A religion is a system of ...

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.
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 Clifford Geertz

Quotes from the same author

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it
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 Clifford Geertz
The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.
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 Clifford Geertz
I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style
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 Clifford Geertz
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
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 Clifford Geertz
To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.
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 Clifford Geertz