Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is being politely surgical here: “fairly hospitable” is praise with the brakes on, a social-science hedge that signals both recognition and reservation. The line works because it performs the very cultural tact anthropology prides itself on. It doesn’t declare the discipline enlightened; it suggests a comparative advantage in a landscape where many fields were openly exclusionary. “In general” and “always” pull in opposite directions, too: one makes the claim defensible, the other makes it sound like an ingrained tradition. That tension is the subtext.

Context matters. Geertz’s career spans the decades when second-wave feminism was reshaping universities, when “women in the field” was no longer a novelty but still not fully normalized, and when “feminist scholarship” was treated in many departments as either a corrective or an intrusion. Anthropology, with its attention to kinship, domestic labor, reproduction, and everyday life, had intellectual room for questions feminism sharpened. Its methods also helped: fieldwork often rewarded listening, relationality, and skepticism toward official stories, which can make a discipline more permeable to outsiders and dissenters.

But “even to feminist scholars” gives away the hierarchy. It implies feminist work was a special case: tolerated, perhaps admired, yet still marked as potentially ideological compared to an imagined neutral center. Geertz is hinting at anthropology’s self-image as unusually pluralistic while also acknowledging that feminism arrived as a test of that self-image. The sentence is less a victory lap than a quiet audit of a discipline’s tolerance, and of the mild condescension that can hide inside institutional generosity.