Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is putting a blade to the intellectual reflex that turns messy life into tidy rule. “Fasten” is the key verb: it implies strapping something down that was never meant to stay still. Hegemony, in his mouth, isn’t just political dominance; it’s the scholar’s temptation to smuggle a master key into every door, to make one explanatory framework click everywhere with satisfying certainty. His “instincts” signal that this is not merely a methodological preference but a cultivated suspicion, a kind of anthropological street sense learned in the field, where cultures refuse to behave like lab specimens.

The line lands with quiet aggression because it sounds personal while staking out a disciplinary argument. Geertz, the patron saint of “thick description,” made his reputation by insisting that meaning is local, layered, and interpretive. When he distrusts people who want hegemony “onto things,” he’s not only critiquing imperial politics; he’s critiquing intellectual empire-building: grand theories, totalizing Marxes and Freuds applied like universal solvents, even the bureaucratic urge to standardize human experience into categories that travel too easily.

The subtext is a warning about power hiding inside explanation. A hegemonic framework doesn’t just describe; it ranks, simplifies, and often justifies. By framing his resistance as instinctive, Geertz also dodges the pose of neutrality: he admits that interpretation is situated, and that skepticism toward domination is itself a stance. In an era when social science oscillated between scientistic universal laws and postcolonial reckoning, the quote reads as a principled refusal to let theory become conquest.