Clifford Geertz Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

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

“My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.”

“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.”

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

“We're getting closer to our nature.”

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

“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.”

“Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.”

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