The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford GeertzRead
What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how our understanding of data is shaped by our interpretations of others' perspectives.
Clifford Geertz's quote emphasizes the complex layers of interpretation involved in understanding data. It suggests that what we consider to be data is not a straightforward representation of reality; rather, it is constructed from our perceptions of how others perceive and interact with the world, indicating the subjective nature of knowledge and understanding.
Themes
DataInterpretationPerspectiveKnowledgeUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation about data analysis, I might quote Geertz to highlight the importance of context in interpreting data.
More from Clifford Geertz
All quotes →[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 — in their oddities — 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
Culture is public, because meaning is
Clifford GeertzRead
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