Words matter. These are the best Clifford Geertz Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I don’t write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it’s finished, it’s done.
I don’t think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they’re moving toward more diversity.
I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.
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.
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.
Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I’m satisfied with it.
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.
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’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
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 think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.
I think what’s known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.
I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I’m very skeptical.
I’m an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.
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.
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There’s been an extraordinary advance.
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.
Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.
Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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.
