Clifford Geertz

The aim of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

The great cultural problem of our time is the problem of the coexistence of different cultures.

The concept of culture is essentially a semiotic one.

The study of culture is not a search for laws, but a search for meaning.

The anthropologist's task is to make sense of the lives of others, to understand what they are up to.

The analysis of culture is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

The ethnographer's job is to decipher the meaning of social action.

The study of culture is the study of the way in which people make sense out of things, in terms of the meanings they give to them.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs.

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.

Anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate disciplines.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

The whole point of a moral ideal is that it is hard to achieve.

To see ourselves as others see us can be a bit of a shock.

Culture is public because meaning is.

Exemplary instances... are the glory of anthropology.

The road to hell is paved with good ethnographies.

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normal nervousness of which the disease is a projection.

Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate.

The ethnographer does not report facts but interpretations.