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"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."
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"Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims."

"When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men."

"I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit."

"Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried."

"Madeleine Albright says, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women. I wonder what happens to women who bully other women."

"Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain."

"Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on."

"We need feminism because degrading phrases like 'walk of shame' are commonplace in our social vocabulary, yet these are only applied to women; whereas men in the same situation are praised by their peers and seen as nothing more than ' a guy who got lucky', by the rest of society."
Explore more quotes by Clifford Geertz

"I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now."

"I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false."

"We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard."

"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."

"My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things."

"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."

"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."

"I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field."

"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."

"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."
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