Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Meaning, in Geertz's hands, is not a substance you dig up like ore; it is a public artifact you learn to read. The line is a quiet rebuke to the fantasy that culture is a transparent window onto “what people really think,” or that good science can scrub away interpretation and arrive at pure fact. For Geertz, the point of studying humans is that they live inside webs of significance they themselves have spun. The job isn’t to measure the web’s tensile strength; it’s to understand how it’s patterned, who gets to weave it, and what counts as a “reasonable” thread.

“Socially” signals that meaning is negotiated, policed, and shared - less private revelation than collective agreement, sustained by institutions and everyday rituals. “Historically” insists that meanings have biographies: words, symbols, and norms accrue residue from prior conflicts and compromises. A wink isn’t a wink in the abstract; it carries the local memory of what winks have done before. “Rhetorically” is the sharpest twist, because it frames meaning as persuasion: it is made through stories, performances, categories, and strategic framings that naturalize some interpretations and marginalize others.

The context is Geertz’s interpretive anthropology, especially his push for “thick description” in the 1970s, when social science was wrestling with behaviorism, positivism, and the urge to treat culture as data rather than discourse. The subtext is methodological humility with teeth: if meaning is constructed, then power sits at the construction site, and any analyst claiming neutrality is already arguing for a particular reading of the world.