Matteo Bortolini

Eighteen years have passed since the death of the late American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), and the time is ripe to begin researching his life. My research project aims at producing two different sets of outputs: a narrative biography of Clifford Geertz and a number of scientific articles in which the network constituted by Geertz and his interlocutors will play as a case study to explore some theoretical puzzles in the historical sociology of ideas, intellectuals, and the social sciences. As a protagonist of at least two great revolutions in “the way we think about the way we think”—Postwar high modernism and the cultural turn in social science—Geertz was a member of a number of stellar scholarly networks, and thus gained full access to unprecedented material, ideational, and social resources, at various moments of his professional life. The exploration of the contexts and human situations in which he found himself is necessary to understand his dazzling ideas as the products, but also the causes, of a number of unique local knowledges that can only be understood in a fragmentary way—using his lives and ”the cultural equipment at hand” as tools to weave scattered events and facts and create some value from such a blend.