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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.

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
Law
Significance
Weber
Culture
Believing
Interpretive
Science
Analysis
Webs
Take
Search
Max
Believe
Hero
Spun
Men
Therefore
Suspended
Meaning
Experimental
Animal
Heroic

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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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 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've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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 feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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'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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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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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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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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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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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 never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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