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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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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
Quite
Sentences
Less
Condition
Write
Research
Live
Exist
Different
Balance
Writing
Conditions
Believe
Learning
Pursuing
World
Days
Formed

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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 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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Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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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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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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The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
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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 think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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 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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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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 never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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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I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
Clifford Geertz
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Culture is public, because meaning is
Clifford Geertz