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

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
Clifford Geertz

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

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

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
Clifford Geertz

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.
Clifford Geertz

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

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

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.
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

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.
Clifford Geertz

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.
Clifford Geertz

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

We're getting closer to our nature.
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