Interpretative Anthropology

Interpretative anthropology names a major stream in disciplinary practice of the last fifty years. First articulated within the context of broader conversations about the analysis of symbols, interpretative anthropology came to be understood by many critics and supporters as a harbinger of the postmodernist turn of the 1980s. Yet on closer examination, interpretative anthropology, particularly as articulated by Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), was closely connected to earlier debates regarding humanism and social science in American anthropology that reached back to the interwar period and in some respects even earlier. Attention to the roots of the interpretative program in Harvard's Department of Social Relations (founded in 1946) shows interpretative anthropology to have been a creative reformulation of a particular stream of prewar American anthropology—a reformulation whose urgency stemmed largely from the postwar successes of a variety of scientific models of anthropological inquiry.