Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertzwas an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 August 1926
CountryUnited States of America
home should-have wanted
If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.
elephants turtles stories
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
writing style academic
I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style
thinking impact feminism
I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
structure skeptical agree
I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical
life congratulations taken
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.
believe writing balance
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.
intellectual literature fields
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
thinking humanity perception
I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
writing thinking anthropologists
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
thinking knows
We don't know what we think until we see what we say.
hard-times students convincing
I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.
motivation powerful men
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.
Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.