What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
Clifford GeertzRead
Culture is public, because meaning is
Interpretation
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.
In practice
In a discussion about anthropological studies during a lecture on cultural diversity.
What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
[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.
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
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.
Multi-culture is the real culture of the world - the pure race doesn’t exist.
Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity's shared story.
What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.
If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.
I haven't come to you only to take , I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue , I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair , I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways
Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.
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