The extent of theoretical contribution of Clifford Geertz has gone beyond the limits of anthropology in the United States and other historical centers of this science. Geertz’s approach is significant and influential not only in the sphere of interpretive anthropology (considering his fieldworks in South East Asia and North Africa) but also in many other branches of social sciences. Geertz brought a real methodological renovation with his “thick description” in a way that the etic participant observation of the researcher can be fit into the etic and indigenous view of things. This puts Geertz in a special place as that of Bourdieu and a few other thinkers of the late twentieth century such as Levi-Strauss. In this article we focus on the Geertzian approach to the religious phenomena which shows an evident influence from philosophers like Wittgenstein. This paper also attempts to show that the analytical model used by Geertz may be applied to understand phenomena other than religion in the social arena.
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