Clifford Geertz
A leading proponent of interpretive anthropology, emphasizing the importance of understanding culture as a system of symbols and meanings.
Quotes by Clifford Geertz
Culture is not a power, something to learn, a repertoire of ideas, even a discourse, but a context, something within which ordinary activities are invested with meanings.
Small facts speak to large issues.
Man is precisely the animal most able to make sense out of his world.
The symbolic dimension of social action is, in the main, very much a part of the action itself.
To interpret is to decode, to decipher, to translate.
Anthropology is interpretation.
The world is a web of crisscrossing meanings.
Ethnography is thick description.
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.
Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and display their models of the world.
The aim of anthropology is to understand the way people live.
What anthropologists do is interpret.
Relativism is not about truth but about understanding.
The essence of anthropology is the search for meaning.
In anthropology, everything is data.
Culture is context.
To grasp a culture one must first grasp its symbols.
Anthropology is the comparative interpretation of cultures.
Meaning is not inherent but constructed.
The cockfight is Balinese culture in a nutshell.