Clifford Geertz > Quotes

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”
― Clifford Geertz

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

“There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
― Clifford Geertz

“One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one”
― Clifford Geertz

“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

“What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“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 Interpretation of Cultures

“If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.”
― Clifford Geertz

“What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection—is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households … writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“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

“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. And it is not even, finally, meanings that I am after, but rather significances. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly— that is, thickly— described. In brief, a little thicker description is what we need in this life, and that is what, I am here to argue, ethnography, properly conceived as a thick description of particular social situations, does indeed provide. The task of the ethnographer is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to take, as it were, the native's point of view, to get inside his head and see the world the way he does, to delineate the ethos of his culture as that ethos is manifested in actual behavior.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...)
(The interpretation of cultures)”
― Geertz Clifford

“Geçmişle ne yapılacağını bilmek zordur. Bu fantaziyi ne kadar kurarsanız kurun, veya hatırlarken ne kadar ağır nostalji hissederseniz hissedin, içinde yaşayamazsınız. her ne kadar gösterici, önerici veya tehlike habercisi olsa dahi ondan geleceği öngöremezsiniz; gerçekleşmesi yakın şeyler sık sık olmaz, ipucu vermeyen şeyler sık sık gerçekleşir. Bence, tarihten, sosyal olaylara evrensel olarak uygulanabilecek kanunlar, ölçülebilir sonuçları belirleyen demir zorunluluklar çıkaramazsınız, bunu yapmayı amaçlayan teşebbüsler nafile oldukları kadar bitmez görünse de. İçinde, mutat varoluşun belirsizliklerini çözecek ve umumî davranışın paradokslarını dindirecek ebedî gerçeklikler de bulamazsınız, ya da yine ben bulamam; doğrusu, ana senaryolar yoktur. İşe yararmış gibi görüdnüğü tek şey (belki de birincil olarak, sırf insanların neler anlattığını takdir etmenin yanında) insanın çevresinde neler olduğunu biraz daha az anlamsızca algılamak, gerçekte olanlardan görüntüye girenlere biraz daha bilinçlice tepki vermektir. Geçmişle ilgili klişelerin hepsi; özsüz olduğu, bir kova kül olduğu, başka bir ülke olduğu, geçmiş bile olmadığı, eğer hatırlanmazsa tekrarlanmaya mahkum olduğunuz, cennete doğru geri geri giderken önümüzde biriken enkaz olduğu... arasından işe yarar gerçeğe en çok yaklaşanı Kierkegaard'ın "hayat ileri doğru yaşanır ama geriye doğru anlaşılır"ıdır.”
― Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist

“One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of lives but end in the end having lived only one.”
― Clifford Geertz

“All ethnography is part philosophy and a good deal of the rest is confession.”
― Clifford Geertz

“The notion that the essence of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those features of human culture that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive to this people or that is a prejudice that we are not obliged to share. . . . 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, The Interpretation of Cultures

“... guarding other sheep in other valleys...”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“You either grasp an interpretation or you do not, see the point of it or you do not, accept it or you do not. Imprisoned in the immediacy of its own detail, it is presented as self-validating, or, worse, as validated by the supposedly developed sensitivities of the person who presents it;”
― Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.

“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. And it is not even, finally, meanings that I am after, but rather significances. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly— that is, thickly— described. In brief, a little thicker description is what we need in this life, and that is what, I am here to argue, ethnography, properly conceived as a thick description of particular social situations, does indeed provide. The Task of the ethnographer is to make the familiar strange and strangely familiar, to turn away from the generalizing language of culture and toward the particularities of social experience”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns — customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters — as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms — plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) — for the governing of behavior.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“After slaying many monsters in his wanderings in search of this water which he has been told will make him invulnerable, he meets a god as big as his little finger who is an exact replica of himself. Entering through the mouth of this mirror-image midget, he sees inside the god’s body the whole world, complete in every detail, and upon emerging he is told by the god that there is no “clear water” as such, that the source of his own strength is within himself, after which he goes off to meditate.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”
― Clifford Geertz

“if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first in­stance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“...the difference, however un-photographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. [...] A mere twitch, on the other hand, is neither a failure nor a success; it has no intended recipient; it is not meant to be unwitnessed by anybody; it carries no message. It may be a symptom but it is not a signal. The winker could not not know that he was winking; but the victim of the twitch might be quite unaware of his twitch. The winker can tell what he was trying to do; the twitcher will deny that he was trying to do anything.”
― Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.

“To play the violin it is necessary to possess certain habits, skills, knowledge, and talents, to be in the mood to play, and (as the old joke goes) to have a violin. But violin playing is neither the habits, skills, knowledge and so on, nor the mood, nor . . . the violin.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods . . .); they study in villages.”
― Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.

“Zettel”
― Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics