44+ Clifford Geertz Quotes On Religion, Culture And Knowledge

Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist who is known for his strong influence on the development of the discipline of anthropology. He is known for his works on symbols and culture, which are widely recognized as some of the most influential works in the field. He is also known for his focus on the interpretation of symbols and culture in order to understand the behavior of people and societies. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Clifford Geertz on religion, culture, knowledge.

Top 10 Clifford Geertz Quotes

1. I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
2. 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
3. Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.
4. Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.
5. 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
6. My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
7. 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
8. I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain
9. I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical
10. Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

Clifford Geertz Short Quotes

• I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
• I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
• I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.
• I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style
• A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.
• I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity
• I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done
• Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should
• I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
• If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

Clifford Geertz Quotes About Culture

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

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

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

Culture is public, because meaning is — Clifford Geertz

[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

Clifford Geertz Quotes About Anthropology

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars — Clifford Geertz

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology — 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

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

Clifford Geertz Quotes About World

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

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with. — Clifford Geertz

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world — Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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 — Clifford Geertz

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

We don't know what we think until we see what we say. — Clifford Geertz

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Clifford Geertz

1. Clifford Geertz's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural context of a society in order to understand its behavior and beliefs. He encourages us to look beyond our own cultural assumptions and to recognize that different societies have different ways of interpreting the world.
2. Geertz's work also highlights the importance of empathy and compassion when engaging with people from different cultures. He encourages us to try to see things from the perspective of those we study, rather than imposing our own values and beliefs on them.
3. Finally, Geertz's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of all aspects of a culture, from its language and beliefs to its rituals and social structures. He encourages us to look at the big picture and to recognize the complexity of the societies we study