Clifford Geertz Quotes

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 know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

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

The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

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

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

I feel like I studied anthropology in college for a reason.

Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.

Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

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.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different.

As I said before, there are often disagreements as to what a particular set of facts mean. That is not at all unusual, and one shouldn't read into it more than is there.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

I would love to study cultures and people.

My degrees are in anthropology, and I have friends who have worked with apes.