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

Clifford Geertz

More Quotes by Clifford Geertz
Categorized in : Stories Elephants Turtles
More Quotes From Clifford Geertz

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Clifford Geertz
hero animal believe

[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.

Clifford Geertz
attitude men mean

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.

Clifford Geertz
understanding culture people

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

Clifford Geertz
issues feminist thinking

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.

Clifford Geertz
congratulations nature life

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

Clifford Geertz
humanity may facts
We don't know what we think until we see what we say. by Clifford Geertz

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

Clifford Geertz
knows thinking
Culture is public, because meaning is by Clifford Geertz

Culture is public, because meaning is

Clifford Geertz
culture
Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has... by Clifford Geertz

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz
significance animal men
A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear... by Clifford Geertz

A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

Clifford Geertz
employed scholar destroying

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

Clifford Geertz
anthropology incomplete analysis
Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed. by Clifford Geertz

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Clifford Geertz

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.

Clifford Geertz
motivation powerful men

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.

Clifford Geertz
pain strength religious
My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some so... by Clifford Geertz

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

Clifford Geertz
hegemony want people

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

Clifford Geertz
skeptical agree structure

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.

Clifford Geertz
oddities may people

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
done names numbers
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing... by Clifford Geertz

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist

Clifford Geertz
happens writing thinking

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.

Clifford Geertz
balance writing believe