Quotes by Clifford Geertz

About Clifford Geertz:

Clifford James Geertz is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Understanding 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 Geertz

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.

Clifford Geertz

The 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 Geertz

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.

Clifford Geertz

Anthropology 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 Geertz

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Clifford Geertz

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

Clifford Geertz

Has 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 Geertz

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical.

Clifford Geertz

I 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 Geertz

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.

Clifford Geertz

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

Clifford Geertz

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

Clifford Geertz

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.

Clifford Geertz

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

Clifford Geertz

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Clifford Geertz

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

Clifford Geertz

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

Clifford Geertz

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.

Clifford Geertz

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Clifford Geertz

Author Bio

  • NameClifford Geertz
  • DescriptionAmerican anthropologist
  • BornAugust 23, 1926
  • DiedOctober 30, 2006
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAnthropologist