Quotes from Clifford Geertz

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

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.

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

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

I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

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

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.

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.

A human being is an animal suspended in webs of significance which he himself has spun.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

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.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to 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 think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.

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.

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

But such an affection for what doesn't fit and won't comport, reality out of place...

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

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

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

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