Book: The Interpretation of Cultures

Overview
Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) articulates an interpretive approach to anthropology that treats culture as a system of publicly shared meanings. Geertz rejects the notion that culture can be reduced to laws or fixed variables; instead he insists that culture consists of "webs of significance" spun by humans and that the anthropologist's task is to interpret those webs. The book gathers influential essays in which ethnographic detail and theoretical reflection are intertwined, presenting anthropology as close reading rather than social science in the positivist mold.
Geertz positions interpretation as both an art and a disciplined practice. He argues for a middle ground between mere description and sweeping theory: dense, context-rich accounts that reveal how people make sense of their world. Several chapters, now canonical, combine eloquent prose with careful ethnography to show how symbolic systems organize social life and how meaning is constructed and contested.

Key Concepts
The pivotal methodological concept is "thick description," borrowed and adapted from philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Thick description moves beyond cataloguing behavior to explain layers of context and meaning that make an act intelligible. A wink, for example, can be a reflexive muscle movement, a social signal, a joke, or an insult; thick description teases apart those possibilities and situates the act within local conventions and histories.
Another central idea is the semiotic view of culture: practices, rituals, and objects are treated as texts that can be read for their symbolic content. Geertz emphasizes interpretation over causal explanation, suggesting that understanding why people do what they do requires decoding the symbols through which they order experience. He also stresses the partial and provisional nature of ethnographic interpretation, likening the anthropologist's account to an essayistic act of reading rather than a definitive map.

Method and Examples
Geertz's essays model his method. "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" lays out the approach in theoretical terms, while "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" offers a vivid application: cockfights in Bali are analyzed as a highly codified performance that communicates status, kinship, male honor, and local cosmology. By attending to detail, who bets with whom, how spectators react, and the event's narrative framing, Geertz reconstructs the symbolic logic underpinning the practice.
Other essays, such as "Religion as a Cultural System," explore how rituals and beliefs function as systems of meaning that provide models of and for reality. Geertz reads religious symbols as vehicles that both express and shape social structures and individual dispositions. Across his studies, ethnographic narrative and theoretical interpretation are inseparable: description earns its "thickness" through analytical attention to context, language, and symbolic layering.

Legacy and Critique
The Interpretation of Cultures transformed anthropology and influenced cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, and beyond by legitimizing symbolic and interpretive methods. Geertz's prose and insistence on nuance encouraged researchers to privilege meaning, narrative, and local knowledge. His work opened pathways for reflexive, humanistic social science that values depth over quantification.
Critics have pointed to limits: the interpretive focus can underplay political economy, power dynamics, and material forces. Some argue that Geertz's essays valorize eloquent reading at the expense of systematic critique, leaving questions of causality and inequality insufficiently addressed. Nonetheless, the book remains a foundational statement about how to apprehend human worlds: attentive, context-rich, and conscious of the interpreter's own position in the act of meaning-making.