Quotes By Clifford Geertz

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

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

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.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

We're getting closer to our nature.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means.

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

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

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