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"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."
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"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."
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
"He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess."
"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."
"One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor."
Explore more quotes by Clifford Geertz
"I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves."
"People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous."
"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."
"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."
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