Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

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.

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

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

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.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

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