What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
Clifford GeertzRead
[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Culture is a shared system of symbols and meanings that shapes our understanding and communication about life.
In this quote, Clifford Geertz emphasizes that culture is not just a set of customs or practices but a complex system of meanings and symbols that influence how people perceive and interact with the world. It is through these inherited patterns that individuals communicate their experiences and understandings, shaping their knowledge and attitudes towards life itself.
Themes
CultureSymbolsCommunicationKnowledgeMeanings
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of cultural heritage, one might quote Geertz to highlight the role of symbols in shaping identity.
More from Clifford Geertz
All quotes →The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford GeertzRead
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
Clifford GeertzRead
It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
Clifford GeertzRead
To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.
Clifford GeertzRead
Culture is public, because meaning is
Clifford GeertzRead
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A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn't atrophy.
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