# Quote — Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

> After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.

- Author: [Clifford Geertz](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-geertz.md)
- Book: [The Interpretation of Cultures](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-geertz/the-interpretation-of-cultures.md)
- Page: 3
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clifford_Geertz#The_Interpretation_of_Cultures_(1973)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-geertz/the-interpretation-of-cultures/after-we-have

## More from this book

> 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 conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

p. 90 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-geertz/the-interpretation-of-cultures/a-religion-is-a-system.md)

> The "control mechanism" view of culture begins with the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public — that its natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square.

p. 45 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-geertz/the-interpretation-of-cultures/the-control-mechanism.md)

> Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like.

p. 29 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-geertz/the-interpretation-of-cultures/cultural-analysis-is-intrinsically.md)