Joan Wallach Scott Rereads Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures 50 Years Later

In the journal Sociologica, Professor Emerita Joan Wallach Scott has written an essay on The Interpretation of Cultures, published in 1973, by Clifford Geertz, the first and founding Professor in the School of Social Science (1970–2000, Emeritus 2000–06).

The essay, “On Rereading Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures 50 Years after the Fact,” is split in two: first, a retrospective section in which Scott explains her first readings of the text; and second, her reaction 50 years later, now informed by a post-structuralist approach. 

In these two readings, Scott offers both a personal and historical narrative of Geertz’s influence, disciplinary disruption, and, ultimately, the relationship between politics and scholarship. In the end, Scott discusses Geertz’s “interpretive social science” and its influence on her own intellectual occupations, as well as the Institute’s School of Social Science, which she calls “his monumental and, so far, enduring institutional accomplishment.”

Faculty in the School since 1985, Scott has published groundbreaking work that has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history. Broadly, the object of her work is the question of difference in history: its uses, enunciations, implementations, justifications, and transformations in the construction of social and political life.

Volume 18 of Sociologica, where Scott’s essay is published, proposes a symposium titled “The Interpretation of Cultures at Fifty. Scholarly Dialogues on a Classic,” and includes an essay by Anne Taylor and past Member in the School of Social Science Jeffrey C. Alexander (1985–86), as well as a conversation between Giovanni Zampieri and past Member in the School Giovanni Levi (1985–86).