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Life and career

Born in San Francisco on August 23, 1926, Geertz served in the US Navy in World War II from 1943 to 1945. He received a bachelor of arts in philosophy from Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1950 and a doctor of philosophy in anthropology from Harvard University in 1956.

At Harvard University he studied in the Department of Social Relations with an interdisciplinary program led by Talcott Parsons. Geertz worked with Parsons, as well as with Clyde Kluckhohn, and was trained as an anthropologist. Geertz conducted his first long-term fieldwork together with his wife, Hildred, in Java, Indonesia, in a project funded by the Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he studied the religious life of the small, upcountry town of Mojokuto for two-and-a-half years (1952 to 1954), living with a railroad laborer's family. After finishing his thesis, Geertz returned to Indonesia, visiting Bali and Sumatra, after which he would receive his PhD in 1956 with a dissertation entitled Religion in Modjokuto: A Study of Ritual Belief In A Complex Society.

In the course of his career, Geertz received honorary doctorate degrees from around fifteen colleges and universities, including Harvard, Cambridge, and the University of Chicago; as well as awards such as the Association for Asian Studies ' (AAS) 1987 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Following his divorce from anthropologist Hildred Geertz, his first wife, he married Karen Blu, another anthropologist.