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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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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
Moon
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Books
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Book
Nowhere

More quotes by Clifford Geertz

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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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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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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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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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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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 don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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
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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 never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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.
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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Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
Clifford Geertz
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I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
Clifford Geertz