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
Clifford Geertz quotes about
humanity may facts
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
intellectual literature fields
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance
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.
structure skeptical agree
I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical
writing thinking anthropologists
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist
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
atmosphere alive fields
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.
destroying scholar employed
A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.
real anxiety matter
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
oddities people may
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.
paragraph satisfied sentences
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
mean thinking intuition
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.