La Interpretacion de Las Culturas

Unlike the traditional approach to anthropology, which was governed by the working style of the natural sciences, Geertz proposes an anthropology closer to the human sciences, whose main task is not to measure and classify, but to interpret. In this way, Geertz restores the ideology of Kroeber and Boas, for whom it was a matter of reading human activity as a text and symbolic action as a drama in which the human capacity to express itself in a self-conscious rhetoric manifests itself.

Since the late 1960s, the discipline cultivated by Clifford Geertz has been called «symbolic anthropology». It is not a school, but a way of conceiving anthropological work. Geertz's conception of the symbolic is opposed to other ways of understanding symbolism, such as that of Marshall Sahlins, Victor Turner or Mary Douglas. His approach includes several variants, which require ways of interpreting at various levels.

Geertz's anthropology contributed to a fundamental turn in this discipline, which consists of relativizing the anthropologist's own point of view and questioning his conditioning and prejudices as factors influencing his work.

Like Lévi-Strauss, Geertz is a unique and unrepeatable creator and The Interpretation of Cultures is one of the major landmarks of contemporary anthropology.