Via the AoIR list this morning, I heard that Clifford Geertz has died of heart surgery complications at the age of 80.

I’ll never forget the epiphanic moment I had when I was introduced to ‘thick description’ as an undergraduate via Geertz’s essay Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, which opens like this:

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there.

‘Malarial and diffident’ – I always thought it was just brilliant to drop that in there.

But then you get stuff like this:

This crosswise doubleness of an event which, taken as a fact of nature, is rage untrammeled and, taken as a fact of culture, is form perfected, defines the cockfight as a sociological entity. A cockfight is what, searching for a name for something not vertebrate enough to be called a group and not structureless enough to be called a crowd, Erving Goffman has called a “focused gathering”-a set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow. Such gatherings meet and disperse; the participants in them fluctuate; the activity that focuses them is discreet-a particulate process that reoccurs rather than a continuous one that endures. They take their form from the situation that evokes them, the floor on which they are placed, as Goffman puts it; but it is a form, and an articulate one, nonetheless. For the situation, the floor is itself created, in jury deliberations, surgical operations, block meetings, sitins, cockfights, by the cultural preoccupations-here, as we shall see, the celebration of status rivalry-which not only specify the focus but, assembling actors and arranging scenery, bring it actually into being.

Brilliant. Reading it again, I realise how influenced I’ve been by Geertz, especially in the very long sentence department, which maybe isn’t such a great thing given the contemporary aesthetics of academic writing–we seem to have banished parenthesis of all kinds: commas; complex clauses chained together, like so; brackets, and dashes. 😉

More on remembering Geertz all over the place, but see especially space and culture, which links to a good post with lots of links at savage minds.