Matteo Bortolini is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Padua, and a 2024-2025 Consortium Research Fellow.
With the help of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, I have been able to travel to three archives in the Northeastern United States to advance research for my multi-year project of a biography of the influential American anthropologist, Clifford J. Geertz, jr. (1926-2006). Working on a biography of Geertz’s friend and collaborator, sociologists Robert N. Bellah (published in 2021 by Princeton University Press under the title A Joyfully Serious Man), I learned that the story of a scholar’s life might be a privileged vehicle not only to reflect on collective and systemic processes of expert knowledge production (my own specialization as a historical sociologist), but also to disentangle a number of exquisitely theoretical problems. General sociological questions as the relationship between intellectual creativity and the social context of its emergence; the connection between the changing worldview of the individual and wider historical and cultural processes; and the relationship between the political, moral, and cognitive aspects of scientific and humanistic knowledge are all topics that a well-conceived biography might explore in depth, relating personal, institutional, and macro-historical elements in a better and a deeper way that the commentary of texts or a partial, “intellectual” biography might do.
Obviously enough, archival work is the cornerstone of said enterprise: personal papers such as correspondence and fieldnotes and institutional documents from the many organizations and corporations that had to do with Geertz (and vice versa) are scattered in various libraries and archives, mostly in the USA. In the past I have visited repeatedly the Hanna Olborn Gray Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago where the papers of Clifford Geertz are stored. The Consortium fellowship allowed me to access three different archives which proved crucial for my research.
My first stop was in Cambridge, MA, where I visited the Harvard University Archives and the Tozzer Library of the Harvard Department of Anthropology. Clifford Geertz was a graduate student at the Harvard Department of Social Relations between 1950 and 1955, and had a life-long relationship with one of his mentors, the influential sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). Moreover, Geertz was a student of the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960)—with whom he collaborated on the project that produced the famous Kroeber-Kluckhohn volume on definitions of “culture” and the so-called “Harvard Values Study”—and a lifelong acquaintance of another famed sociologist, David Riesman (1909-2002). The papers of all these individuals are stored at Harvard, along with the departmental papers of Social Relations. During my time in Cambridge I was able to visit the Harvard University Archives and look for documents from these collections, as well as from the papers of anthropologist J. O. Brew (1906-1988), in search of traces of the “young Cliff Geertz.” I could see some departmental records regarding Geertz’s career as a grad student, his correspondence with his mentors and academic friends, and was able to recover his doctoral dissertation—“Religion in Modjokuto” (1957)—in its entirety. At Tozzer Library I was also able to obtain a photocopy of an important document written in the late 1940s by Parsons et al., “Towards a Common Language in the Area of the Social Sciences,” which is considered as the early foundation of the “SocRel” program of “basic social science”—an abstract combination of sociological, anthropological, and psychological theory that strongly impacted on Geertz and his understanding of social science as a boundless, interdisciplinary endeavor that he brought with him and frequently reworked during his whole intellectual trajectory.
I then moved south to the Special Collections of Columbia University, New York City. There I dug the papers of sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910-2003), who served as an informal advisor and a member of various committees at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Geertz was a professor from 1970 to his death in 2006; of the Lionel Trilling Memorial Seminar, of which Geertz was a speaker and a discussant at various times; the papers of Lewis Corey (born Louis C. Fraina, 1892-1953), a political activist who also was a professor of Geertz’s at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, OH); and a number of smaller collections where correspondence and other exchanges with Geertz were stored. The Merton Papers were interesting not only for Merton’s correspondence with physicist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), a longtime collaborator and friend of Geertz’s at the Institute, but also because Merton was a member of two important ad hoc committees: the one that confirmed Geertz’s appointment as the first IAS professor in social science (1969-1970), and the one constituted to review the appointment of Robert Bellah as the second Institute professor in social science in 1972-1973, a nomination that sparked an unprecedented academic scandal—at Columbia I found a number of private documents regarding the so-called “Bellah Affair.” In the other collections I was able to find documents pertaining to very different moments of Geertz’s career: the correspondence between Corey and various Antioch alumni, including Geertz, as they moved from college to graduate studies; the correspondence between Geertz and the editors of the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences from the mid-1960s, when the anthropologist was already a well-known and respected intellectual; and the documents and correspondence pertaining to a number of ceremonial and seminarial occasions at Columbia in the 1990s, when Geertz was a (or maybe the) superstar social scientist in the USA. During my time in New York City I also had the chance to visit the Special Collections of the New York Public Library, and see some of the papers of The New York Review of Books, a prestigious journal with which Geertz collaborated from the late 1960s to the time of his death (literally: he was writing a review for the NYRB on his deathbed). Here I found and scanned some of his correspondence with the Review editor, Robert Silver.
The third and final institution I visited during my research trip was the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY. This organization, beautifully immersed in the woods of the Hudson River Valley, is home to the papers of a number of American philanthropic foundations and research organizations. As many other social scientists trained and grown professionally during the Postwar period, Geertz was a lifelong recipient of Ford Foundation grants, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the Ford Foundation was the single most important institution for both his intellectual career and the constitution of the main organizations in which he was embedded as a scholar. During my stay at the Rockefeller Center Archives I focused on two main topics: Geertz’s research projects in Indonesia at various times and their relative grants; and the activity of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which was funded by the Ford Foundation both at the time of its creation in 1970 and for a host of particular projects in the 1980s and the 1990s. As a graduate student, Geertz did his ethnographic fieldwork in Java, under the aegis of a MIT-Harvard collaboration called “the Modjokuto project” (1952-1954), which was lavishly sponsored by the Ford Foundation; later on, the same organization financed Geertz’s second fieldwork in Indonesia, this time in Bali and Sulawesi, in 1957-1958. But it was in 1970 that the most interesting collaboration between the Ford Foundation and Geertz was born, when the former asked the latter to take a trip to Indonesia to survey and evaluate the state of the social sciences, which it had funded for decades. Geertz thus took a two-month trip to Indonesia and wrote a report containing a number of suggestions to ameliorate the training of social scientists and organize research on the basis of local “stations” manned by senior and would-be scholars—a plan that was implemented and evaluated in the ensuing decade. The Ford Foundation, along with the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, was also responsible for the financing of the Institute for Advanced Study School of Social Science, created in 1970 by the Institute’s director, economist Carl Kaysen (1920-2010), with Geertz as its first professor. During my stay at the Rockefeller Archive Center I was able to collect a wealth of documents pertaining to all these moments of Geertz’s trajectory. Unexpectedly, I was also able to survey and scan a massive chest of documents from the Social Sciences Research Council papers regarding Geertz’s participation in the South-East Asia Research Committee in the mid-1970s, a crucial episode to understand the connections and relationships in the field of South-East Asian Studies in the USA.
This Consortium-funded trip has been crucial for my research and also allowed me to visit Geertz’s widow and friends in Princeton, NJ, where I met with my editor, who pushed me to stop doing research and start writing. Back to Italy, I am extremely grateful to all the archivists and librarians who helped me with professionality and kindness. My most grateful thanks go to the Consortium for the fellowship I was granted and the multiple occasions it spawned, among which the online seminar with other fellows, which gave me intellectual nourishment and more than one idea. It is rare to find an institution so committed and “gentle” toward its research fellows.
Now I just have to write the book.
Written in Padova, Italy, on April 13, 2025