# Quote — Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

> Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort — how extraordinarily “thick” it is. In finished anthropological writings, including those collected here, this fact — that what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to — is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined.

- 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: 9
- 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/quoted-raw-a-note

## 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)