Time & Perspective Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is puncturing the feel-good myth of fieldwork as a personal-growth retreat. The line has the dry bite of someone who watched too many earnest students treat “culture” as a mirror, where the exotic becomes raw material for self-discovery and the locals become supporting characters in an American coming-of-age story. His phrasing turns the knife gently: “convincing” implies he’s arguing against a default assumption, not an outlier. The “hard time” signals how entrenched that assumption is.

The intent is methodological and moral at once. Methodological, because anthropology lives or dies on whether you can bracket your own categories long enough to see other systems of meaning as coherent on their own terms. Moral, because self-focused inquiry can slide into extraction: you fly in, collect experiences, leave with a better sense of “who you are,” while the people who hosted your insight remain flattened into ambiance.

The subtext is also a critique of Western liberal cosmopolitanism, the kind that mistakes empathy for a selfie with better lighting. “Understand the North Africans” isn’t a call to perfect objectivity; Geertz famously argued for “thick description,” where interpretation is unavoidable. It’s a demand that interpretation be accountable to what people in a place are actually doing, saying, and valuing, not to the traveler’s inner narrative.

Context matters: mid-century anthropology was wrestling with its colonial inheritance and the growing awareness that researchers don’t arrive innocent. Geertz is drawing a boundary around the discipline’s purpose: if your primary takeaway is yourself, you didn’t do fieldwork - you did tourism with footnotes.