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 More Quotes by Clifford Geertz 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 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. Clifford Geertz knows thinking Culture is public, because meaning is Clifford Geertz culture 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. 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. 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 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 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 turtles elephants stories 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 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
