Clifford Geertz Quotes

• I’m an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Everything, Think

• I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Making

• I’ve written a lot of books which are written from the moon – the view from nowhere.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Written, Moon

• If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Someone, Remember, Information

• 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.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Over, Facts

• It’s always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it’s written now. There’s been an enormous shift in how it’s done, but yet you can’t put your finger on someone who actually did it.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Someone, Actually, Something

• Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Doing

• Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Meaning, Historically

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Instincts, Always

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Replace, Criticism, Research

• 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.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Beauty

  Tags in Thinking, Different, Intuition

• 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.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Really, Reading

• 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.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Father, Mother

  Tags in African, Favor

• We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn’t a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Knowledge, Nature

  Tags in Think, Thought

• We’re getting closer to our nature.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Getting

• Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.

  Clifford Geertz

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Anything, Things, Notion

Clifford Geertz (36)

Birth:	23rd August, 1926
Death:	30th October, 2006
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Anthropologist, Professor, Writer

About

Clifford James Geertz was born in San Francisco, California. He was an American anthropologist, professor and writer. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Antioch College in 1950.  He earned his Ph.D. in 1956 with a dissertation entitled Religion in Modjukuto: A Study of Ritual Belief In A Complex Society. He taught or held fellowships at a number of schools before joining the faculty of the anthropology department at the University of Chicago in 1960. In this period Geertz expanded his focus on Indonesia to include both Java and Bali produced three books, including Religion of Java, Agricultural Involution, and Peddlers and Princes. In 1970 Geertz left Chicago to become professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1970 to 2000, then emeritus professor.

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