Clifford Geertz Quotes

75 quotes in 695 categories

• 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,…
• [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…
• I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
• What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
• If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
• 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…
• I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
• 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…
• I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
• 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…
• I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain
• 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 instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
• Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should
• I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
• If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code
• I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
• I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style
• I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now
• I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical

Browse Clifford Geertz Quotes by Category