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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.

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
Research
Fields
Literature
Making
Often
Anthropology
Also
Accused
Writing
Central
Field

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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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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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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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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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Culture is public, because meaning is
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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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 had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.
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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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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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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 think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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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What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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