Zitat des Tages von Clifford Geertz:
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.
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.
If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.
I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.
I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.
I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.
Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.
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.
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 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.
I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.
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.
Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.
My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.
We're getting closer to our nature.
I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.
I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical.
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.
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
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.
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 think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.
Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.
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'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.
I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.