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 is public, because meaning is
Interpretation
What this quote means
Culture is shaped by collective interpretation, making it a shared experience.
Clifford Geertz's quote emphasizes that culture is not a private matter but a public one, as meanings and interpretations are constructed and understood collectively within a society. This highlights the importance of communal perspectives in shaping our cultural identity and understanding.
Themes
CultureMeaningPublicInterpretationSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about anthropological studies during a lecture on cultural diversity.
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
[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.
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
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When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you.
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