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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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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
World
System
American
Stills
Seems
Still
Best
Think
Thinking
University

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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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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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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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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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I don't think things are moving toward an omega point I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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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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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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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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.
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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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I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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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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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 don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done
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