# Quote — Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

> To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action — art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, common sense — is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of de-emotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.

- 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: 30
- 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/to-look-at-the

## 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)