Quotes from Clifford Geertz

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

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.

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

We're getting closer to our nature.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means

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

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

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.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

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.

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

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.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.

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

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

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.

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.

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

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.

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

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.