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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
Time
Africans
Convincing
Africa
North
Students
Understand
Hard
Going
More quotes by Clifford Geertz
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.
Clifford Geertz
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.
Clifford Geertz
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
Clifford Geertz
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
Clifford Geertz
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
Clifford Geertz
If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
Clifford Geertz
What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
Clifford Geertz
[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.
Clifford Geertz
I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
Clifford Geertz
I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
Clifford Geertz
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
Clifford Geertz
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.
Clifford Geertz
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
Clifford Geertz
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford Geertz
I don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
Clifford Geertz
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.
Clifford Geertz
I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done
Clifford Geertz
I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
Clifford Geertz
My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
Clifford Geertz
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.
Clifford Geertz
