Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz’s polite diss is doing two things at once: drawing a bright border and performing the kind of intellectual restraint that made him influential. “I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing” lands as a blunt credentialing move, a way of signaling to an academic audience that he’s not buying the era’s most glamorous, export-ready theory of mind. But the second sentence immediately softens the blow into something more strategically Geertzian: not a counter-dogma, a posture. “When it comes to innate structures and so on, I’m very skeptical” isn’t just disagreement with a particular claim; it’s a rejection of the style of explanation Chomsky represents.

The subtext is the anthropologist’s evergreen complaint about universalizing frameworks: they glide past the messy, meaning-saturated particulars that culture actually runs on. Chomsky’s “innate structures” promise deep grammar beneath variation. Geertz’s skepticism implies that this depth is purchased by stripping away what humans are doing when they speak, ritualize, joke, or believe. It’s a clash between an architect’s blueprint and a street map.

Context matters: mid-to-late 20th century social science was enthralled by structural models, from linguistics to Levi-Strauss to cognitive science. Geertz helped pivot anthropology away from law-like explanations toward interpretation: “thick description,” symbols, local logics. So the line reads as a boundary-setting gesture in a crowded marketplace of big theories: if you want universals, go see Chomsky; if you want meaning in motion, you’re in Geertz’s camp. The skepticism is less anti-science than anti-shortcut.