Anthropology Quote by 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 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 to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households … writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.””
About This Quote
Source Book: The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz, 1973
Ethnographers confront tangled, ambiguous cultural data that must be deciphered and articulated despite its complexity and opacity.
In simple terms: Ethnography is decoding messy, hidden cultural patterns.
Key Takeaway
Embrace systematic, patient analysis of cultural details.
Themes
culture
methodology
interpretation
complexity
observation
Mood
analytical
curious
reflective
Type
scholarly
observational
When to use this quote
- fieldwork
- interviewing
- ritual observation
- kinship mapping
- household surveys
Key Concepts
symbolic anthropology
ethnographic method
interpretive analysis
Questions to Reflect On
- How do you navigate ambiguous cultural signals?
- What strategies reveal hidden cultural structures?
A Different Perspective
Complexity may obscure clear conclusions, risking misinterpretation.
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![“[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.” quote by Clifford Geertz](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/53a/clifford-geertz-11500_attitude_culture-denotes-an-historically-transmit_747021.jpg)
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