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"Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo."
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"Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is."
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Personal Development

"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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Personal Development

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
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Personal Development

"The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive."
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Personal Development

"Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo."
Author Name
Personal Development

"He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
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Personal Development

"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."
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"If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology."
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Personal Development

"Man is at the bottom an animal midway a citizen and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top."
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"It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today."
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"Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before."
Food

"In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn."
Food

"Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can."
Food

"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."
Nature

"People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue."
Environment

"My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it."
Food

"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."
Science

"Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring."
Science

"Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we've more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us."
Culture

"To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture - that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product."
Society
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