Clifford Geertz Quotes

Quotes about:

• [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 Geertz

  Attitude, Mean, Men

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.89, Basic Books

  60 Copy quote

• 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.

  Clifford Geertz

  Believe, Hero, Animal

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.5, Basic Books

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Men, Animal, Significance

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.5, Basic Books

  37 Copy quote

• We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

  Clifford Geertz

  Thinking, Knows

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.77, Basic Books

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Understanding, Culture

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• One 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 Geertz

  Humanity, May, Facts

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.45, Basic Books

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• To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

  Clifford Geertz

  Life, Nature, Congratulations

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• Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

  Clifford Geertz

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• 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.

  Clifford Geertz

  Motivation, Powerful, Men

  Clifford Geertz (2017). “The Interpretation of Cultures”, p.98, Hachette UK

  25 Copy quote

• Culture is public, because meaning is

  Clifford Geertz

  Culture

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.12, Basic Books

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• 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

  Thinking, Issues, Feminist

  55 Copy quote

• 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 Geertz

  Data, People, Construction

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.9, Basic Books

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Analysis, Anthropology, Incomplete

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.29, Basic Books

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• 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

  Oddities, People, May

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.43, Basic Books

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• As 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 Geertz

  Strength, Religious, Pain

  Clifford Geertz (2017). “The Interpretation of Cultures”, p.111, Hachette UK

  30 Copy quote

• A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

  Clifford Geertz

  Destroying, Scholar, Employed

  Clifford Geertz (2012). “Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics”, p.67, Princeton University Press

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

  Clifford Geertz

  People, Hegemony, Want

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• If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

  Clifford Geertz

  Home, Should Have, Wanted

  Clifford Geertz (2012). “Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics”, p.96, Princeton University Press

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Names, Numbers, Done

  "Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction" by Gary A. Olson, Journal of Advanced Composition 11.2, hypergeertz.jku.at. 1991.

  24 Copy quote

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Writing, Thinking, Happens

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Intellectual, Literature, Fields

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Structure, Skeptical, Agree

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• 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

  Hard Times, Students, Convincing

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• 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

  Real, Anxiety, Matter

  25 Copy quote

• There 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 Geertz

  Turtles, Elephants, Stories

  René Girard, Clifford Geertz, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Stanford University. Committee on Modern Thought and Literature (1973*). “Myth and ritual in Shakespeare: A midsummer night's dream”

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