Clifford Geertz Quotes

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

The job of an anthropologist is to make the familiar strange and to make the strange familiar,

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 wanted to be an anthropologist and travel.

I love to see what real human behavior looks like. I've always envisioned my job as just observing and noting that and, for the purposes of my work, just cutting out the boring parts.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

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.