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
thinking issues feminist
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
attitude mean men
[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
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
men animal spun
Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.
people understanding culture
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.
analysis anthropology incomplete
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.
culture
Culture is public, because meaning is
thinking humanity perception
I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
thinking knows
We don't know what we think until we see what we say.
people hegemony want
My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things
strength religious pain
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.
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