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Clifford Geertz
(23 Aug 1926 - 30 Oct 2006)
American anthropologist who did ethnographic field work in Bali, Java and Morocco. He wrote books about symbolic and interpretive anthropology and essays on economic development, religion, and politics in the Third World. Throughout his career Geertz tried to interpret the lives of people in terms of their cultural symbols such as ceremonies, political gestures, and literary texts.
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Science Quotes by Clifford Geertz (2 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 Geertz
The Interpretation of Cultures (1977), 89.
The road to the general, to the revelatory simplicities of science, lies through a concern with the particular, the circumstantial, the concrete, but a concern organized and directed in terms of … theoretical analysis … analyses of physical evolution, of the functioning of the nervous system, of social organization, of psychological process, of cultural patterning, and so on—and, most especially, in terms of the interplay among them. That is to say, the road lies, like any genuine Quest, through a terrifying complexity.
— Clifford Geertz
In 'The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man' (1966), The Interpretation of Cultures (1973).
See also:
- 23 Aug - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Geertz's birth.