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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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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
Men
Toward
Expressed
Perpetuate
Life
Attitude
Pattern
Conceptions
System
Conception
Embodied
Knowledge
Symbols
Meanings
Means
Patterns
Inherited
Culture
Communicate
Historically
Form
Develop
Symbolic
Denotes
Mean
Forms
Attitudes
Transmitted

More quotes by Clifford Geertz

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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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Culture is public, because meaning is
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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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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 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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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 we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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.
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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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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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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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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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 never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with 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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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 write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done
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