Geertz Anthropology Quotes & Sayings

Systems don't change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict. — Starhawk

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

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

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology. — Clifford Geertz

Our attitude toward life determines life's attitude towards us — Earl Nightingale

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

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. — Clifford Geertz

The notion that someone who does not hold your views holds the reciprocal of them, or simply hasn't got any, has, whatever its comforts for those afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it, not conduced to much in the way of clarity in the anti-relativist discussion, but merely to far too many people spending far too much time describing at length what it is they do not maintain than seems in any way profitable. — Clifford Geertz

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. — Clifford Geertz

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home. — Clifford Geertz

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means. — Oliver Sacks

Similarly, if a dog barks annoyingly to be let into the house from the yard and the owner usually eventually caves in, the first time the owner ignores the dog's barking the behavior won't stop right away. The dog will try harder and bark more. How hard he tries depends on how much he's had to bark to get his way in the past. The existence of the extinction burst means that when we address a bad behavior by removing the reward, we have to be ready to endure a temporary worsening of the behavior. — Sophia Yin

It may be in the cultural particularities of people - in their oddities - that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found. — Clifford Geertz

Beautiful girls have throats instead of necks. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Ready when you are. — Kerstin Gier

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard. — Clifford Geertz

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. — Clifford Geertz

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. — Clifford Geertz

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. — Clifford Geertz

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity ... It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity. — Clifford Geertz

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. — Clifford Geertz

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