States of Mind

Season 1 • Episode 11: Clifford Geertz • Watch with subtitles

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Episode 11: Clifford Geertz

May 7, 1983

In Victorian times armchair anthropologists regarded tribal man as a fossilised remnant of our primitive ancestors. Clifford Geertz, Professor of Social Science at Princeton, who has done extensive field work in Indonesia and Morocco, explains why he thinks that the magical rites of pre-literate people express a different, but by no means primitive, attitude to the world around them.

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