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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Cultural differences reveal universal truths about humanity.
Clifford Geertz emphasizes that by examining the unique and sometimes peculiar aspects of different cultures, we can uncover fundamental insights into the human experience. These 'oddities' serve as a lens through which we can better understand the commonalities and complexities of being human across diverse societies.
Themes
CultureHumanityInsightDiversityExperience
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at a cultural symposium might use this quote to illustrate the importance of embracing 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
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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