Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is taking a scalpel to the fantasy that social science can operate like a lab bench: facts on one side, theory on the other, then a quick check to see if they “fit.” The line works because it mimics the voice of methodological common sense only to revoke it. “Surely” sounds like reassurance, but it’s a trapdoor: he’s insisting that if any discipline should resist the plug-and-play model of evidence, it’s the one studying meaning as lived, negotiated, and performed.

The specific intent is methodological provocation. Geertz is defending anthropology as interpretive work, not the mechanical testing of detachable propositions. His larger argument (especially in The Interpretation of Cultures) is that ethnographic “facts” aren’t raw materials waiting to be stacked into a neutral account. They’re produced through description, translation, and the anthropologist’s own positioning. “Text” isn’t a garnish added after observation; it’s the medium through which observation becomes intelligible at all.

The subtext has bite: he’s calling out a certain scientistic posture that treats culture like an object you can measure without being implicated in it. In anthropology, the “data” are already saturated with concepts, categories, and power relations - including the researcher’s. The line also hints at the ethical stakes: forcing messy human worlds into rigid evidentiary compartments doesn’t just risk bad scholarship; it risks flattening people into variables.

Contextually, this lands in the postwar moment when anthropology is wrestling with positivism, decolonization, and the crisis of representation. Geertz is arguing that the discipline’s strength is not predictive certainty, but disciplined interpretation - “thick description” as an honest response to cultural complexity.