading Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures 50 Years after the Fact

Abstract

The essay offers two readings of Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures, one from the author’s perspective in the 1970s and a later one from her thinking in the present. The present thinking, influenced by post-structuralism, questions the sharp distinction between politics and scholarship that Geertz offers in this work.

Keywords

• culture
• hermeneutics
• ideology
• power
• difference