Clifford Geertz Quotes

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means.

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.

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

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.

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

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.

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

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.

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.

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

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

I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

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

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