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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
Also
Accused
Writing
Central
Field
Research
Fields
Literature
Making
Often
Anthropology

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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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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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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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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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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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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 don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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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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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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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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 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 think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
Clifford Geertz
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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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Culture is public, because meaning is
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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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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