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

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

Clifford Geertz

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.

Clifford Geertz

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

Clifford Geertz

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.

Clifford Geertz

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.

Clifford Geertz

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Clifford Geertz

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

Clifford Geertz

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

Clifford Geertz

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

Clifford Geertz

The 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 Geertz

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

Clifford Geertz

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.

Clifford Geertz

Younger 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 Geertz

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

Clifford Geertz

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 Geertz

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 ...

Clifford Geertz

What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.

Clifford Geertz

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz

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

We're getting closer to our nature.

Clifford Geertz

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.

Clifford Geertz

Author Bio

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