Quotes from Clifford Geertz

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.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

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.

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

The notion that someone who does not hold your views holds the reciprocal of them, or simply hasn't got any, has, whatever its comforts for those afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it, not conduced to much in the way of clarity in the anti-relativist discussion, but merely to far too many people spending far too much time describing at length what it is they do not maintain than seems in any way profitable.

All ethnography is part philosophy and a good deal of the rest is confession.

guarding other sheep in other valleys...

One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of lives but end in the end having lived only one.

if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first in­stance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.

The strict separation of theory and data, the "brute fact" idea; the effort to create a formal vocabulary of analysis purged of all subjective reference, the "ideal language" idea; and the claim to moral neutrality and the Olympian view, the "Go?s truth" idea - none of these can prosper when explanation comes to be regarded as a matter of connecting action to its sense rather than behavior to its determinants.

What sort of scientists are they whose main technique is sociability and whose main instrument is themselves? What can we expect from them but charged prose and pretty theories?

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.

To play the violin it is necessary to possess certain habits, skills, knowledge, and talents, to be in the mood to play, and (as the old joke goes) to have a violin. But violin playing is neither the habits, skills, knowledge and so on, nor the mood, nor . . . the violin.

What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is.

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.

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

What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.