Clifford Geertz Quotes
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I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
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I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now
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People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.
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Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.
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I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
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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
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I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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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.
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My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
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Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.
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I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.
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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
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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.
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We don't know what we think until we see what we say.
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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
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If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code
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Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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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.
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I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
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I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical
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I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity
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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
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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.
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Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
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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
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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
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Culture is public, because meaning is
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I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style
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Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
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