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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
Africa
North
Students
Understand
Hard
Going
Time
Africans
Convincing

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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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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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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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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 never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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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 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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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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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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[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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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
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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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