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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
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I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.
Clifford Geertz
People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.
Clifford Geertz
I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
Clifford Geertz
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
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
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.
Clifford Geertz
I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.
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
I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.
Clifford Geertz
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.
Clifford Geertz
Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.
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
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
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
Clifford Geertz
I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.
Clifford Geertz
I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.
Clifford Geertz
If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.
Clifford Geertz
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.
Clifford Geertz
Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
Clifford Geertz
We're getting closer to our nature.
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
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
I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.
Clifford Geertz
I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.
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
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.
Clifford Geertz
I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical.
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
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.
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
I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.
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 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.
Clifford Geertz
I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.
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
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field history literature science anthropology. Theres been an extraordinary advance.
Clifford Geertz
Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.
Randy Newman
People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.
Clifford Geertz
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
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
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.
Franz Boas
If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.
Wilhelm Dilthey
Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
Joan D. Vinge
Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different.
Nancy Banks Smith
Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.
Clifford Geertz
There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.
Paul Ricoeur
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
Margaret Mead