Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically…

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

— Clifford Geertz

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand…

— Clifford Geertz

“One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds…

— Clifford Geertz

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…

— Clifford Geertz

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

— Clifford Geertz

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a…

— Clifford Geertz

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…

— Clifford Geertz

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

— Clifford Geertz

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

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it…

— Clifford Geertz

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

— Clifford Geertz

“What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data…

— 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…

— Clifford Geertz

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

— Clifford Geertz

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on…

— Clifford Geertz