Whereas social structure embraces economic, political and social life and its institutional forms, Mr. Geertz drew a careful distinction between culture and social structure, differentiating himself from functionalists like Lévi-Strauss, who believed that rituals, institutions and other aspects of a culture could be best understood by the purposes they serve. In one of his most widely cited essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” included in “The Interpretation of Cultures,” he analyzed the kinship and social ties that are constructed, emphasized and maintained in this form of ritual “deep play” as if they were “an assemblage of texts.” Geertz also wrote voluminously on his fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco. The Times Literary Supplement called the book one of the 100 most important since World War II. “Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning,” he wrote in his 1973 book, “The Interpretation of Cultures” (Basic Books). Geertz analyzed and decoded the meanings of rituals, art, belief systems, institutions and other “symbols,” as he defined them. Drawing on history, psychology, philosophy and literary criticism, Mr.
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