Clifford Geertz

"The local context is essential for understanding any human phenomenon."

"Power operates through the naturalization of particular ways of seeing and knowing."

"Culture is a text, and like all texts, it is subject to multiple interpretations."

"Humans are beings who must continually justify their existence through meaningful activity."

"The ethnographer must cultivate a kind of intellectual humility in the face of cultural difference."

"Interpretation is a creative act that brings new meaning into being."

"The significance of cultural practices lies in their power to organize experience and structure reality."

"Understanding requires breaking free from the tyranny of one's own categories."

"Social institutions are maintained through the constant performance of cultural meanings."

"The task of anthropology is to multiply the ways in which we can conceive of what it is to be human."

"Humans create meaning through language, gesture, ritual, and artistic expression."

"The relationship between observer and observed is constitutive of knowledge itself."

"Culture is neither entirely constraining nor entirely liberating; it is both and neither."

"The interpretation of cultures is an ongoing conversation that never reaches final closure."

"Humans are self-aware creatures who must live with the knowledge of their own mortality."

"The ethnographer's task is to make visible the implicit structures that organize social life."

"Meaning is generated through the interplay of structure and agency, constraint and creativity."

"The study of culture reveals the deep interconnection between individual psychology and social structure."

"Interpretation requires a willingness to be changed by what one encounters."

"Humans live in webs of significance that are both beautiful and constraining."

"The way to understand a religion is not to read about it, but to participate in it."

"Culture is public because meaning is public."

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."

"The anthropologist's task is not to predict but to interpret."

"Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant naturally sees; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions concludes."

"We are not just going to get away from a problem by ignoring it."

"Thick description is the anthropologist's most powerful tool."

"The great tradition and the little tradition work out their relationship in each individual case."

"Politics, like the study of religion itself, requires interpretive skill."

"What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions."