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Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns — customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters — as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms — plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) — for the governing of behavior.

— Clifford Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

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More quotes by Clifford Geertz

In the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they look, the one-eyed is not king, he is spectator.

Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983)

The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.

One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.

The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

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.

The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.

The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Clifford Geertz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.