克利福德·格尔兹（Clifford Geertz,1926—2006），1926年生于美国加州，在俄亥俄州安蒂奥克学院学习文学和哲学，1950年在该校获哲学学士学位。之后进入哈佛大学，师从C.克拉克洪学习人类学并于1956年获得人类学博士学位。曾先后在芝加哥大学、斯坦福大学、麻省理工学院、普林斯顿高等研究院社会科学部等著名学府讲学或担任教职。

作为象征人类学和解释人类学的代表人物，格尔兹以其在印度尼西亚和摩洛哥的田野工作为基础，对宗教、文化等领域的研究影响巨大，著有：《爪哇宗教》（1960）、《被信奉的伊斯兰教》（1968）、《文化的解释》（1973）、《尼加拉：19世纪巴厘剧场国家》（1980）、《地方性知识》（1983）、《论著与生活》（1988），《追寻事实》（1995）等，并先后获得了美国社会学会索罗金奖、美国人文－自然科学院社会科学奖、日本福冈“亚洲奖大奖”等多项荣誉。

格尔兹无疑是是近几十年来人类学界中最有影响的人物，但是其影响远不止此，在人类学之外，哲学、语言学、组织研究、文学批评等领域都可见格尔兹的影响，其“农业内卷化”、“地方性知识”、“作为意义体系的宗教”、“解释之解释”、“深描”等概念或方法不仅在人类学界广为流传，也被其他学科所引用。

The illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories-this is magic, that is technology-has long since been exploded. What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy self-absorption-time wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary innocence is long enough.