Science Quote by Clifford Geertz

Geertz is needling his own field with the deadpan of someone who helped make it sprawling in the first place. The line lands because it sounds like a complaint but reads like a diagnosis: anthropology’s strength - its promiscuous curiosity - has become its professional anxiety. When “you can do anything and call it anthropology,” he’s not just mocking youthful hand-wringing about disciplinary boundaries; he’s pointing at a structural problem of legitimacy. If the label can stretch to cover everything, it risks meaning nothing, especially in a university economy that rewards recognizable methods and sellable expertise.

The subtext is Geertz’s long-running argument about interpretation and meaning. His “thick description” era expanded what counted as data: symbols, rituals, stories, gestures, the everyday semiotics of social life. That expansion made anthropology intellectually magnetic and institutionally messy. Younger scholars inherit the mess and mistake it for a flaw of pluralism rather than a consequence of the field’s success at invading other territories (history, literary criticism, political theory, science studies). Geertz’s jab is also about status: “too diverse” often means “hard to defend at funding meetings.”

Context matters: late-20th-century anthropology was absorbing postcolonial critique and the discipline’s own crisis of representation. Geertz’s quip refuses the fantasy that a clean, unified anthropology ever existed. It’s a reminder that the discipline is less a fenced-off method than a recurring wager: that culture can be read, and that reading has stakes.