Clifford Geertz Quotes

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Culture is public, because meaning is

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code

What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.