Geertz Quotes

“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

“The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that humans are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking’ animals. In our species, he says, ‘the drive to make sense out of our experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.’ To Geertz, a human being is an organism ‘which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.”
― Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative