Stausberg/Theories, 1. Geertz: “Religion as a Cultural System”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) is widely acknowledged as one the most influential anthropologists of the twentieth century’s last four decades. Known for his programmatic (methodological-theoretical) idea of “thick description” (Geertz 1973, 1–30), his admirers herald him as an advocate of difference and particularism: “a master of distinctions who recoils at typologies, grand theories, and universal generalizations” (Shweder 2005, 1).