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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
Arguing
Fit
Facts
Place
Ever
Anthropology
Text
Argue
Surely

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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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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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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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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 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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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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 don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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.
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'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
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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Culture is public, because meaning is
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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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
Clifford Geertz