Walters has many more examples of historical works that make use of Geertz.

For a thorough and excellent discussion of Geertz's use of, and influence on, historians, see Walters, Ronald, “ Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and Historians,” Social Research, 47 ( 1980), 537–56 Google Scholar.

H., “ Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling Among the Gentry of Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 34 ( 1977), 239–57 CrossRef Google Scholar. See also Beeman, Richard, “ The New Social History and the Search for ‘Community’ in Colonial America,” American Quarterly, 29 ( 1977), 428–43 CrossRef Google Scholar Stannard, David, “ Death and Dying in Puritan New England,” American Historical Review, 78 ( 1973), 1306 CrossRef Google Scholar PubMed and Breen, T. In his introduction, Higham calls Geertz “virtually the patron saint” of that collection. See, for example, Higham, John and Conkin, Paul, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. In anthropology, as in novels, everything matters – the colour of a hat, the onset of the first menses, the name of the child, the rituals of social visiting.2. Reading about cock-fighting in Bali sharpens how well we see our own patterns of relationship, our own social ritual it draws the mind's camera back into a long shot, before plunging again into the thick of the detail. I suppose they seem to mirror the work that novels do, describing and analysing the precious minutiae of human interaction in particular worlds. And these shaping beliefs will always be at work in the stories we write, however obliquely, or at whatever level of conscious or unconscious deployment. From those books we derive the framework of our beliefs, the underpinning convictions thatform our mindset and play through and around the witnessing, empathetic, dreaming parts of our perception.

But books of ideas can be significant in a novelist's formation too - history or science or philosophy or whatever, depending on taste and training and accidental encounter. If you mapped out a novelist's history in books, beloved and influential fictions would have to loom large in the foreground.

The interpretation of cultures