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… — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him. — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it… — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
