Clifford GeertzThinkers

Anthropology is a discipline that does not promise explanation or remedy, but to provides a more useful way of discuss these things, a way of talking about them that is both less obscuring of what in fact is going on in this instance or that and less given to the distortion the deep emotionality of these issues seems inevitably to produce.

Anthropology is a field of study that seeks to contribute to discussions of race and racism, the third world, and the formation and maintenance of collective self-images.

Anthropology is a field of study that seeks to gain access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term, converse with them.

Anthropology seeks to multiply uncertainties, not to diminish them. Not to answer our deepest questions. But to make available to us answers that others have given.

Anthropology is an interpretive science (concerning meaning) rather than an experimental science (concerning laws) which engages others where they are and represents them where they aren't.

Anthropology is not a science, but an interactive way to find meanings.

Anthropology is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Anthropology is primarily concerned with the way in which an individual acquires his cultural specificity.

Anthropology is a study that should base itself on the humanistic disciplines, utilizing description, poetics, literature, myths, symbols, and features of human beings which differentiate them from other species.

Anthropology is tasked not to generalize between cases but to generalize within them in order to ferret out the unapparent import of things.