Every new intellectual movement needs to look back from time to time. Revisiting a point of origin can provide a way to clarify a sense of identity, define a mission, and generate profitable intellectual strategies. At its best such a pilgrimage does more than simply worship slavishly at the altar of the totemic ancestor. Rather there will be an effort to reconfigure a legacy to fit present needs and to generate critical readings that have the somewhat unfair benefit of hindsight. This is not an activity of disrespect. The greatest tribute that can be paid to a thinker of a prior generation is to take them as a living interlocutor rather than as a fossil. For the growing field of interpretative sociology Clifford Geertz stands out as a scholar worthy of the closest attention. At once inspirational and frustrating, he is a writer who urgently needs to be thought through and thought over, or, put another way, fought through and fought over. Here I undertake this task via a particular strategy, looking at his output not in the aggregate but in miniature. I suggest that we might leverage some wider insights by first paying close and critical attention to Geertz’s single greatest masterwork.
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Similar content being viewed by others NotesGeertz, Clifford. 1973a. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York. Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973d. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” pp. 412–53 in The Interpretation of Cultures.
Geertz, Clifford. 1968. Islam Observed. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press.
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1984. Theoretical logic in Sociology, Vol. 4. The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973b. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture” pp. 3–30 in The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 10.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris. Plon.
Barthes, Roland. 1968. Elements of Semiology. New York. Hill and Wang.
Clifford, James. 1983. “On Ethnographic Authority” Representations 1, 2: 118–46.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 1986. “Hermes’ Dilemma: the Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description” pp. 51–76 in James Clifford and George Marcus, ed., Writing Culture. Berkeley. University of California Press.
Alexander, Jeffrey. 1987. Twenty lectures: Sociological Theory since World War II. New York. Columbia University Press.
Tomashevsky, Boris. 1965. “Thematics” pp. 61–95 in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, ed., Russian Formalist Criticism. Lincoln, NB. University of Nebraska Press, pp. 62–3.
Durkheim, Emile. 1912. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Paris. Alcan.
Eichenbaum, Boris. 1971 [1925]. “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story” pp. 227–70 in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, ed., Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, p. 231.
Jakobson, Roman. 1971 [1935]. “The Dominant” pp. 82–7 in Matejka and Pomorska, Readings in Russian Poetics.
Freud, Sigmund. 1955 [1914]. “The Moses of Michelangelo” pp. 211–36 in James Strachey, ed., Sigmund Freud Standard Edition. Vol. 13. London. Hogarth Press, pp. 211, 213.
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See also Alexander, Jeffrey, and Philip Smith. 2001. “The Strong Program in Cultural Theory: Elements of Structural Hermeneutics” pp. 135–50 in J. Turner, ed., Handbook of Social Theory. New York. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Jeffrey C. Alexander Philip Smith Matthew Norton
Copyright information© 2011 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Philip Smith, and Matthew Norton
About this chapter Cite this chapterSmith, P. (2011). The Balinese Cockfight Decoded: Reflections on Geertz and Structuralism. In: Alexander, J.C., Smith, P., Norton, M. (eds) Interpreting Clifford Geertz. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118980_3
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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