Top 183 Anthropology Quotes & Sayings

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)

I had just received my degree in Calcium Anthropology... the study of milkmen.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

I do feel a kinship with anthropology or ethnography, although when you hear those terms you think of something exotic. Generally, photographic anthropology has that taste of the faraway or undiscovered place. But my anthropology has more to do with what's in my reach.

I love Anthropology for kitchenware - they make the best bowls, plates, cutlery etc.

For no sooner had I begun to read this great work [Frasier, The Golden Bough ], than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.

When I went to college, I really became interested in cultural anthropology. Our behavior isn't that different from other primate species'.

I was an anthropology major in college, and I've had a lifelong fascination with Egyptology, mummies, and all sorts of bizarre cultural practices.

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

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Commitment, belief and positive attitude are all important if you're going to be a success, whether you're in sports, in business or, as in my case, anthropology.

My degrees are in anthropology, and I have friends who have worked with apes.

Ever since I was a kid, I've had an enormous interest in the sciences - everything from quantum physics to anthropology.

My son is a lecturer at Bristol University in anthropology. His degree was in, get this, human mating strategies - sex!

Because human development is the most specific and exalted mission of woman, studies in anthropology and theory of pedagogy are essential in girls' education.

For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.

I studied anthropology and art history, as I have always been captivated by living traditions.

Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.

I wasn't a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.

Maybe if I'd studied writing instead of anthropology, I'd be more sensible. You know - pick a genre, follow the rules, stay in the box - but let's face it. Sensible people don't major in anthropology.

I attended classes and taught classes, in Food Anthropology at Pace University, with an anthropology professor. You can trace history by the architecture and food of a place. Food is one of those things that transcends and stays in the culture.

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

The last time I saw a brow that low I was watching slides in anthropology class

Theology is anthropology.

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

I cannot wait until the day I can go back to school... I've already picked my program: anthropology at Columbia. I will not get in, but a girl can dream.

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

I feel like I studied anthropology in college for a reason.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over-except when they are different.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

For me, a bit of anthropology in the evening is always better than staying and watching the telly.

Archaeology is the only branch of Anthropology where we kill our informants in the process of studying them.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.

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.

Well, we are terribly divided politically, yes, and, you know, I don't mean to intimidate you and your listeners but I have a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.

I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.

Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.

I look at my time on this earth as social anthropology, at home and in work life.

I was born in Middletown, Connecticut, while my dad was getting his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and anthropology at Wesleyan University.

In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West.

Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one rarely sees in anthropology. Lifeworlds, unsurprisingly, is no exception. The several essays included here fit into an impressive whole that set out a compelling case for a type of ethnography of which Jackson is one of the masters. The writing is strong and the critical reflections impressive. This book defines an approach to anthropology that is resonant enough to challenge the leading models of our time.

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

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

Telling everyone I wanted to go into forensic anthropology was my form of rebellion.

Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.

Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.

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.

In anthropology, which historically exists to 'give voice' to others, there is no greater taboo than self-revelation. The impetus of our discipline, with its roots in Western fantasies about barbaric others, has been to focus primarily on 'cultural' rather than 'individual' realities. The irony is that anthropology has always been rooted in an 'I' - understood as having a complex psychology and history - observing a 'we' that, until recently, was viewed as plural, ahistorical, and nonindividuated.

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

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

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different.