The state [..is a] metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing conditions of life to be consistent with that reality: that is, theatre to present an ontology of the world and, by presenting it, to make it happen--make it actual.
Download Image Share on X Share on Facebook

About This Quote

About Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz was a 20th-century American anthropologist. Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades ... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Read more on Wikipedia →

More quotes by Clifford Geertz

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”
— Clifford Geertz
psychology

“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conception...”
— Clifford Geertz
culture religion society symbolism

“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”
— Clifford Geertz
anthropology culture

“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 Geertz
anthropology culture

“Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their op...”
— Clifford Geertz
anthropology culture geertz

“The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are thin...”
— Clifford Geertz
Thinking Intuition
View all quotes by Clifford Geertz →