What we call our data are really our own constructions of other peopleβs constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
Clifford GeertzRead
Culture is public, because meaning is
Interpretation
What this quote means
Culture is shaped by collective interpretation, making it a shared experience.
Clifford Geertz's quote emphasizes that culture is not a private matter but a public one, as meanings and interpretations are constructed and understood collectively within a society. This highlights the importance of communal perspectives in shaping our cultural identity and understanding.
Themes
CultureMeaningPublicInterpretationSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about anthropological studies during a lecture on cultural diversity.
More from Clifford Geertz
All quotes βThe point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford GeertzRead
[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 GeertzRead
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
Clifford GeertzRead
It may be in the cultural particularities of people β in their oddities β that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
Clifford GeertzRead
To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.
Clifford GeertzRead
Similar quotes
The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.
Shashi TharoorRead
In a lot of ways I think food is starting to take the place in culture that rock and roll took 30 years ago, in that eating has become incredibly political. And just as the street has always dictated fashions on music and other things, itβs starting to happen that way in food.
Jonathan GoldRead
If you read a lot of Chinese literature, there has always been very strong women figures - warriors, swordswomen - who defended honor and loyalty with the men. So, it's not new to our culture - it's always been very much a part of it. It's good that now the Western audience would have a different image of the Chinese women.
Michelle YeohRead
We also want to try and slow down all this foolishness that's going on between the East and West. We gotta understand that Hip Hop is now universal. Hip Hop is not East coast or West coast.
Afrika BambaataaRead
I realized that you cannot think European and want to write or create something African. You have to think African in everything.
Fela KutiRead
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
Steven JohnsonRead