“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like.”

—  Clifford Geertz, book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 29

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Clifford Geertz16
American anthropologist 1926–2006

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