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Anthropology Quotes
"Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess."
48
"Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities."
20
"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."
19
"The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive."
19
"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."
17
"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."
16
"I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it."
15
"Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology."
15
"I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology."
15
"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."
14
"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."
13
"Men were primitive in the eyes of angel beingsas men are primitive in the eyes of wilier races."
13
"If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African."
11
"One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor."
9
"He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
9
"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."
8
"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."
5
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
1
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