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Culture is public, because meaning is

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
Meaning
Public
Culture

More quotes by 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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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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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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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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If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
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
Clifford Geertz
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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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
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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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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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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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[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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I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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.
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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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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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