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 GeertzI think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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 GeertzI think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
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 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 Geertz