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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
Hard
Going
Time
Africans
Convincing
Africa
North
Students
Understand

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I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means
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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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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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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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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[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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Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
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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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It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
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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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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
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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'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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I don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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