Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is lancing anthropology with a compliment disguised as a diagnosis. The field, he argues, isn’t anxious because it’s failing; it’s anxious because it can’t hide behind the usual disciplinary alibis: a sealed-off object (cells, markets, wars) or a proprietary tool kit (experiments, models, equations). Anthropology’s “subject matter” is whatever humans do, which is to say everything, and its “method” is less a protocol than a stance: immersion, interpretation, and the risky art of taking other people’s meanings seriously.

The intent is to force honesty about what anthropologists actually traffic in. Geertz’s own project of “interpretive anthropology” treats culture not as a thing you can measure cleanly but as a web of symbols you read. That makes the discipline perpetually vulnerable to charges of softness: too literary for scientists, too empirical for humanists, too comparative for area studies, too anecdotal for policy. The anxiety he names is institutional as much as intellectual: departments justify themselves to universities and funders that reward neat boundaries and replicable techniques.

The subtext is sharper: maybe anthropology’s lack of a “real method” isn’t a deficiency but a refusal to pretend that human life comes pre-sorted into variables. Geertz isn’t offering an escape from the insecurity; he’s explaining why the insecurity is the price of the work. If you study meaning across radically different worlds, you don’t get to be comfortable. You get to be accountable.