Interpretation and Critical Classification. Geertzism and Beyond in the Sociology of Culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/18663Keywords:
Hermeneutics, interpretation, history of humanities, Geertz, Weber, Verstehen, critiqueAbstract
How can we explain the success of Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures in American sociology? On rereading Geertz today, it seems insufficient to point to the limits of Parson’s account of values and the lack of culture elsewhere in the discipline at the time to understand why such relatively concept-free and eclectic essays could become the placeholder for “culture” in some circles. If Geertz was successful partly because of the ambiguity of his work, this ambiguity is not perfectly open. The paper works towards a critical understanding of the celebration of Geertz in sociology in the context of the alternatives occluded within it. It discusses the consequences of an interpretation of “hermeneutics” and “the humanities” that goes back only as far as Dilthey, which ignores alternative, earlier forms of hermeneutics; it also discusses Weber’s position, which was also already an answer to Dilthey. What is at stake is the question as to how interpretation is defined, what it is defined against, and whether and how it is possible to combine interpretation with observation and critique in the sense of situating social phenomena within the range of possibilities for how things could be otherwise.
References
Alexander, J.C. (1987). Twenty Lectures. Sociological Theory Since World War 2. Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press.
Alexander, J.C. (2008). Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program: The Human Sciences and Cultural Sociology. Cultural Sociology, 2(2), 157–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975508091030
Boeckh, A. (1877). Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften. Leipzig: Teubner.
Bortolini, M., & Cossu, A. (2020). In the Field but Not of the Field: Clifford Geertz, Robert Bellah, and the Practices of Interdisciplinarity. European Journal of Social Theory, 23(3), 328–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431018823140
Brown, D.K. (1990). Interpretive Historical Sociology: Discordances of Weber, Dilthey and Others. Journal of Historical Sociology, 3(2), 166–191. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.1990.tb00095.x
Cossu, A. (2021). Clifford Geertz, Intellectual Autonomy, and Interpretive Social Science. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9, 347–375. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00085-8
Dilthey, W. (1977). The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of Life in: Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding. Den Haag: Nijhoff. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9658-8_3
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Geertz, C., & Micheelsen, A. (2002). “I Don’t Do Systems”: An Interview with Clifford Geertz. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 14(1), 2–20. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006802760198749
Grafton, A. (1981). Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44, 101–129. https://doi.org/10.2307/751054
Guryeva, I., Mazayeva, O., & Kruglikovai, M. (2016). W. Dilthey as an Expert Historian. SSH Web of Conferences, 28, 01044. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20162801044
Hamann, J. (2014). Die Bildung der Geisteswissenschaften. Zur Genese einer sozialen Konstruktion zwischen Diskurs und Feld. Konstanz/München: UVK.
Horstmann, A. (1997). Wozu Geisteswissenschaften? Die Antwort August Boeckhs. Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/1575
Krause, M. (2024). Scientificity before Scientism: The Invention of Cultural Research in German Studies of Antiquity 1800–1850. Theory and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-024-09543-w
Marchand, S.L. (2003). Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Paidipaty, P. (2020). “Tortoises all the Way Down”: Geertz, Cybernetics and “Culture” at the End of the Cold War. Anthropological Theory, 20(1), 97–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619899747
Rebenich, S. (2021). Die Deutschen und ihre Antike. Eine wechselvolle Beziehung. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta.
Spoerhase, C., & Dehrmann, M.G. (2011). Die Idee der Universität: Friedrich August Wolf und die Praxis des Seminars. Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, 1, 105–117. https://doi.org/10.17104/1863-8937-2011-1-105
Weber, M. (1985). Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik. In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (pp. 214–215). Tübingen: Mohr. (Original work published 1906)
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Monika Krause
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
