Geertz conducted his first long-term fieldwork together with his wife, Hildred, in Java, Indonesia, in a project funded by the Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

There he studied the religious life of the small, upcountry town of Mojokuto for two-and-a-half years (1952 to 1954), living with a railroad laborer's family.

[4]: 8–9  After finishing his thesis, Geertz returned to Indonesia, visiting Bali and Sumatra,[4]: 10  after which he would receive his PhD in 1956 with a dissertation entitled Religion in Modjokuto: A Study of Ritual Belief In A Complex Society.

As part of the project, Geertz conducted fieldwork in Morocco on "bazaars, mosques, olive growing and oral poetry,"[4]: 10  collecting ethnographic data that would be used for his famous essay on thick description.

[citation needed] He was remembered by the New York Times as "the eminent cultural anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people’s lives.

"[12] Geertz's often-cited essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"[13] is a classic example of thick description, a concept adopted from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle which comes from ordinary language philosophy.

"[13]: 89 He was one of the earliest scholars to see that the insights provided by common language, philosophy and literary analysis could have major explanatory force in the social sciences.

[13] We cannot discover the culture's import or understand its systems of meaning, when, as Wittgenstein noted, “we cannot find our feet with them.”[13] Geertz wants society to appreciate that social actions are larger than themselves:[13] It is not against a body of uninterrupted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.

[13] Cultural theory is not its own master; at the end of the day we must appreciate, that the generality “thick description” contrives to achieve, grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstraction.

He would reflect an early leaning toward functionalism in his essay "Ethos, Worldview and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols", writing that "the drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs.

"[13]: 140 Geertz's research and ideas have had a strong influence on 20th-century academia, including modern anthropology and communication studies, as well as for geographers, ecologists, political scientists, scholars of religion, historians, and other humanists.

Furthermore, Asad criticized Geertz for operating according to a eurocentric view of religion that places import on signs and symbols that may or may not carry through in non-Christian religious cultures.