Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

The line lands with Geertzian restraint: a cool field note masquerading as praise. “I do think” and “attempt” keep the claim provisional, as if he’s measuring a social campaign the way an anthropologist measures a ritual’s effects. The modesty is the point. Geertz is less interested in cheering a movement than in describing a cultural shift: “raise consciousness” frames feminism and gender politics as a kind of collective re-education, a project aimed at changing what people notice, name, and feel entitled to contest.

The apparent compliment, though, carries a sly double edge. Saying the attempt “has succeeded” because people are “very aware” stops short of saying anything has improved. Awareness is a diagnostic, not a cure. Subtext: modern societies have gotten good at talking about gender, at recognizing the vocabulary of harm and inequality, while remaining uneven at redistributing power. It’s the anthropologist’s implicit warning that symbols can outpace structures.

Contextually, this fits late-20th-century Western academia, where “consciousness-raising” migrated from feminist organizing into institutional life - syllabi, HR trainings, media discourse. Geertz, who built a career on “thick description,” is registering that gender has become a dominant interpretive lens, one that reorganizes everyday interactions into something readable and debatable.

The sentence works because it’s both acknowledgment and distancing. He concedes the cultural victory - heightened attention - while leaving open the harder question: awareness of gender concerns for whom, and to what end?