Book of a lifetime: The Interpretation of Culture by Clifford Geertz

From The Independent archive: Tessa Hadley reveals the shared logic that exists between literary and anthropological writing

Geertz’s reasoning doesn’t diminish the force of the symbolic systems he describes. For me it has the same satisfying sweetness as a story fitting home (Getty/iStock)

If you mapped out a novelist’s history in books, beloved and influential fictions would have to loom large in the foreground. 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.

From those books we derive the framework of our beliefs; the underpinning convictions that form our mindset and play through and around the witnessing, empathetic, dreaming parts of our perception. 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.

I love reading anthropology books. I suppose they seem to mirror the work that novels do, describing and analysing the precious minutiae of human interaction in particular worlds. 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. 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.