Gadamer's Hermeneutical Circle of Ontology and the Genesis of Interpretive Anthropology: The Thinking-Way of Truth and Method and It's Effective-History on Geertz's Beginning of Philosophizing

There is little doubt about the influence of Hermeneutics' thinking on the genesis of Geertz's interpretive anthropology philosophizing. But Hermeneutics' philosophizing itself has its own genesis and development, i.e. its beginning, the "hermeneutical circle" in Truth and Method from the prehistory of romantic hermeneutics, its "ontological turn". The problem is, which part of the development of hermeneutics' thinking has its key effect on the genesis of interpretive anthropology in The Interpretation of Cultures? The thematic context in the horizon of this question is: how is the genesis of Geertz's interpretive anthropology philosophizing and the development of Gadamer's thinking relate to each other and differentiate from each other. Under this thematic conciousness, this essay attempts to search into the basic argument of Truth and Method and the implied tendency of the "ontological turn" in such line of thought, and consequently to search Geertz's interpretive anthropology transformation and critical adoption of hermeneutical circle and its relation with the tendency of the "ontological turn". Therefore, this essay firstly tries to review, according to the question of understanding as the original question of Gadamer's thought, the basic conception of Truth and Method, i.e. of a person who is trying to understand as being-in-the-world, the method for it, and the philosophical hermeneutics as the line of thought. Based on this first point, this essay would secondly examine this work and outline the two approaches and their tension in the analysis of a person who is trying to understand, that is, the hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of a person who is trying to understand as being-in-the-world, and the hermeneutical circle analysis of a person who is trying to understand as concrete subjectivity, in order to find out: why Gadamer only mentioned about the philosophical hermeneutics' understanding process and went halfway to the "Platonic dialectic"? Thirdly, this essay also provides understanding to the inspiration of the holistic thinking-way of Truth and Method on Geertz's philosophizing and to Geertz's own transformation of it, i.e. concerning the original question of understanding to question of truth, with regards to the perspective of thinking, from a person who is trying to understand as being-in-the-world and its tradition and religional classics to effective-history consciousness and its historicality, and regard to the line of thought from cognitive anthropology to interpretive anthropology. Finally from the whole thematic context of t