Clifford Geertz Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“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”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Thinking #Issues #Feminist

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

#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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Strength #Religious #Pain

“I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Thinking #Impact #Feminism

“I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Writing #Style #Academic

“Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.”
-- Clifford Geertz

“[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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Attitude #Mean #Men

“I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Thinking #Humanity #Perception

“We don't know what we think until we see what we say.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Believe #Hero #Animal

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Animal #Men #Significance

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

#Intellectual #Literature #Fields

“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”
-- Clifford Geertz

#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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Hard Times #Students #Convincing

“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”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Real #Anxiety #Matter

“I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain”
-- Clifford Geertz

#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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Atmosphere #Fields #Alive

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

#Writing #Research #Literature

“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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#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”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Names #Numbers #Done

“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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Oddities #People #May

“People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#People #Different #Asking

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

#Book #Moon #Views

“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Analysis #Anthropology #Incomplete

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

#Data #People #Construction

“If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#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.”
-- Clifford Geertz

#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”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Humanity #May #Facts

“I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist”
-- Clifford Geertz

#Writing #Thinking