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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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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
Religion
Acts
Moods
Order
Mood
Clothings
Formulating
Seems
Motivation
Clothing
Motivations
Long
General
Establish
Aura
Men
Seem
Realistic
Conceptions
System
Conception
Auras
Existence
Lasting
Pervasive
Powerful
Symbols
Uniquely

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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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I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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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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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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
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Culture is public, because meaning is
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I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things
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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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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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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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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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