Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.
- Clifford Geertz Quote


I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.
- Clifford Geertz Quote

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.
- Clifford Geertz Quote