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

More quotes by Clifford Geertz

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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 think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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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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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
Clifford Geertz
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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
Clifford Geertz
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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
Clifford Geertz
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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
Clifford Geertz
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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
Clifford Geertz
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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
Clifford Geertz
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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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