Short Bio
Hildred Geertz has done extensive fieldwork in Java, Morocco, and Bali. She has recently completed more than two years of fieldwork research in the village of Batuan on the Indonesian island of Bali. Working in the same village that was studied in the 1930s by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Professor Geertz has focused her study on the interconnections between different Balinese art forms and how and why such forms have changed through time. The effects of economic development and tourism on Balinese artistic endeavor were also investigated. The first book on this work, Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, was published in January 1995 (University of Hawaii Press). In 2004, The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant Village was also published by the University of Hawaii Press. Professor Geertz is the author of The Javanese Family, coauthor with Clifford Geertz of Kinship in Bali, with Clifford Geertz and Lawrence Rosen of Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society, and has recently edited State and Society in Bali. Professor Geertz teaches courses on the history of anthropological theory, the anthropological study of life stories, the anthropology of art, and the ethnographer's craft.