In 1972, Hildred became the first chairperson of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University, and thus the first woman chair of a department at Princeton, a position in which she served for many years. She was named Professor Emeritus in 1998.
Hildred did extensive fieldwork in Morocco, and in Java and Bali, Indonesia and returned to Indonesia repeatedly during her career to conduct the research which helped fuel her extensive list of publications. She completed more than two years of fieldwork research in the village of Batuan on the island of Bali. Working in the same village that was studied in the 1930s by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, she focused on the interconnections between different Balinese art forms and how and why such forms have changed through time. She investigated the effects of economic development and tourism on Balinese artistic endeavor.
The first book from the research in Batuan, Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, was published in January 1995 (University of Hawaii Press). In 2004,The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant Village was also published by the University of Hawaii Press. Among her other works, Professor Geertz is co-author with her former husband Clifford Geertz of Kinship in Bali (University of Chicago Press, 1975), and co-author with Clifford Geertz and Lawrence Rosen of Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (Cambridge University Press, 1979). Most recently, in 2017, at the age of 90, her book, Storytelling in Bali, was published by the Dutch publishing house Brill.
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