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.”

“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”

“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.”

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

“People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.”

“Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.”

“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.”

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

“The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.”

“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.”

“I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical.”

“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.”

“I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.”

“Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.”