Top 239 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Anthropologists - Page 2

The anxiety around such work [vulnerably written ethnographies] is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussable.

I do not think there is such a thing as a "clash of civilizations." When I say that Muslims as Muslims cannot be represented in the West, I was being ironic, and also referring to the fact that ninety percent of the time when people talk about "the problem of Muslims" in the West, it is to complain about the fact that Muslims have not "integrated."

An education that teaches you to understand something about the world has done only half of the assignment. The other half is to teach you to do something about making the world a better place.

There is a fundamental spiritual quality to gratitude that transcends religious traditions. Gratitude is a universal human experience that can seem to be either a random occurrence of grace or a chosen attitude to create a better experience of life; in many ways it contains elements of both. Grateful people sense that they are not separated from others or from God; this recognition of unity with all things brings a deep sense of gratefulness, whether we are religious or not.

if we center our lives on BMWs, RVs, VCRs, PCs and the other acronyms of consumerism, we cannot expect our children to do otherwise.

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.

If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!

We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project.

I do not criticize religion as such, but I criticize the concept and the definition of "religion" - as I said in Genealogies.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?

Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.

The genius of culture is to create an ontological system so compelling that what is inside and outside of a person are viewed as of a piece, no seams and patches noticeable.

Nothing is more detestable to the physical anthropologist than... the wretched habit of cremating the dead. It involves not only a prodigal waste of costly fuel and excellent fertilizer, but also the complete destruction of physical historical data. On the other hand, the custom of embalming and mummification is most praiseworthy and highly to be recommended.

A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: 'What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!

You cannot fully understand your own life without knowing and thinking beyond your life, your own neighborhood, and even your own nation.

We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust.

I think we need to think about Islamic tradition as a way of asking questions that cut across (and transgress) the assumptions of a purely secular world in which we already know how things stand for individual subjects as well as for societies.

Witches try to 'connect' with the world around them. Witchcraft, they say, is about the tactile, intuitive understanding of the turn of the seasons, the song of the birds; it is the awareness of all things as holy.

The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.

The Hollywood atmosphere of crises and continuous anxiety is a kind of hysteria which prevents people from thinking, and is not too different from the way dictators use wars and continuous threats of war as an emotional basis for maintaining their power.

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

In Hollywood, the ... basic freedom of being able to choose between alternatives is absent. The gifted people who have the capacity for choice cannot exercise it; the executives who technically have the freedom of choice do not actually have it, because they usually lack the knowledge and imagination necessary for making such a choice.

While it is true that without a vision the people perish, it is doubly true that without action the people and their vision perish as well.

Without language, it is safe to say that man would not have become fully human.

Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

In Hollywood, primitive magical thinking exists side by side with the most advanced technology.

I have a huge need for financial security; the emigrant in me has a fear of ending up homeless and in the gutter.

When there is pressure for leaders to respond to problems or crises, they often simply intensify their efforts in their particular defined sphere of activity - even if that's not relevant to the real problem. To do otherwise requires taking on entrenched practices and asserting power in areas where it often will not be well received. And leaders tend to see major crises more as threats to their own position rather than as systemic challenges for the societies that they govern or the institutions that they manage.

Evolution is not controversial in the field of science. It's controversial in the public sphere because public education is highly politicized.

You do not need intellectuality for deep faith. You do not need it for behaving humanely towards people whether fellow Muslims or non-Muslims. You do not need a concept, a theory, you do not need intellectual arguments for justifying a way of living that is already in place in order for it to proceed.

the trouble with a woman standing behind her man is that she can't see where she is going!

That which we witness, we are forever changed by, and once witnessed we can never go back.

I think what bothers me so much of the time, is they take the data and theory and distort it. They must know they're distorting.

We must not reject all sexual contact between adults and young people as inherently oppressive.

It seems to me perfectly possible to act humanely towards other beings, whether humans or animals or plants. One simply has to learn how to behave. To behave "humanely" it is perfectly possible to do without the notion of "humanity."

Researchers have found very little difference between men and women in terms of the amount of time spent gossiping.

Creationists who want religious ideas taught as scientific fact in public schools continue to adapt to courtroom defeats by hiding their true aims under ever changing guises.

The notion of "humanity" as a form of transcendence derives, I think, from the conviction that intellectuality possesses an absolute power, from the demand that our best behavior depends on our ability to think abstractly, in terms of a universal rule, about something called humanity, that we need to understand humanity abstractly so that we can act responsibly towards those who represent it.

You plan and plan and plan then Africa happens

We often feed the critic gourmet meals and starve the rest.

No society can sustain unlimited growth - none ever has. History demonstrates that expectations of infinite growth lead to collapse. Unfortunately, millennia of evidence also indicates that needed attempts to stabilize such societies run counter to the expectations of the populace and of interest groups. For that reason, such attempts at stabilization frequently fail.

Our response to an event is more important than the event itself.

When we dance we touch the essence of who we are and experience the unity between spirit and matter.

To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards of deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death.

In liberal society we claim that freedom of speech is sacred and therefore has an absolute character. But we know (or should know) that "free speech" inhabits a structured space: not only is "hate speech" legally forbidden in liberal societies, but there are also laws protecting the circulation of copyrighted material, and the reproduction of trademarks and patents without explicit permission.

The woman who bore me is no longer alive, but I seem to be her daughter in increasingly profound ways.

For the law, the clarity of language and the finality of judgment is crucial, because you have to decide a case one way or another - whether it is criminal or civil or whatever. In ordinary life, you do not have to decide things with absolute finality. You do not have to decide on a theory in order to behave in a certain way towards other people.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

The portal of healing and creativity always takes us into the realm of the spirit.

[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves

Four Rules For Life Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don't be attached to the results.

I'm not criticizing how people experience what they might call spirituality. I am interested in looking critically at something else - at how people use their language to articulate theories about something they call religion, to say, for example, that "in Islam religion and politics necessarily go together," or to insist that "violence has no place in religion," to universalize it.

History is full of delightful reversals, where the opposite of what one predicts comes true.

In the sweet territory of silence we touch the mystery. It's the place of reflection and contemplation, and it's the place where we can connect with the deep knowing, to the deep wisdom way.

An order given in battle, an instruction issued by the master of a sailing ship, a cry for help, are as powerful in modifying the course of events as any other bodily act...You utter a vow or forge a signature and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman or prison.

In order to survive, an animal must be born into a favoring or at least tolerant environment. Similarly, in order to achieve preservation and recognition, a specimen of fossil man must be discovered in intelligence, attested by scientific knowledge, and interpreted by evolutionary experience. These rigorous prerequisites have undoubtedly caused many still-births in human palaeontology and are partly responsible for the high infant mortality of discoveries of geologically ancient man.

Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.

I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two.

All of salvation is to make us look good! We who are dirty, worn, broken, and sinful are to be the showcase of heaven.