Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is needling a disciplinary insecurity: the fear that if anthropology reads too well, it can’t be “real” science. The accusation that he turned anthropology into literature is meant as a demotion, as if style were a perfume sprayed over sloppy method. He flips it. Field research is nonnegotiable, he agrees, but the conversion of lived encounter into knowledge happens through writing, not after it. The subtext is blunt: you don’t collect “data” in some pristine form and then merely report it; you make arguments, select details, build scenes, translate meanings, and you do all of that in sentences.

Context matters here. Geertz’s career sits in the postwar moment when anthropology was fighting for scientific legitimacy while also confronting its own complicity in colonial power. “Thick description” wasn’t a bid to turn ethnography into a novel; it was a claim that culture is interpretive and that interpretation has a craft. If your object is webs of meaning, your instrument can’t be only a survey or a measurement. It has to be a narrative intelligence capable of showing how a wink differs from a twitch in a particular place, for particular people.

The intent isn’t to romanticize the writerly anthropologist; it’s to expose a fantasy of neutral transcription. Geertz is arguing for accountability: if writing is central, then rhetoric, voice, and framing are not embarrassing extras but ethical and epistemic commitments. Your prose is where your method cashes out.