Clifford Geertz and his Look at Religion and Culture

Unquestionably, Clifford Geertz was one of the most important and influential contemporary Anthropologists. Trying to overcome the conflict between interpretation and explanation, he improved the intellectual position of anthropology amongst the humanities and social sciences. With this in mind, his position among Anthropologists can be compared with Max Weber as a Sociologist. Knowing Weber through the American Sociologist Parsons, he tried to apply an interpretative reading of culture and cultural phenomena. His attempts to clarify the relationship between «Society» and «Culture», is one of his valuable legacies. Pointing to culture as an independent entity and being concerned about its priority over society, he improved on an approach called Culturalist – Symbolist by some scholars. An efficient tool at his hand was the concept of ritual. Despite his popularity in other countries, it seems that Iranian students are not sufficiently informed about him. This article is a humble attempt to introduce some of his views and to show in which sense he should be seen as a promoter of an interpretative approach. In doing so, this article reviews his main ideas about culture and religion and through one of his popular experimental works, Cockfight, tries to show how he used a ritual as a text to interpret a culture.