Between 1960 and 1970, Geertz served as a research scholar,[4] a lecturer,[5] and an assistant professor[2] of social anthropology at the University of Chicago.
She provides detailed ethnographic data to show how the most central unit: the nuclear family, stabilizes and sustains Javanese society.
[12] Geertz conducted fieldwork in Bali for a year in 1957 where she continued her research of kinship systems.
[13] This book refutes the popular view by the time: an emphasis on autonomous characteristics of kinship.
It argues that the kinship system should be examined as a subsystem that inherits particular cultural patterns, ideas, and symbols of the society.