Matteo Bortolini is associate professor of sociology at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World at the University of Padova (Italy). An historical sociologist of ideas and intellectuals, he is currently committed to writing a full biography of the late American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), with a special focus on Geertz’s ethnographies in Bali, Java, and Morocco. His first article from this project is ‘A twenty-four hour job’. Hildred and CliffordGeertz’s first foray into the field and the scholarly persona of the ethnographer.’