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The Interpretation of Cultures
Geertz's 1973 collection of essays — including Thick Description and the Balinese cockfight essay — that redefined anthropology as an interpretive discipline and provided the methodological vocabulary this volume applies to the AI transition.
The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) is Clifford Geertz's most influential work and one of the most widely cited books in the social sciences of the twentieth century. The collection gathers essays written across the 1960s and early 1970s that together articulate the interpretive program Geertz had been developing since his return from fieldwork in Java and Bali. The opening essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," provides the methodological foundation. The closing essay, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," offers the celebrated demonstration. Together they constitute the founding text of what came to be called symbolic or interpretive anthropology.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book appeared at a moment when the human sciences were ripe for methodological reconsideration. The functionalism and structuralism that had dominated mid-century anthropology were losing their explanatory authority. Cybernetic and ecological frameworks had their advocates but could not accommodate the full range