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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

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
Rhetorically
Constructed
Historically
Socially
Meaning

More quotes by Clifford Geertz

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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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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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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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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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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I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
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 think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
Clifford Geertz
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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
Clifford Geertz
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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
Clifford Geertz
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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.
Clifford Geertz
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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
Clifford Geertz
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Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
Clifford Geertz
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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.
Clifford Geertz
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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
Clifford Geertz
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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.
Clifford Geertz
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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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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
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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
Clifford Geertz
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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
Clifford Geertz