Larisa Astakhova

Clifford Geertz's Interpretative Anthropology of Religion: Religious Practices as Webs of Meaning

Larisa Astakhova - Associate Professor, Chair of Department of Religious Studies, Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Kazan, Russia, lara_astahova@mail.ru

Clifford Geertz, well known as the founder of "interpretative anthropology", is still not fully acknowledged within the field of Russian religious studies. His works, however, may be of interest not just for his fieldwork methodology but also for the essential role of religion in Geertz' social theorizing. His understanding of religion evolved, but in general he saw it as a net of meanings that allow people to transcend the everyday and to overcome existential finitude.

Keywords: C. Geertz, symbolic anthropology, interpretative anthropology, religion.

CLIFFORD Geertz noted back in the 1980s that "today, all areas of knowledge have their own names"1. Geertz's arguments about the essence of scientific research, when humanitarian research does not always match the spirit of science itself, and sometimes even turns out to be only "literary constructs" 2, reflected the difficult situation in the American academic community associated with contradictions-

1. Geertz, C. (1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, p. 154. New York: Basic Books.

2. By criticizing American and British anthropologists, Geertz analyzed their works, describing research and discoveries like literary works, which allowed him to act as a "literary critic". As a result," Discoveries " are revealed to the reader as literary constructions. Details-

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the relationship between institutional concepts and the real needs of science. The American academic world has gone through a difficult path to overcome this gap, including through the efforts of K. Geertz himself; these processes are painfully familiar to the Russian academic reader. Religious studies did not escape this either.

In recent decades, religious studies in Russia has been undergoing rapid development. During this period of qualitative growth and active expansion of the diversity of approaches, religious studies, defending not only the importance of studying religion as a phenomenon, but also the very right to independent existence, articulates its object and subject. Such processes, as before in the academic world of other countries, are often associated with a kind of "canonization" of the "founding fathers", which is a reflection of the dynamics of the development of the actual religious studies scientific and disciplinary"niche".

All paradigms that co-exist within the framework of religious studies contribute to a single scientific field. And often in the dynamics of this process, individual names and even paradigms are forgotten due to their belonging to a different "disciplinary space" (or due to the usual "labeling").

In our opinion, this is exactly what happened to Clifford Geertz due to his unconditional membership in the anthropological workshop: while recognizing his methodological developments for fieldwork, including the principle of "rich description"that has become almost basic for the empirical method of the humanities, 3 religious scholars do not always recognize Geertz's "dense" developments as conceptually defining. This does not mean that Geertz is not read or known in Russia: you can find a number of analytical articles devoted to Geertz's interpretive anthropology and his method4.

For more information, see Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford University Press.

3. To be fair, although Geertz is credited with the use of "rich description" as a new "key to understanding culture", he refers to Gilbert Ryle, who also has a very vivid example of "winking boys", which Geertz used (Geertz K. K.). Interpretation of Cultures, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004, p. 11).

4. Among the names of domestic researchers of K. Girtz's work are N. L. Elfimov, Ya. V. Chesnov, V. N. Kilkeev, and others. See for example: A. L. Elfimov Reflections on the Fate of Science // Ethnographic review. 1996. N 6; Elfimov A. Ob antropologii i gumanitarnykh naukakh: nekotorye zametok o tvorchestve K. Girtsa [On anthropology and humanities: a few notes on the work of K. Girts]//New Literary Review. 2004-N70; Elfimov A. Clifford

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What is the reason for this "loss" of K. Girtz5 on the way to the formation of religious studies and right now, when the existing knowledge and developed concepts are of formative importance for the growing Russian religious studies in terms of methodological completeness - and because of this fact they are so necessary? Let's try to answer this question by analyzing Geertz's concept of religion.

On the one hand, religious studies is moving in the same direction as American cultural anthropology during the twentieth century, relying in its analysis on one of three ways to explain socio-cultural changes: historical, structural-functional, and comparative. For American anthropology, this was justified by the fact that for a long time it was perceived as more of a natural science discipline. And if at the beginning of the XX century F. Boas made a" humanitarian graft " of anthropology, connecting it with linguistics, then K. Geertz continued this process, introducing historical, literary and philosophical hermeneutical elements into the once positivist-naturalistic anthropology.

On the other hand, in religious studies, these methodological approaches are gradually becoming almost paradigmatic in the eyes of the community of scientists who share them: we can recognize the existence of communities of scientists who consider each of these methods not just basic, but only scientific (which raises the question of the scientific nature of other methods, but this is not what will be discussed now).

Geertz also moved in line with the academic vector of his time. His scientific priorities were reflected in the change of his concepts of culture: at the first stage - as a value-oriented action, later, at the second stage-from description to understanding and, further, to the textual form of the " web of meanings "and, at the third stage - to the need for"interpretation of cultures".

Geertz is one of those researchers who entered the active phase of theorizing, already having field work experience.

Geartz: Interpretation of cultures//Ethnographic review. 1992. N 3. It is worth noting that K. Geertz was mainly considered by ethnographers and anthropologists.

5. Anticipating doubts about the" forgotten " K. Geertz in Russian science, we note that this name is not only not found in most encyclopedic dictionaries (especially on religious studies), at least as an independent article, but, moreover, it was often even printed with an error. See, for example: Iser B. What is literary anthropology? The difference between explanatory and exploratory fiction //Logos. 1999. N2. pp. 185-214.

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Like many researchers of his generation, he did not belong to the type of so-called armchair researchers, anthropologists-theorists. He began his theoretical generalizations during the period of structural functionalism and worked, undoubtedly, under the influence of E. Durkheim and in the context of theoretical pressure from T. Parsons; this important methodological remark will be confirmed a little later, but for now we will agree that: "Edward Shiels, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner obviously work under the influence of Durkheim, without even feeling the need to quote... For these authors and their readers, Durkheimian logic is completely unproblematic and is taken for granted"6. We are talking about the perception of Durkheim's theory and its analytics as basic, as well as about a new reading of Durkheim's legacy: a careful, hermeneutically oriented analysis and interpretation of its "Elementary Forms", which is a kind of current in social theory, called by J. Alexander "new Durkheimianism" 7.

At the same time, the first stage of his theoretical research outlined above was related to the analysis of social action with a value orientation. Geertz admits that analyzing the role of religion is "not just a matter of finding correlations between specific ritual actions and specific social phenomena in the mundane realm, although such correlations certainly exist..."8.From his point of view, religious systems are qualitatively different already at different levels of their development, and even a close level of development of the societies in which these religions were formed does not guarantee the achievement of proximity of the compared religions - and therefore the analysis of each of them as a special symbolic system seems to Geertz more promising.

Summarizing the theoretical origins of Geertz's works, we note that his essay "Religion as a cultural system", in his own understanding, should be studied with the support of the "four whales":

6. Rothenbuhler, E.W. (1992) "The Liminal Fight: Mass Strikes as Ritual and Interpretation", in J. C. Alexander (ed.) Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, p. 66. Cambridge University Press.

7. Smith, P. and Alexander, J. C. (1996) "DurkheinTs Religious Revival", The American Journal of Sociology 102 (2): 583.

Girts K. 8. Interpretatsiya kul'tury [Interpretation of Cultures], Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004, p. 144. For the convenience of the reader, we will rely on the generally accepted translation, and links to page-by-page citations will also be provided for this publication.

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Durkheim's arguments on the nature of the sacred, Weber's understanding methodology, Freud's parallels between personal and collective rituals, and Malinowski's study of the difference between religion and common sense"9. The anthropologist immediately points out that these are only starting points for a broader conceptual analysis. It is no accident that the very understanding of culture - as a historically transmitted system of meanings embodied in symbols, which is considered Geertz's classic definition-in his understanding is nothing more than a conceptual framework, but not a dogma, that is, a framework that both he and some other researcher can form in completely different stylistic directions. "Sharing M. Weber's point of view," Geertz writes, "according to which man is an animal hanging on a web of meanings woven by himself, I take culture for this web, and its analysis for the work of science, not experimental, engaged in the search for law, but interpretive, engaged in the search for meanings." 10 Geertz extends the same principle to other definitions - religion, symbol, meaning/meaning, etc. The dogmatic character for Geertz is the concept of meaning, which he places in the foundation of the concept of religion.11
* * *

So, what is religion for Geertz? It would seem that the presence in Geertz's fundamental work "Interpretation of Cultures" of a separate chapter devoted to religion should remove the problems associated with understanding the researcher's position on this symbolic system. However, reading only this essay will not reveal the full essence of Geertz's interpretive method in the eyes of an attentive reader, nor will it clarify his views on religion. While the anthropologist attaches great social significance to religion as a phenomenon, he does not forget it.

Girts K. 9. Interpretation of cultures. p. 105

10. Ibid., p. 11

11. K. Geertz's arguments about meaning/meaning allow us to recall the influence of his works as a theoretical resource on the formation of a" strong program " of cultural sociology, which, like cultural anthropology, goes back to the Durkheimian tradition. In this connection, we recall the discussion between cultural anthropologists of the USA and European social anthropologists about the correlation and assessment of the significance of the concepts of "culture" and "society": which of them is the dominant system, and which is the subsystem?

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analysis of almost any cultural phenomenon. The concept of the sacred is included by Geertz in the interpretation of symbols and meanings. Strictly speaking, this is justified due to the fact that it is impossible to separate religious and social symbols, especially in the communities that the anthropologist's attention is directed to; Geertz does not separate religion and society, but includes religion in the system of formation and reproduction of society - reproduction in the broad sense of the word. That is why the discussion of religion is scattered in almost all of his articles, essays and comments.

At the same time, the essay "Religion as a cultural system" in the eyes of Geertz himself is intended to clarify his point of view on what is meant by religion and the reasons for this understanding. It is precisely because of this assumption that this chapter of his book deserves special attention.

Geertz begins his reflections with a functionalist thesis about sacred symbols, namely: "The function of sacred symbols is to synthesize the ethos of a people - that is, the type, character and style of its life, the distinctive features of its ethics and aesthetics-and its picture of the world, that is, its idea of the order of things, the most comprehensive ideas about the structure mira"12. Through religious faith and practice, ethos is recognized and accepted intellectually as the ideal lifestyle and structure of everyday life; however, their sensory and emotional acceptance is also important. Of course, this statement may not be understood as unambiguously as Geertz himself understands it, if only because "sacred symbols" are interpreted by him again in the Durkheimian way, namely, they cannot always be correlated exclusively with the sphere of religion. However, this only emphasizes the indivisibility of the sphere of meaning in the author's description and in the eyes of the reader. At the same time, Geertz includes here not only (and not so much) sacred objects or certain actions, but shows that the meaning of a sacred symbol is much broader than the actual real position of a certain body in a certain space (where either the first or the second is sacralized) - this is the objectification of morality , aesthetic representations, and the structure of the universe, Thus, a religious system consists of a group of sacred symbols connected in a single whole.

12. Ibid., pp. 106-107.

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Geertz thus addresses the well-known problem of correlating what is observed with theory, as well as understanding what is observed properly; the idea that "religion coordinates human actions with a certain cosmic order and projects images of the cosmic order onto the plane of human experience" 13 he recognizes as not new, but at the same time points out the incompleteness of the mechanisms of interpretation, its disclosing data. Indeed, even today, fieldwork still mostly stops at the level of ethnographic description without interpretation, confirming the need for an interpretive theoretical anthropology.

Geertz's methodological framework is finally revealed in his definition of religion: religion is understood by him as "a system of symbols that contributes to the emergence of strong, comprehensive and stable moods and motivations in people, forming ideas about the general order of being and giving these ideas a halo of reality in such a way that these moods and motivations seem to be the only real ones"14.

In this definition, we find not only echoes of the crisis of ideas associated with the decline in trust in positivism in American social science that had already occurred at that time, which is expressed in a non-a priori understanding: motivations no longer "become real", but only "seem" to be so to the religious actor. There is also a direct opposition to his theory to the positivist paradigm, which is characterized by the understanding of religion as describing the social order: from Geertz's point of view, religion does not describe it, but forms it. Symbols in this definition are cultural models, social patterns, external sources and information carriers; however, models are not only "copying", but also "giving meaning", and therefore forming. "The complex of religious ideas that creates the image of a cosmic order is at the same time a commentary on the earthly world of social relations and psychological processes... But these views are more than a comment; they are also a template. " 15
Working with concepts for Geertz is working with a tool; in the process of this work, the author himself discovers both the advantages of the tool and its use.-

Girts K. 13. Interpretatsiya kul'tury [Interpretation of cultures], p. 107.

14. Ibid., p. 108.

15. Ibid., p. 143.

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as well as its defects. In the definition of religion, they separate activities, moods, and motivations that have a religious character: "memorizing a myth is as much a religious activity as amputating the phalanx of a finger" 16; not only the fact of the action itself becomes important, but also the predisposition with which the activity is performed, "psychological tendencies" that objectify feelings and motivations in the "thing", "that which is revealed", which can be understood as a religious quality. Religion, according to Geertz, forms, induces and supports motivation through sacred symbols, as a vector "a steady desire, a constant desire to perform certain actions and experience certain feelings ..." 17, and momentary, momentary, temporary moods.

In Geertz's eyes, man's dependence on symbols is so absolute that it is a crucial factor for his creative vitality; religion must provide a person with the ability to cope with panic when faced with the fact of human limitations - an awareness of the limits of analytical abilities, the limits of endurance (the fact of physical suffering), the limits of moral ideas. "The problem of Meaning is to affirm, or at least acknowledge, the existence of the incomprehensible, pain, and injustice in the plane of human life, while simultaneously denying that these irrational moments characterize the world as a whole."18 This again brings us back to the functional understanding of religion: the anxiety that engulfs a person when approaching borders must be eliminated, which is why religion is needed, "no matter how primitive it may be." Geertz is actually trying to explain how religion "supplies" resources for transgression-grounds for moving to the" other side " of suffering, mind, ethics; for understanding the world "before and after the border." Reconstruction of the universe is what religion does: "the symbolic functioning of religion as a cultural system should ensure, consolidate, and, as far as possible, protect against the inconsistent revelations of worldly experience." 19
Geertz's other essay, "Ritual and Social Change: The Javanese Example,"is also filled with theoretical reflections on religion,

16. Ibid., p. 113.

17. Ibid., p. 113.

18. Ibid., p. 127.

19. Ibid., p. 130.

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where the author evaluates the resources of functionalism in assessing a religious phenomenon and comes to the conclusion that functionalism impoverishes knowledge about religion, makes its reading one-sided. He finds the reason for this in excessive attention to the functional side of customs and traditions, the tendency to describe social homeostasis. At the same time, according to the anthropologist, it is necessary to monitor the disorganizing properties of rituals, the destructive moods that cover the participants of rituals, and the disintegrating side of the phenomenon as a whole, which does not always play a "positive role" in the existence of society. Geertz rightly sees the main problem that has emerged from this reading as the complexity of interpreting social change; moreover, he places the problem of religion within the framework of the tension between "culture" and "structure"already mentioned. In his essay, through the story of the funeral ritual of the boy Paijan, religion - through ritual-becomes not a pillar of integration, but, on the contrary, a disintegrating factor. The functional analysis criticized by Geertz turns out to be flat, static, without affecting the dynamically changing meanings of culture. Ritual, the author notes, should be interpreted not only through the prism of meanings, but also through understanding it as a social interaction. And from this point of view, a ritual is a response to a certain event, a provocation to destabilize social relations as a reaction to the already disrupted course of these relations. Thus, religion is already a symbolically active powerful mechanism that not only reflects, but also influences; moreover, it affects not only cultural, but also economic, political, and ideological changes in society: "When there is an event that requires ritual registration - a transition to a different stage of life, a holiday, a serious illness - the religious form that should be used in this case does not work for the benefit, but to the detriment of social balance. < ... > The disruption of the funeral of Pajan can be reduced in the end to one single reason: inconsistency between the cultural system of meanings and the modeling of social interaction, the discrepancy that arose as a result of the preservation in urban conditions of the religious symbolic system inherent in peasant social organization " 20. Thus, a religious ritual - in this case, a funeral-has become an occasion for political debate.

Girts K. 20. Interpretatsiya kul'tury [Interpretation of cultures], pp. 198-199.

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Geertz's concept is quite broad and includes individual statements, sometimes unarticulated, but implied: because of this, it can be difficult to confirm them with a short quote, it is necessary to read the entire essay. Thus, the thesis about the disintegrating function of religion is actually based on the idea of globalization, which was quite innovative for its time. This term is not directly mentioned in the paper. However, arguing that "rapid social changes have undermined the foundations of Javanese society"21, Geertz places a unified traditional society in a new environment, as a result of which "the people of Kompong are socially urban and culturally still rural"22.

Ritual in Geertz's interpretation appears to us as a sacral action, in the process of which the belief arises that religious concepts reflect reality and that religious prescriptions are reasonable.23 The need for a ritual is determined by the point of fusion of the worldview before and after the action, transgression and transformation of the sense of reality. Moreover, "by evoking a certain set of moods, motivations - an ethos - and creating a certain image of the cosmic order - a picture of the world - using the same set of symbols, the ritual action turns the aspect of 'models of something' and 'models for something' in religious beliefs into aspects that are interchangeable " 24.

It is interesting that Geertz remarks to M. Weber, who, being "too strongly influenced by the monotheistic tradition, in which all aspects of human experience should be considered as originating from a single source endowed with will"25, overly extends his "monotheistic" reflections - including to Eastern religions. However, similar doubts about the inclusiveness of the theory can be addressed to Geertz himself, since his reflections are based solely on observations of beliefs and practices that sociologists and religious scholars often do not consider it possible to call religions in full

21. Ibid., p. 191.

22. Ibid., p. 193.

23. Ibid., p. 131.

24. Ibid., p. 137.

25. Ibid., p. 124.

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in every sense of the word. It is not enough for religion to exist as a full-fledged system and the presence of a feeling "that moral intuition does not correspond to moral experience" 26.

In our opinion, the classification of religions from the point of view of K. Geertz deserves special consideration. He does not devote a special article to this issue, but in one form or another specifies various criteria that could be used to distinguish different types of religions. These reservations undoubtedly exist due to the uncertainty inherent in many social scientists who have not chosen the dominant principle of classification grounds, which is why they are of some value.

The anthropologist's arguments about the validity of the Weberian classification are found in the essay "Internal Conversion" in modern Bali, where "the difference in the relationship between religious beliefs and forms of social organization"is defined as a criterion27.From this point of view, Weber defines two opposite ideal types of religion in world history - "traditional" and "rationalized". Geertz, looking at this dichotomy, says that traditional religions, in general, consist of a chaotically formed circle of rituals, animistic images, a delineated circle of sacred objects, fragmentary and inconsistently connected. Geertz defines the main difference between traditional and rationalized religions of Weber as the problem of meaning: if in traditional religions it is presented fragmentally, then in rationalized religions we find a logical, universal and convincing harmony.

In another chapter of the book, however, Geertz classifies religions quite differently, one might say anthropologically, in contrast to Weber's sociological principle. Geertz mentions three types: tribal religions, mystical religions, and charismatic religions - according to the source of authority. In the first case, authority is stored in the "persuasive power of the traditional image system", in the second-in the "indisputable power of extrasensory experience", in the third - "in the attractiveness of a charismatic personality".

Geertz K. 26. Interpretation of cultures, p. 125.

27. Ibid., p. 202.

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There is no doubt that Geertz's classification is no less conditional than Weber's concept criticized by him. Those who have experience of the Other often have an appeal for believers, but the creators of religions rarely rely solely on the charismatic image. At the same time, experiencing a situation of experience can be caused by performing traditional patterns of religious behavior through practices. A number of religions meet the requirements of all three forms of religion, and it will be difficult to assign them anywhere; and this is especially true for the forms of religious syncretism described by Geertz himself, such as Javanese, in which the" religion of tribal peoples " is mixed with Islam and Christianity.

* * *

As we can see, the concept of authority is extremely important for Geertz, not only in his reflections on political and ideological processes, but also in his studies of religious life. Everyday life as a whole, as a product of culture, is reconstructed by Geertz as a system of authoritative meanings reproduced and transmitted from generation to generation. At the same time, this world is perceived as a dual reality - existing and unchanging as "Mount Everest", the scene and object of our actions.28
Yet Geertz does not believe that man lives in this symbolically rich world all the time. Here it is appropriate to recall A. Schutz and his concept of everyday life and everyday experience, which Geertz also refers to directly or indirectly, but regularly, when analyzing the concept of "attitudes" / "perspectives", as well as other terms describing the symbolic mediation of relations between an actor and a situation. The everyday world of everyday life, according to Schutz, is the most important "higher reality" for human cognition, and it is necessary to study this world using special, specific methods:"...Specific methodological schemes created by social scientists for a deeper understanding of social reality are more suitable for discovering general principles inherent in all human knowledge than similar schemes developed within the framework of natural sciences"29. Reasoning about everyday social experience, it is important to note that this is not the case.

28. Ibid., p. 129.

Schutz A. 29. Formation of the concept and theory in social sciences//American Sociological Thought, Moscow, 1996, p. 541.

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Schutz studied "how we understand each other, how a common perception and general idea of the world is formed." 30 According to Schutz, a person perceives everything that he encounters in the external world as certain types/classifications, in which socially conditioned knowledge is reflected. People are also types, or at least they appear to us to be types; therefore, given the varying degrees of anonymity with which these different types are perceived, the most important thing for interaction and for understanding the social world of a person is "we are a group" or "partners" (i.e., it is on them that a person is most oriented degrees). Understanding the Other is possible if, in order to achieve mutual understanding, we turn off individual perception of the situation and begin to evaluate others from the point of view of the Other, as we "typically" imagine it; in fact, we begin to play a typed role (individual characteristics can only come to light when they conflict with the actions prescribed by the role).

As a result, Geertz solves the problem of constructing the world through the concept of "perspective", defining it as a way of perceiving life, a way of seeing the world. There are four such "perspectives": the common sense perspective, the scientific perspective, the aesthetic perspective, and finally the religious perspective. Each of the last three " perspectives "calls into question the immutability of the world and its meanings; each of the" perspectives " is a way to rise above everyday life. And only common sense, like the "perspective of naive realism", is the way to accept the world as it is. Geertz agrees with Schutz on this point, saying that common sense is oriented pragmatically as a way of either subjugating the world around us, if possible, or adapting to it.

The "religious perspective" rises above everyday life, fitting it into the regime of all-encompassing truths and absolute reality. Geertz differentiates "religious actions" and "actions from other perspectives" based on the participants ' motivation and moods, and in fact - through the presence of that very transgression: the staging of a religious ritual by observers will look like an element of ethnography or an aesthetic spectacle, while for participants it is a "presentation". As a result, religious action is what gives authority to religion as a symbolic system in general and to each particular set of symbols in particular.

30. Istoriya sotsiologii v Zapadnoy Evrope i SSHA [History of Sociology in Western Europe and the USA], Moscow, 1999, p. 529.

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Thus, religion for Geertz is a symbolic system that is transcendent in relation to everyday life, correcting the meanings and concepts in crisis situations of subjective, everyday, ordinary, "daily" reality. The values that are in the field of conflict between the heritage of a cultural system and the inner experience of a person need to be correlated and corrected; it is this organizational and corrective function that Geerc assigns to religion, including it on a par with other cultural systems: science, art, ideology, etc.

Everyday life seems to be dialectical and discursive: "We have to live in both worlds: the world of everyday, ordinary reality with its palpable imperfections, and the cultural world through which we try to understand and overcome these imperfections." 31 And religion appears to the reader of Geertz as a mechanism of social control over human behavior, in any case - as a desire for a stable state, where modeling practices turns out to be an "instruction" to maintain everyday order. However, since the state of absolute stability of society, especially in the context of globalization, is impossible, religion constantly turns out to be a borderline factor, often a destabilizing one.

* * *

When concluding the review of a researcher's methodological analysis, most often they focus on the contribution that he made to the development of science. On the one hand, Geertz's place in the history of anthropology as a science is significant: "He was able to recreate in anthropology the necessary bridge between the social sciences and the humanities. Geertz succeeded in integrating the macrosociological kind of research with detailed ethnographic analysis, historical research, and philosophical knowledge. " 32 Postmodernists value Geertz for "deconstructing common sense," "its basic evidence and prejudices,"33 but consider him a postmodernist himself

31. Geertz, C. (1968) Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, p. 94. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Elfimov A. 32. Clifford Geertz: interpretation of cultures / / Ethnographic Review. 1992. N3. pp. 13-14.

33. Marcus, G. and Fisher, M. (1986) Anthropology as a Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, p. 137. Chicago, 1986.

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it would be a mistake: due to attempts to integrate the sciences, Girc is more ideologically related to the previous scientific tradition. On the other hand, interpretive anthropology meets the requirements of the time and is not just following the fashion for hermeneutics: dynamically changing social reality simply required new tools for understanding it.

However, as far as Geertz's contribution to the study of religion proper is concerned, it is still difficult to assess. Apparently, not enough time has passed to properly assess the significance of this direction for religious studies. But even now we can say that not only in the applied field, but also in the theoretical field of social sciences, K. Geertz has earned a worthy place by offering a new understanding of culture and religion, taking it beyond the rigid framework of previously existing paradigms - especially beyond the hyper-social Parson's structural-functional theory and then still influential positivist approaches. But, most likely, religious scholars will have to appreciate the legacy of K. Geertz in the future.

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Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Marcus, G. and Fisher, M. (1986) Anthropology as a Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, 1986.

Rothenbuhler, E. W. (1992) "The Liminal Fight: Mass Strikes as Ritual and Interpretation", in J. C. Alexander (ed.) Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, pp. 66 - 90. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, P. and Alexander, J. C. (1996) "DurkheinTs Religious Revival", The American Journal of Sociology 102 (2): 583 - 592.

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