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I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

Clifford Geertz

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Clifford Geertz
Age: 80 †
Born: 1926
Born: August 23
Died: 2006
Died: October 30
Anthropologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
San Francisco County
California
Clifford J. Geertz
Clifford James Geertz
Going
Time
Africans
Convincing
Africa
North
Students
Understand
Hard

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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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.
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The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
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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 as we say, sufferable.
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I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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Culture is public, because meaning is
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I don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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 and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
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I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done
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Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.
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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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