Quotes By 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.

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.

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.

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.

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

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

We're getting closer to our nature.

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.

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 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.