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Ben White
INTRODUCTION
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10. Peddlers and Princes (1963b), a comparative study of entrepreneurship cast in the language
of modernization and take-off theory, has not stood the test of time; The Social History of
an Indonesian Town (1965), in my view one of Geertzs best-written books, attracted little
notice outside of Indonesian studies.
11. The book is a largely unrevised version of Geertzs 1956 PhD thesis (supervised by Cora
Dubois), minus the introductory and concluding chapters.
12. The book has literally less than two dozen citations and no bibliography, and makes only
passing reference to a few previous studies on Indonesian society and two general works on
Mohamedanism.
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grandfather was arrested once by the Dutch and taken to Bragang and put into jail because
of his ilmu [science] all his pupils walking along behind him as he was led in. When they
returned home, they found him there in the house ready to teach, and it turned out that he was
in both places at once . . . (Geertz, 1960: 89)
Joyos tall tale, relayed neutrally in simple prose and without further comment or interpretation, is admitted, not as a curiosity, but as something that
reasonably passes between two persons (Siegel, 1995: 94); I talked to Joyo
on the corner the other night places the reader right there, listening to Joyo
over Geertzs shoulder, and invited to reflect on what he says, making the
overall effect of the episode unforgettable (Anderson, 1995: 20). This being
there approach to field research and writing is a source of the great evocative power of Geertzs work, but also of some of its weaknesses. As critics
were quick to note, The Religion of Java embodied quite serious problems
in Geertzs depiction of the Javanese social world, and the place of Islam in
that world.
In this and other works, Geertz distinguished three main aliran (streams)
or cultural types which reflect the organization of Javanese culture: the
santri (orthodox, modernist), abangan (Javanist, syncretist) and priyayi (Indic, Hindu-Buddhist) varieties of Javanese Islam (Geertz, 1960: 4). This
tripartite horizontal social cleavage is put forward with typical Geertzian
panache, as too apparent to be missed by even the most positivist sociologist (Geertz, 1965: 124). Both Indonesian and foreign scholars were quick
to point to Geertzs conflation of horizontal (religious orientation and world
view) and vertical (social class) axes of social distinction, both of which are
equally important in Javanese society, and which do not coincide but cut
across each other; priyayi refers to a distinction of social class (opposed to
wong cilik or common people) rather than of religious culture, and priyayi
may be either orthodox or syncretist Muslims (Cruikshank, 1972; Bachtiar,
1973; Hefner, 1987; Koentjaraningrat, 1960). This is an early example of
the reluctance to recognize the importance of distinctions of class and power
which runs like a red thread through Geertzs work.
Geertzs determination to explore everyday Islam through ethnographic
study of the practices through which ordinary Muslims experienced their
religion (Hefner, 1999: 14), was a healthy reaction to prevailing Orientalist
traditions of historical and literary (textual) scholarship on Islam. However,
Geertz seems to have accepted uncritically his modernist santri informants
narrow views of what is really Islamic, dismissing the religious practices of
abangan and priyayi as Hindu-Buddhist and un-Islamic. He thus embraced,
perhaps unwittingly, an updated version of colonialisms comfortable, Orientalist vision of Islam as a thin, late-deposited cultural veneer floating
loosely on the bedrock of real eastern culture, and in this way contributed
to the relative marginalization of Islam in Indonesian (and more generally
Southeast Asian) studies, which later scholarship has had to redress (Hefner,
1999: 1116).
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Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (1963a) set the agenda for much subsequent research on social change in
rural Java for the next two decades. The book is not directly based on field
research research findings from Mojokuto or other locations are not
referred to at all but on a few, mainly Dutch, publications on Indonesian
colonial history. Using statistics from 1920 to show a positive relation between sugarcane production, population density and per-hectare rice yields,
and doing history backwards to figure out how the situation characteristic
of this later period could have been produced (Geertz, 1963a: 70), Geertz
argued that the Javanese response to colonial pressures on production and
population growth had consisted of a combination of labour intensification in
subsistence production, and increased complexity on both the technical and
the social side of agriculture. Geertz invoked the concept of involution, the
overdriving of an established form in such a way that it becomes rigid through
an inward overelaboration of detail (ibid.: 82) 13 (contrasted, therefore, with
evolutionary or developmental patterns of change) to depict the cultural
response of Java and other regions of inner Indonesia to Dutch colonial
policies, made possible by their ecological setting. Irrigated rice terraces,
he argued, can respond to labour intensification almost indefinitely without
loss of soil fertility, but with only stable or declining per capita output, and
this allowed a symbiotic rotation of the main export and subsistence crops
(sugarcane and paddy) from the early nineteenth century until Indonesian
independence and beyond.
Agricultural change thus consisted mainly of involutionary technical hairsplitting and unending virtuosity in pregermination, transplantation, more
thorough land preparation, fastidious planting and weeding, razor-blade harvesting, double-cropping, a more exact regulation of terrace flooding, and the
addition of more fields at the edge of volcanoes (ibid.: 778). The hallmark
of Javas involuted rural society of the 1950s was a relative social-economic
homogeneity of village communities, encapsulated in the phrase shared
poverty, 14 achieved by dividing the economic pie into a steadily increasing
number of minute pieces through the elaboration of traditional land-tenure
and labour relations, mechanisms through which the agricultural product
was spread, if not altogether evenly, at least relatively so, throughout the
huge human horde which was obliged to subsist on it (ibid.: 97); this elaboration being matched and supported by a similar involution in rural family
life, social stratification, political organization, religious practice, as well
13. The term involution is borrowed from Kroebers student Alexander Goldenweiser (1936)
who had applied it in the 1930s to Maori woodcarving.
14. Geertz claimed his use of the term shared poverty was an allusion to Winston Churchills
characterization of communism (Geertz, 1984: 527), though many have considered it more
likely borrowed from Boeke.
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In all his early work Geertz was preoccupied, like his teachers and mentors
at Harvard, MIT and Chicago, with the problems of modernization. Agricultural Involution, Peddlers and Princes and the integrative revolution all
make frequent reference to the modernization theories of Parsons, Rostow
and Shils. While firmly wedded to their ideas on development, Geertz was
increasingly uncomfortable with their positivistic approach to social science
epistemology and method and it was inevitable that he would make an explicit break with this tradition. His Cambridge and Chicago years also saw
the emergence of fierce debates on the concept of culture. In the 1960s, as
the younger generation tried to make sense of Marxism and Levi-Straussian
structuralism, North American anthropology became the site of polarized
struggles and stand-offs between the advocates of a (positivist, materialist)
science of culture (Harris, 1968, 1979) on the one hand, in which human affairs are essentially caused by the ways human beings cope with nature and
on the other a more humanistic, mentalist, qualitative approach which saw
humankind as spinning ever more complex webs of signification through
autonomous processes of the symbolic faculty (Wolf, 1984a: 148). All of
Geertzs publications of the 1960s show a clear alignment with the symbolic
approach, although he preferred to give his version of it another name.
Once at Princeton that island of upmarket composure (Geertz, 2000c:
53) and secure in his reputation, Geertz finally freed himself from his
uneasy relationship with the modernization theorists, threw down the gauntlet
against the functionalist and positivist science represented by his Harvard and
Chicago mentors, and argued eloquently, forcefully and often for what he
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become a major (and now perhaps, dully repetitive) strategy of both writing
and analysis in ethnographic, historical and literary scholarship (Marcus,
1999: 106).
These two essays sent a tidal wave across the disciplines, by showing:
how to take a piece of culture a ritual, a tall tale, a performance, a symbol, or an event
and treat it as text . . . Liberated from the rigours of explanation and able to take as a focal
text any piece of the social world, great or small, historians . . . , literary critics . . . and even
policy analysts . . . were freed to put culture centre-stage. (Swidler, 1996: 300).
Geertz thus located culture and ethnography squarely within the semiotic turn
in anthropology, and the general revival of intellectual interest in hermeneutic (meaning-centred) approaches in many other disciplines. But he also
distanced himself implicitly from the more rarefied schools of symbolic and
cognitive anthropology, and structuralism, that treat culture as purely a symbolic system, and thus run the danger . . . of locking cultural analysis away
from its proper object, the informal logic of actual life (Geertz, 1973: 17). In
another equally well-quoted passage (later forgotten by many of his followers) he argues: If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of
what happens, then to divorce it from what happens from what, in this time
or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, and
from the whole business of the world is to divorce it from its applications
and render it vacant (ibid.: 18).
For the next decade, while the Indonesia specialists, irritated by his apparent carelessness and disregard for evidence, engaged in a long season of
Geertz-bashing, Geertz himself emerged as north American anthropologys
superstar (a position formerly occupied by Margaret Mead, who died in 1978)
and its chief ambassador to other disciplines, with major influence on the
other social sciences, literary studies, philosophy, and beyond (Sewell, 1999:
35).
THE THEATRE STATE IN BALI
Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980), Geertzs most
important work on Bali, is the only one of his Indonesia books written after
he had abandoned modernization theory, although many of its main ideas had
been sketched out in earlier publications (Geertz, 1966a, 1977; Geertz and
Geertz, 1975). Negara is also the only one of Geertzs works which makes
significant use of the work of Indonesian scholars. 18
18. While Geertz was revered among Indonesian scholars, he seems to have had a very low
opinion of their work. In 1972, in an influential consultancy report for the Ford Foundation
on the state of the social sciences in Indonesia, Geertz characterized Indonesian intellectual life as centralised, over-organised, spasmodic, practical, and strongly influenced by
economists, and social science training as bookish, speculative, and . . . philosophical or
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This bold vision required Geertz to make the heroic assumption that elderly
informants interviewed in the late 1950s could reliably recall conditions of
precolonial Bali, more than a half-century earlier, and also that no important
structural changes had occurred in Bali from the fifteenth century until the
Dutch conquest in 19068. It is thus actually a kind of anti-history, ostensibly situated in time but greatly underplaying historical change (Errington,
2007: 196). As with Agricultural Involution, subsequent detailed work by
various authors (in this case, with colonial archives and court manuscripts)
has eroded Geertzs claim that Balis royal elites were not involved in precolonial village rule, irrigation organization, taxation and the like. They suggest,
instead, that what Geertz saw as classical Bali was, in fact, the very result
of 20th century colonial policy and ideology (Schulte Nordholt, 1981: 474):
Anthropologists like Geertz and [Stephen] Lansing have, for reasons of their own, overlooked
the role of the king as a ruler . . . The kings were dispossessed of their power to manage and
control irrigation, manpower, taxes, and adjudication by the bureaucratic colonial state . . .
In sum, the kings were left with the roles that anthropologists have labeled the theatre state
and the peasants with the democratic irrigation model. (Hauser-Schaublin, 2003: 170)
even doctrinal (Geertz, 1974: 365, 369). Those who have worked in Indonesia during this
period will recognize the truth of much of Geertzs assessment. On the other hand, he seems
to have retained from his Yogyakarta days twenty years previously the pith-helmet view
of Indonesian academics avoiding real field research, in favour of a brief study trip in
search of written records, or an interview or two, a generalized summary of the accessible
literature on the subject, or a fish-net type of fact-gathering survey (ibid.: 369). This
sweeping dismissal did no justice to the pioneering village-level research of many Indonesian academics and their students during the 1950s and 1960s, including path-breaking
efforts at what is now called participatory action research (White, 2005: 11320), which
Geertz does not appear to have read, never mentioning them in his own work.
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Paradoxically, the moment when history and other disciplines began to take
serious notice of Geertzian anthropology was precisely the moment when
anthropologists began to question it (Rabinow, 1986: 2412). William Sewell,
a social historian, encapsulates the edgy relationship between Geertz and
his anthropological colleagues:
The positivists criticize Geertz for abandoning . . . scientific values in favour of the more
glamourous or alluring qualities of interpretive method. The post-modernists, by contrast,
reproach him for not pushing his interpretive method far enough in particular, for failing to
subject his own interpretive ethnographic practice to critical interpretation. The materialists,
finally, criticize him for his neglect of history, power, and social conflict. (Sewell, 1999: 356)
Geertz argued that ideology (Geertz, 1964), religion (Geertz, 1966b), common sense (Geertz, 1975), art (Geertz, 1976), and many other aspects of
19. Geertz, letter to the author, 3 January 1985, referring to his (1984) response to critiques of
Agricultural Involution.
20. See for example his response to critiques of The Theatre State (Geertz, 2003) and of his
views on post-colonial and post-socialist states (Geertz, 2004).
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social life and ideas are cultural systems, and (as we have seen) that culture itself is a general system of symbolic forms, to be understood in their
actual practice. But he never explained precisely what he thought symbols
are, what he really meant by systems of symbols, or how they should be
analysed (Lieberson, 1984: 11); indeed he proclaimed, late in life: I am an
ethnographer . . . from beginning to end; and I dont do systems (Geertz,
2000a: x).
On the Geertzian method, Elizabeth Colson noted in an early review that
Geertz s ethnography does not provide a model for other anthropologists
or sociologists of lesser talent to follow since he proceeds from an intuitive
grasp of what is important and reaches his conclusion with a flourish that
conceals the tedium of the procedures (Colson, 1975: 6378). A great deal of
debate around Geertzian interpretivism has centred around the lack of clear
criteria for evaluating alternative cultural interpretations, or intuitive grasps
of what is important. In the mid-1980s Geertz joined the debate by turning
his talents as a literary critic on to his own discipline, most notably in Works
and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988a). Taking selected works of
Claude Levi-Strauss, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski and
Ruth Benedict, he exposed their distinctive styles of writing in new criticism
mode, and asked where lay their capacity to persuade readers . . . that what
they are reading is an authentic account (Geertz, 1988a: 143). Arguing in this
and other writings that anthropology is ultimately a literary and rhetorical
vocation, Geertz came perilously close to arguing that the best interpretations
of culture and social life are simply the best-written ones, a position taken
up by various post-modernist authors and carried to extremes from which
he had to distance himself. Geertz thus provided fuel for the debate among
postmodernists around ethnographys double crisis of representation and
of legitimation (Brewer, 2000: Ch. 2; Clifford, 1988; Clifford and Marcus,
1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 4576).
Despite Geertzs warning against those varieties of hermeneutics which
divorce culture from the whole business of the world, this seems to have
been forgotten by many of his followers, who continue to neglect issues
of power, interests, economics, and historical change . . . in favour of simply
portraying the native point of view as richly as possible (Marcus and Fischer,
1986: 77; cf. Hefner, 1990: xiii). This has led some scholars to question the
ability of interpretive frameworks to explicate the things we most wish to
understand such as contemporary processes of domination, displacement,
marginality and violence (Steedly, 1999: 432).
The fact that social historians, who are professionally concerned with questions of transformation over time, should have been so strongly influenced by
Geertzs insistently synchronic work, is something of a paradox. Geertzs
cultural systems do appear somewhat impervious to change, but the Geertzian
approach did open the door to modes of historical enquiry and exegesis based
on thick description, at a time when social history was gaining in popularity. If historians want to combine this with diachronic analysis, however,
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they need to adopt a different theory of culture than Geertzs, focusing not
on the assumed unity of cultural systems but on multivocality and internal differentiation as sources of change (Sewell, 1999). Both historians and
anthropologists have argued that Geertzs vision of cultures as systems of
shared symbols (and associated practices) blinded him to questions of social
differentiation, social conflict, and associated negotiations and contestations
over meanings. Who in society gets to spin the webs of significance, and
who gets caught in the web? These questions bring us into areas of enquiry
which thick description cannot so easily reach, and raise questions about
Geertzs approach to politics.
In general, Geertz appeared indifferent to the trend to place issues of power
and history more centrally in anthropology, 21 as reflected in Roseberrys
(1982) critique of his work on Bali and Asads (1983) critique of his approach
to religion. Geertzs own political stance was more or less that of the liberal
North American humanist; he rarely took public stands or joined campaigns:
my own general ideological position is largely the same as that of Aron,
Shils, Parsons and so forth; . . . I am in agreement with their plea for a civil,
temperate, unheroic politics (Geertz, 1973: 200)
Geertzs avoidance of any serious discussion of the Indonesian mass murders of 19656, and what they mean for our understanding of Indonesian
politics, is both puzzling and revealing. The bulk of the killings occurred in
Geertzs two fieldwork regions of Central/East Java and Bali. Some weeks
after the crushing of a bungled leftist coup attempt in Jakarta (which killed
twelve persons in total), an orchestrated anti-Communist backlash resulted
in the massacre of hundreds of thousands by the army and army-trained
militias. In the years that followed Geertz alluded only in passing to the
killings, with a weary resignation, in which striking insights are encompassed in turns of phrase full of the kind of detachment and wryness that
has angered his younger critics (Marcus, 1999: 107, fn 15). In a 1973
postscript to his (pre-1965) article on primordialism, Geertz described the
killings as having been done in Java at least, mainly along . . . primordial lines pious Moslems killing Indic syncretists (Geertz, 1973: 282).
On Bali, where the killing was relatively more severe than in any other region, Geertz wrote in the landmark cockfight article: if one looks at Bali
. . . also through the medium of its cockfights, the fact that the massacre
occurred seems, if no less appalling, less like a contradiction to the laws
of nature (ibid.: 452). Such cultural accounts of the massacres became
untenable as the years passed and more became known: it is clear that
the military bears the largest share of responsibility and the killings represented bureaucratic, planned violence rather than popular, spontaneous violence (Roosa, 2006: 28). On Bali, Geoffrey Robinsons historical account
of political conflict along class, caste and ideological lines offers a powerful
21. A key mover in this trend was Eric Wolf (192399), Geertzs near-contemporary and another
GI Bill beneficiary (Wolf, 1982, 1999; see Gledhill, 2005)
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By his own account Geertz wrote all his work by hand, very slowly about
a paragraph a day and never wrote drafts: I write from the beginning
to the end, and when its finished its done . . . I would not advise that other
people write this way (in Olson, 1991: 5). The result is a unique, dense prose:
erudite, meandering, seductive, often playful and self-deprecating, difficult
to ignore: Almost everyone initially gets side-tracked by the visibility and
distinctiveness of Geertzs writing style, which is like Cyrano de Bergeracs
nose. It is conspicuous, it is spectacular, but . . . it is best just to ignore it, for
the sake of getting on with a discussion of his ideas (Shweder, 2005: 2).
From about the mid-1970s onwards, when Geertz was more or less finished with fieldwork and became a full-blown essayist, something seemed
to happen to his writing style as the self-conscious flourishes threatened to
take over the substance (Anderson, 1995: 20). Local Knowledge, the second
volume of essays written between 1974 and 1982 (Geertz, 1983), did not
develop his central position on culture and interpretive anthropology but
consisted mostly of general reflections on dissimilar topics, in prose which,
for all its irreverence and occasional brilliance, is too often digressive and
clotted with metaphor, tending to a self-conscious virtuosity that is at first
immensely attractive but in the end forced and almost oppressive. Drugged
into a kind of exhilaration by his racing sentences . . . one sooner or later
realizes that one has no clear idea of his view (Lieberson, 1984: 11).
A few years later Works and Lives (Geertz, 1988a) provoked Edmund
Leach to vent his irritation at Geertzs habit of tacking long, comma-riddled
lists (of names, places, events, schools of thought) on to every point: every
point of argument is reinforced as if it needed to be supported by a thesaurus. The resulting garrulity quickly becomes intolerable (Leach, 1989:
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Despite his skills in ethnographic field work, Geertz was an awkward and
somewhat reclusive person, and many found his erudition and encyclopaedic
knowledge intimidating, although he got on well with students, preferring
to teach undergraduates. Certainly not a born teacher, he could also inspire,
as recalled by Robert Darnton who taught a Princeton undergraduate course
with him for many years:
He talked too fast and mumbled into his beard so badly that the students found it difficult
to understand him . . . The rumpled, disheveled figure at the far end of the table frequently
said nothing, apparently lost in its own thoughts. Then suddenly it would explode in talk. The
words would tumble out in a torrent, and we would sit back amazed . . . When his eyes lit up,
and the words poured out, he infected students with the excitement of the chase. (Darnton,
2007: 323)
The excitement which Geertzs work provoked, and his greatest legacy, lie
not so much in research findings as in his vision of culture and ethnography,
and in the evocative power of his writing. For four decades, he kept Indonesia
specialists and anthropologists inspired and irritated in equal measure by his
research, and a much wider group of intellectuals inspired by his vision: for
many social scientists Geertz literally changed the way we study culture
(Swidler, 1996: 299).
Geertzs legacy is not straightforward; it endures by way of, and through,
the critique that succeeded him (Marcus, 2001: 167). His polemical stands
for interpretation against explanation, for description against theory, and
22. This problem peaks in the tortured, manneristic prose of Fred Inglis, Geertzs sycophantic
intellectual biographer in the Key Contemporary Thinkers series (Inglis, 2000).
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against all general theory, were important at the time, to make the point.
But they are now largely red herrings (Swidler, 1996: 302). To express these
contrasts in either/or terms is to misunderstand the nature of both the natural sciences and of the humanities. Hermeneutics is not the only legitimate
approach to social analysis; good anthropological (and sociological, and historical) research combines and feeds on the dynamic tensions between particularistic thick descriptions and comparative enquiry into larger realities, 23
and it is the engagement of general theory and localized research that makes
anthropology a discipline (Hefner, 1990: xii): the most humanistic of the
sciences, and the most scientific of the humanities.
REFERENCES
(For a complete bibliography of Geertzs works, and other biographical material with links
C WorldCatalogue, available at
to archives and video interviews, see the HyperGeertz
http://hypergeertz.jku.at)
Anderson, Benedict OG. (1983) Old State, New Society: Indonesias New Order in Comparative
Historical Perspective, The Journal of Asian Studies 42(3): 47796.
Anderson, Benedict OG. (1995) Djojo on the Corner, London Review of Books 24 August:
1920.
Apter, David (2007) On Clifford Geertz, Daedalus 136(3): 11113.
Asad, Talal (1983) Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz, Man:
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(2): 23759.
Bachtiar, Harsja W. (1973) The Religion of Java: A Commentary, Majalah Ilmu-Ilmu Sastra
Indonesia 5(1): 85118.
Branch, T. (2007) Justice for Warriors, The New York Review of Books 54(6): 403.
Brewer, John (2000) Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Brown, Colin (1997) Economic Change in Southeast Asia, c. 18301980. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford
University Press.
Burawoy, Michael (1998) The Extended Case Method, Sociological Theory 16(1): 433.
Burawoy, Michael et al. (1991) Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern
Metropolis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burawoy, Michael et al. (2000) Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in
a Postmodern World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, James and George Marcus (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Colson, Elizabeth (1975) Review of Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Contemporary
Sociology 4(6): 6378.
Cruikshank, Robert B. (1972) Abangan, santri and prijaji: A Critique, Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies 3(1): 3943.
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of Books 54(1): 323.
Doornbos, Martin (1972) Some Conceptual Problems Concerning Ethnicity in Integration Analysis, Civilizations 22(2): 26383.
23. As argued powerfully, and practised, by Eric Wolf (see note 22) and Michael Burawoy (1998;
also Burawoy et al. 1991 and 2000).
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Errington, Shelley (2007) In Memoriam Clifford Geertz (19262006): An Appreciation, Indonesia 83 (April): 18998.
Geertz, Clifford (1956a) The Development of the Javanese Economy: A Socio-Cultural Approach.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for International Studies.
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and Africa. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
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IL: The Free Press.
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Approaches to the Study of Religion, pp. 146. London: Tavistock (also reprinted in Geertz,
1973).
Geertz, Clifford (1968) Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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reprinted in Geertz, 1983).
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1983).
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University Press.
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Studies 24(3): 3151.
Geertz, Clifford (1995) After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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