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In Memory of Clifford Geertz

By cortex on November 1, 2006.

Clifford Geertz, the founder of interpretative anthropology, passed away yesterday. To commemorate his body of work - The Interpretation of Cultures is a true masterpiece - I thought I'd offer up two of my favorite Geertz quotes:

"Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."

"Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is... There are a number of ways of escaping this--turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semiotic concept of culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as... 'essentially contestable.' Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of the consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other."

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Here's my favorite Geertz quote,

"Thus, cultural anthropologists were the first to point out that the world does not divide into the pious and the superstitious... we have, with no little success, sought to keep the world off balance; pulling out rugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers. It has been the office of others to reassure; ours to unsettle." - June 1984

He will be missed