Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz’s casual “If I remember correctly” is doing more than hedging; it’s a scientist’s way of puncturing the romantic mystique of authorship. He pulls the writer off the pedestal and plants them back in the world of systems: a writer is not a vessel for inspiration but an operator trying to move information from one mind to another. The deflation is deliberate. In Geertz’s universe, meaning isn’t a private glow inside the author; it’s something that has to survive translation across social conventions.

Calling language “a code” is the loaded move. Code implies arbitrariness and shared rules: you don’t “naturally” understand a sentence any more than you naturally read Morse. You learn the key. That framing fits Geertz’s broader project in interpretive anthropology, where culture itself is a web of symbols people inhabit and negotiate. If writing is coding, then reading is decoding, and misunderstanding isn’t a moral failure; it’s what happens when the sender and receiver don’t share the same cipher, or when the cipher shifts across class, era, or community.

The subtext is a quiet warning to anyone who treats text as self-evident. Information is never just “there” in words; it’s packaged, shaped, and constrained by conventions that feel invisible to insiders. Geertz isn’t reducing literature to data transfer so much as insisting that meaning is engineered - and that the engineer’s materials are social.