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 GeertzOne of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one
Clifford GeertzPeople keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.
Clifford Geertz[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 GeertzBelieving, 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 GeertzI think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
Clifford GeertzHas feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue
Clifford GeertzCultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.
Clifford GeertzI don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done
Clifford GeertzI think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
Clifford GeertzThe point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford GeertzI agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical
Clifford GeertzMy instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
Clifford GeertzA 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 GeertzAs 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 GeertzThe North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.
Clifford GeertzThere is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down
Clifford GeertzIt 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 GeertzIf I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code
Clifford GeertzI do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now
Clifford GeertzYounger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology
Clifford GeertzAnthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is
Clifford GeertzI had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.
Clifford GeertzIf 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 GeertzUnderstanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
Clifford GeertzThe way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
Clifford GeertzI think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
Clifford GeertzI'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 GeertzIt'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
Clifford GeertzAnthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
Clifford GeertzI don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.
Clifford GeertzI've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
Clifford GeertzI'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
Clifford GeertzI 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