The Octopus Ride. Reading Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

In what follows, I create a pathway inside and around a famed and influ- ential collection of essays—Clifford Geertz’ s The Interpretation of Cultures (IC), first published more than fifty years ago. Not only is the book a testi- mony to the breadth of the scholar’s interests and his originality as a thinker, it is also a foundational text of interpretive social science and a touchstone in the Bildung of many social scientists. Trying to combine a few dimen- sions—the objective and the subjective, the material and the ideational, the historical and the contemporary—I take ink, paper, cardboard, and canvas seriously and talk briefly about the book in its materiality, taking stock of the differences between text and object(s). I then build on the fieldnotes I took during a cover-­ to-­ cover reading of IC in February 2025 to decode how Geertz constructed it. In the final section of the essay, I go back to 1973 and reconstruct the context of the volume’s initial reception in various fields to connect that moment with its continuing significance today, ending with a twist on a forgotten metaphor.