Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist as well as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Research Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
Having offered in the U.S. Navy in the other WW2, he took his BA in viewpoint at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH in 1950 and also his doctorate in viewpoint at Harvard University in 1956 where he had actually studied social anthropology. He showed at numerous institutions before ending up being a part of the sociology department at the University of Chicago in the years 1960-1970. He was a teacher of social scientific research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1970 to 2000, then he ended up being professor emeritus. He obtained honorary levels from fifteen various schools, consisting of Harvard, the universities of Chicago and also Cambridge.
He was first married to the anthropologist Hildred Geertz. After the divorce he wed Karen Blu, additionally an anthropologist.
At the University of Chicago Geertz ended up being a champ of symbolic anthropology, which is largely concerned with the storage tank (signs) role in culture. Symbols regulates the action. Society, specified by Geertz in his publication The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), is "a system of acquired ideas revealed in symbolic kinds whereby individuals connect, keep and create their understanding and mindsets regarding life." (1973:89). Society's feature is to ascribe to the world opinion and make it reasonable. The role of anthropologists is to try (also if total success is not feasible) to analyze the regulating signs in each society. His essay, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, located in The Interpretation of culure, is a traditional example of thick description.
Geertz was very cutting-edge, considering that he was among the initial so that the understanding of typical language understanding as well as literary evaluation can be an effective explanatory factor in the social sciences.
Our collection contains 32 quotes who is written / told by Clifford.
"I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist"
"I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false"
"I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology"
"Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is"
"I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere"
"I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain"
"I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves"
"I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field"
"Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue"
"My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things"
"Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should"
"Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed"
"I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything"
"If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code"
"I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it"
"I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style"
"I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now"
"I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical"
"It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it"
"If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology"
"I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means"
"Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance"
"The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about"
"I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things"
"I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world"
"I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done"
"I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity"
"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars"
"Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology"
"The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable"
"People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous"
"I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it"
