Top 36 Quotes by Clifford Geertz

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.