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
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literary criticism in anthropology seeks to understand the effectiveness of persuasion rather than replace empirical research.
Clifford Geertz highlights the role of literary criticism within the field of anthropology, emphasizing that its purpose is not to supplant traditional research but to explore the intricacies of persuasion in human communication. This suggests that understanding the narratives we construct can enhance our comprehension of cultural dynamics and human behavior.
Themes
Literary CriticismAnthropologyPersuasionCommunicationCulture
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on anthropology, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of understanding communication dynamics in cultural studies.
More from Clifford Geertz
All quotes →[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
Culture is public, because meaning is
Clifford GeertzRead
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