Clifford Geertz's Quotes

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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 feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

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

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

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.

We're getting closer to our nature.

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.