Clifford Geertz125 definitions
The Absolute cosmopolite (n.) is a person capable of such heights of adaptability and fellow feeling as to be able to see as others see, to think as others think, speak as others speak, and on occasion even to feel as they feel and believe as they believe.
An Active center of social order (n.) is a point in a society where its leading ideas come together with its leading institutions to create an arena in which the events that most vitally affect its members' lives take place.
The Anthropologist (n.) is a merchant of astonishment.
Anthropology (n.) 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 (n.) 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 (n.) 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 (n.) 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 (n.) 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 (n.) is not a science, but an interactive way to find meanings.
Anthropology (n.) is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
Anthropology (n.) is primarily concerned with the way in which an individual acquires his cultural specificity.
Anthropology (n.) 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 (n.) is tasked not to generalize between cases but to generalize within them in order to ferret out the unapparent import of things.
An Anti-anti-relativist (n.) is not a relativist, but thinks that naïve anti-relativist are more dangerous than relativist.
Art (n.) is at work in society not in an instrumental way, but, in a semiotic one. Nothing very measurable would happen if yoruba carvers stopped carving. Just some things would no longer be said, or be able to be said, or be able to be felt and life would be greyer for it.
Art (n.) is made in the same shop as the equipment to grasp art, brought into existence by the experience of living in the midst of certain sorts of things.
A Bazaar economy (n.) is an economy in which individual traders do not trust one another, rarely cooperate, and spend much of their energy trying to outwit each other.
Belief (n.) is requisite to knowledge. He who would know must first believe.
A Blurred genre (n.) is a kind of genre mixing in intellectual life which focuses less on the general and more on the abstract.
Chaos (n.) is a tumult of events lacking not just interpretations but interpretability.
