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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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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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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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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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto 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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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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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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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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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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I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
Clifford Geertz
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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
Clifford Geertz
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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
Clifford Geertz
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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.
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] 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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
Clifford Geertz