100+ Clifford Geertz Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

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

Topics: Thinking, Issues, Feminist

quote culture denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols clifford geertz Quotes

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

Topics: Structure, Skeptical, Agree

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

source: - Clifford Geertz (2017). “The Interpretation of Cultures”, p.111, Hachette UK

Topics: Strength, Religious, Pain, Personal Loss

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

Topics: Thinking, Impact, Feminism, Anthropology, Anthropologists

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

Topics: Writing, Style, Academic

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.89, Basic Books

Topics: Attitude, Mean, Men

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

Topics: Thinking, Humanity, Perception, Arts And Humanities

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

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.77, Basic Books

Topics: Thinking

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.5, Basic Books

Topics: Believe, Hero, Animal, Spun, Weber

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

Topics: Animal, Men, Significance

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

Topics: Intellectual, Literature, Fields, Anthropology

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

source: - René Girard, Clifford Geertz, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Stanford University. Committee on Modern Thought and Literature (1973*). “Myth and ritual in Shakespeare: A midsummer night's dream”

Topics: Turtles, Elephants, Stories

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

Topics: Hard Times, Students, Convincing, North Africa

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

Topics: Real, Anxiety, Matter, Anthropology, Subject Matter

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

Topics: Thinking, Neurology, Uncertain

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Topics: Mean, Thinking, Intuition

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.

Topics: Atmosphere, Fields, Alive, Disagreement

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

Topics: Writing, Research, Literature, Anthropology

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.

Topics: Mother, Horse, Brother

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

source: - "Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction" by Gary A. Olson, Journal of Advanced Composition 11.2, hypergeertz.jku.at. 1991.

Topics: Names, Numbers, Done, Anthropology, Anthropologists

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

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.43, Basic Books

Topics: Oddities, People, May

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

Topics: People, Different, Asking, Anthropology, Anthropologists

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

Topics: Book, Moon, Views

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

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.29, Basic Books

Topics: Analysis, Anthropology, Incomplete

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

source: - Clifford Geertz (2012). “Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics”, p.96, Princeton University Press

Topics: Home, Should, Wanted

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

Topics: People, Understanding, Culture

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

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.45, Basic Books

Topics: Humanity, May, Facts

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

source: - "A Life in Photos: Q&A with Sam Abell". Interview with Jenny Wells, uknow.uky.edu. July 20, 2012.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Anthropologists

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

Topics: Thinking, World, Being The Best, American Universities

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

Topics: People, Soul, Literature, Shelley

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

Topics: Facts, Arguing, Fit, Anthropology

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

Topics: Book, Writing, Mean

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

Topics: Writing, Done, Ends

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

Topics: Moving, Thinking, Diversity

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

source: - Clifford Geertz (2012). “Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics”, p.67, Princeton University Press

Topics: Destroying, Scholar, Employed

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

Topics: Life, Congratulations, Taken

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

Topics: Criticism, Research, Persuasive, Anthropology, Literary Criticism

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

Topics: Feminist, Female, Anthropology, Anthropologists

Culture is public, because meaning is

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.12, Basic Books

Topics: Culture

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it

Topics: Looks, Done, Amusing

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

Topics: Thinking, People, Consciousness

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

Topics: Paragraph, Satisfied, Sentences

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

Topics: Writing, Want, Information

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

Topics: Thinking, Trying, Hedgehogs

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

Topics: Should, Ethnography, Straightforward, Anthropologists

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

Topics: People, Hegemony, Want

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

source: - Clifford Geertz (2017). “The Interpretation of Cultures”, p.98, Hachette UK

Topics: Motivation, Powerful, Men

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

source: - Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.9, Basic Books

Topics: Data, People, Construction

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

source: - Clifford GEERTZ (2009). “After the Fact”, p.133, Harvard University Press

Topics: Believe, Writing, Balance

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

Topics: Philosophy, Political Opinions, Social

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