Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is quietly telling you what kind of thinker he distrusts: the hedgehog with a single Big Theory that explains everything, and explains it too smoothly. By calling himself an "inveterate fox", he borrows Isaiah Berlin's famous split not as a cute personality quiz but as a methodological confession. The fox is the scavenger of reality, opportunistic, plural, allergic to tidy closure. "Inveterate" adds a note of stubbornness: this isn't eclecticism as whim; it's a disciplined refusal to be captured by one lens.

The line also smuggles in Geertz's larger project in anthropology and interpretive social science. His best-known move was to treat culture as meaning in motion, something you read closely rather than measure from above. That requires trying "everything": different methods, metaphors, sites, genres of writing, even the willingness to look slightly ridiculous while you test an angle that might fail. Under the surface, it's a defense of intellectual promiscuity against the prestige economy of academia, where being a hedgehog can sound like seriousness and being a fox can be dismissed as dabbling.

There's a cultural critique here too. Grand explanatory systems are seductive because they promise moral clarity and predictive power; Geertz hints that they often purchase that clarity by flattening what people actually do and say. The fox stance isn't anti-theory. It's pro-context: a bet that understanding is built from many partial truths, not one conquering idea.