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"I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology."
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"If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African."

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."

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

"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."

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

"If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology."

"He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

"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."

"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."
Explore more quotes by Clifford Geertz

"I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."
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