Quotes by Clifford Geertz
“The problem of meaning is that it is a slippery object, which escapes determined capture.”— Clifford Geertz
“The ethnographer 'inscribes' social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.”— Clifford Geertz
“It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.”— Clifford Geertz
“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”— Clifford Geertz
“The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts.”— Clifford Geertz
“The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.”— 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
“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
“We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture.”— Clifford Geertz