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"The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive."
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"If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African."
"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."
"He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
"Man is at the bottom an animal midway a citizen and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top."
"Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is."
"It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today."
"Men were primitive in the eyes of angel beingsas men are primitive in the eyes of wilier races."
"I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology."
"Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo."
"I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it."
Explore more quotes by Clifford Geertz
"Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance."
"My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things."
"I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous."
"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."
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