Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Anthropology’s funniest trick is how completely it can reinvent itself while keeping its origin story conveniently anonymous. Geertz is pointing at a familiar academic phenomenon: a discipline reads its own past and laughs at the clunky prose, the blunt categories, the colonial confidence. Then it congratulates itself on its newer voice, more reflexive, more cautious, more attuned to power. The “amusing” isn’t just a light chuckle; it’s a dry diagnosis of institutional self-fashioning.

The subtext is about style as ideology. Early 20th-century anthropology often wrote like it owned the world it described: authoritative, extractive, “objective” in a way that smuggled in hierarchy. By Geertz’s time, the field had shifted toward interpretation, thick description, and skepticism about the clean separation between observer and observed. That’s the “enormous shift.” But his twist is the uncanny part: you can’t name the single revolutionary who changed it. No founding hero, no manifesto everyone signed, no moment of overthrow.

That matters because it exposes how intellectual change actually happens: not as a clean break, but as a slow drift of norms, graduate training, peer review, funding incentives, and professional anxieties. Everyone adjusts their sentences and citations a little, and a generation later the old writing looks morally and aesthetically impossible. Geertz is also needling the discipline’s desire for neat genealogies. Anthropology wants to narrate its growth as ethical progress; he’s reminding us that the mechanics are messier, collective, and partly deniable.