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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

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
Argue
Surely
Arguing
Fit
Facts
Place
Ever
Anthropology
Text

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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 don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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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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 think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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 think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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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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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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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 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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Culture is public, because meaning is
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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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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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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.
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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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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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