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

More quotes by 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
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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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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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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.
Clifford Geertz
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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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 written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
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.
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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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Culture is public, because meaning is
Clifford Geertz
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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
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 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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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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
Clifford Geertz
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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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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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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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