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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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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
Research
Point
Find
Anthropology
Persuasive
Replace
Literary
Criticism

More quotes by Clifford Geertz

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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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.
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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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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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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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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
Clifford Geertz
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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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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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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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[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 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 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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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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.
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