Recollections of An Itinerant Career

Of the many foreign social scientists who have carried out fieldwork in Indonesia since the second world war, few have gone on to reach the eminence of Professor Clifford Geertz. His books, written largely on the basis of his work in Java and Bali in the 1950s, have become classics. They have inspired a vast amount of debate and subsequent research on issues as diverse as the anthropology of religion and the economics of agricultural development, both in Indonesia and in other parts of the developing world. In 1986 Professor Geertz spent six months revisiting his original fieldwork site in Pare, East Java. During a visit to Canberra in late 1987, he gave the following interview to Anne Booth and Jamie Mackie. The interview began with a question on how the original decision came to be made for a group of Harvard graduate students to mount a team study of Pare in 1952.