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… — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
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… — 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 collection—is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then… — Clifford Geertz Copy Share
