Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is doing something deceptively strategic here: he takes the big, culture-war-sparking question "Has feminism made us all more conscious?" and answers it with a modest "I think it has", then immediately narrows the claim to the professional terrain where he has real authority. That shift matters. He is not offering feminism as a moral brand or a partisan identity; he's treating it as a diagnostic tool that improved his instrument panel as a scholar.

The phrase "anthropological masculine bias" lands like an admission and a recalibration. Anthropology, especially in the mid-20th century when Geertz rose to prominence, liked to present itself as the cool, neutral observer of "culture". Feminist critique punctures that self-image by insisting that neutrality can be a well-disguised standpoint - often male, often Western, often unmarked because it is treated as default. Geertz isn't defending past work so much as conceding a blind spot: not that individual men were uniquely wicked, but that the discipline had habits of looking that made some lives legible and others peripheral.

The subtext is professional humility with a boundary. He validates feminism's impact while keeping the emphasis on method: "increased my sensitivity". Sensitivity sounds personal, even gentle, but in scientific fields it's a quiet boast about better calibration - fewer errors, less projection, more accurate description. It's also a reminder that critique is not an external attack on "science"; it's one of the ways science updates itself, by forcing practitioners to notice what their categories and questions have been filtering out.