Art & Creativity Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is quietly picking a fight with the cult of “proper” scholarly prose, and he does it with the plainspoken understatement of someone who’s already won the argument in practice. “I don’t have the notion” sounds almost casual, but it’s a rhetorical feint: he’s rejecting not just a preference, but an entire disciplinary reflex that treats one sanctioned voice as a proxy for rigor. The sentence deflates the moral pressure behind academic conformity - the “has to” - and replaces it with a permission structure: scholarship can be serious without sounding like a standardized exam.

The subtext is methodological. Geertz’s anthropology was built on “thick description,” an approach that treats culture as something you interpret, not merely measure. If your object of study is meaning-making, then style isn’t decorative; it’s part of the instrument. A single academic style implies a single way of knowing: detached, impersonal, frictionless. Geertz is saying that kind of voice can become a blindfold, especially when you’re trying to render the texture of ritual, symbols, and lived experience.

Context matters: postwar social science was busy polishing itself into a “hard” science, chasing legitimacy through technical language and procedural neutrality. Geertz pushes back by insisting that clarity, narrative, and even literary tact can be intellectually honest forms of precision. He’s not arguing for anything-goes; he’s arguing that disciplines should be judged by the quality of their seeing, not by their ability to mimic the same institutional accent.