Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz’s line lands with the casual understatement of someone who knows a paradigm shift when he sees it, even if he won’t dress it up as revolution. Coming from the most famous advocate of “thick description,” it’s also a quiet admission that anthropology’s classic self-image - the patient, neutral observer decoding “culture” - was never as innocent as it sounded. Feminism didn’t just add women to the ethnographic cast list; it challenged the camera angle.

The specific intent is partly corrective and partly defensive: a senior figure marking feminism as consequential enough to have reshaped the discipline’s methods and questions, not merely its politics. The subtext is sharper. If feminism “impacted” anthropology, then earlier anthropology had blind spots that were structured, not accidental: who got counted as a social actor, whose labor was legible, whose voices were recorded, what counted as “kinship,” “ritual,” or “power.” It’s a polite way of conceding that anthropology’s old common sense was often masculinity in academic drag.

Context matters: Geertz’s career rose alongside postwar fieldwork institutions and peaked amid the late-20th-century “crisis of representation,” when anthropologists started interrogating their own authority. Feminist scholarship fit that moment like a key in a lock, insisting that standpoint, embodiment, and everyday domestic life were not side plots but engines of social order. It also forced a rethink of the ethnographer: not a disembodied instrument, but a gendered, positioned person producing a text.

Geertz is signaling that feminism didn’t simply critique anthropology; it made anthropology better at what it claims to do: interpret meaning without pretending the interpreter is invisible.