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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
Powerful
Symbols
Uniquely
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

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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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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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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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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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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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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 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 never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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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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[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'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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Culture is public, because meaning is
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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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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.
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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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