“Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort — how extraordinarily “thick” it is. In finished anthropological writings, including those collected here, this fact — that what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to — is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined.”

— Clifford Geertz, book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 9

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, a fair sense of …" by Clifford Geertz?

Clifford Geertz16

American anthropologist 1926–2006

Related quotes

“Health care costs so darn much because we pay so darn little for it… So we have almost no incentive to care about how much it cost… Most of what we spend on health care is other people’s money. We never spend other people’s money as carefully as we spend our own.”

David R. Henderson (1950) American economist

Source: The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey (2002), p. 256

“How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: The Writing Life

“Well-being is about the combination of our love for what we do each day, the quality of our relationships, the security of our finances, the vibrancy of our physical health, and the pride we take in what we have contributed to our communities. Most importantly, it's about how these five elements interact.”

Tom Rath (1975) American author

Tom Rath, ‎James K. Harter & ‎Jim Harter (2010), Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, p. 4

“We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote of Naum Gabo, 1950; as cited in: Eidos: a journal of painting, sculpture and design. Nr.1, p. 31
1936 - 1977

“We really haven't got any great amount of data on the subject, and without data how can we reach any definite conclusions? All we have — everything — favors the idea of what religionists call the "Hereafter."”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

Science, if it ever learns the facts, probably will find another more definitely descriptive term.

As quoted in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 295
1930s

“What a strange phrase — –not seeing other people. As if it’s been constructed to be a lie. We see other people all the time. The question is what we do about it.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

“How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

I'm not Stiller (1955)

“We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. … The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.”

John N. Bahcall (1934–2005) American physicist

John N. Bahcall, quoted in his obituary at CalTech (7 September 2005) http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/features/articles/20050907.shtml; On the Hubble Space Telescope's capabilities for the advancement of science

“What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”

Greg McKeown (author) book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Clifford Geertz16

Related quotes

Related topics