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

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

"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."
Explore more quotes by Clifford Geertz

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

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

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

"People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous."
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