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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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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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If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology
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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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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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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things
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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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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Culture is public, because meaning is
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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 don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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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 an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it
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