Clifford Geertz Quotes

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'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.

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

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected.

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

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.

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

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

I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques.

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

When I went to college, I really became interested in cultural anthropology. Our behavior isn't that different from other primate species'.

I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.

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.

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.

A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years.

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.

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.

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats.

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.