Clifford Geertz

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.

The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one. 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.

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.

The ethnographer's task is, in so far as it is possible, to make sense of the lives of others, to understand what they are up to.

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 makes them available to our attentions.

The aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.

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.

To say that culture is symbolic is not to say that it is merely symbolic.

The locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don't study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods); they study in villages.

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with, 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 to first grasp and then to render.

The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.

The problem of the interpretation of cultures is essentially the problem of the interpretation of texts.

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

The world is a vast museum of cultural forms.

The image of a 'superorganic' culture, existing somehow above and beyond the individuals who compose it, is a misleading one.

The study of culture is the study of the way in which people make sense out of things.

The culture of a people is an ordered system of meanings and symbols, in terms of which social interaction takes place.

The task of ethnography is to make available to us the answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.

The analysis of culture is not an exact science, but an interpretive one.

The problem of understanding other people's lives is not a matter of empathy, but of interpretation.