Quotes by Anthropologists - Page 2

Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.

Carlos Castañeda

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

Pierre Bourdieu

Today while the titular head of the family may still be the father everyone knows that he is little more than chairman at most of the entertainment committee.

Ashley Montagu

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

The study of man is the study of his extensions.

Edward T. Hall

Human war has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions.

Robert Ardrey

These ideas fit the experience of these Japanese women who often talked about searching for or trying to develop "self" (jibun). Cultivating or polishing self by doing tea ceremony or being a good mother, for example, had a good connotation for the Japanese because it meant that you were trying to go beyond your narrow self and connect self with the larger world beyond social norms. But developing self in the new way these women used it meant to develop self according to just what you want to do or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way?

Nancy Ross Rosenberger

And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?

Ernest Becker

It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers.

Lawrence Blair

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

Zora Neale Hurston

Men with high baseline levels of testosterone marry less frequently, have more adulterous affairs, commit more spousal abuse, and divorce more often.

Helen Fisher

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.

Zora Neale Hurston

Once you wake up thought in a man you can never put it to sleep again.

Zora Neale Hurston

Neoclassical economics is precisely the theory one would expect a vastly complex system of international corporations, world markets, and interconnected currencies to create to sustain, justify, explain, and predict "itself." And classical economics, correspondingly, was a predictable expression of an earlier European capitalism.

Roger M. Keesing

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

Jared Diamond

...those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements

David Harvey

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

Margaret Mead

As a result, amongst working-class Americans, government is now generally seen as being made up of two sorts of people: "politicians," who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and "bureaucrats," who are condescending elitists almost impossible to uproot.

David Graeber

The most satisfactory definition of man from the scientific point of view is probably Man the Tool-maker.

Kenneth Oakley

Apparently, when conditions were right, peoples of all world regions were quite capable of transforming wild plants into domesticated crops—a good point to keep in mind when next you hear someone claim that some cultures (usually their own) are more inventive or creative than others.

James Peoples

When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.

Loren Eiseley

He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.

William Graham Sumner

Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.

Jared Diamond

Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.

Thor Heyerdahl

Let the sun go down on you like King Harold at the battle of Hastings — fighting gloriously. Maybe a loser but what a loser! Greater in defeat than the conqueror. Certainly not a coward that rusted out lurking in his tent.

Zora Neale Hurston

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.

Pierre Bourdieu

What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!

Pascal Boyer

We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.

David Harvey

Yes, I felt very small. The typewriter seemed larger than a piano, I was less than a molecule. What could I do? I drank more.-pg 237

Albert Sánchez Piñol

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves

Margaret Mead

Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoningof the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrainedmaterial production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasiveevil to have emerged in all of history, and it may eveneventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no "twisted" peoplewhom we can hold responsible for this.

Ernest Becker

The first key to leadership is self-control.

Jack Weatherford

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

Zora Neale Hurston

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

Clifford Geertz

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

Zora Neale Hurston

We called one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation... We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives.

Ernest Becker

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.

Ashley Montagu

Then, as we turned the final curve past the abandoned little hamlet of Ballydubh, with the village almost out of sight, he forced me to turn around and take in the full sweep of the mountains and the sea. "And there", he said, "is your An Clohan. You had best said good-bye, now.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

The Hawaiian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe.

Roland Burrage Dixon

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.

Ernest Gellner

Much has been written on the excellence of bats' navigation equipment. It is all false. Tropical bats spend their entire time flying into obstacles with a horrible thudding noise. They specialize in slamming into walls and falling, fluttering onto your face. As my own 'piece of equipment essential for the field' I would strongly recommend a tennis racket; it is devastatingly effective in clearing a room of bats.

Nigel Barley

The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The many-fathers theory instead posits that concealed ovulation evolved to give the women access to many sex partners and thus to leave many men uncertain as to whether they sired her children.

Jared Diamond

The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.

Thomas Henry Huxley

A baby's cry is precisely as serious as it sounds.

Jean Liedloff

Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution, and often afford convincing evidence of it. At the same time, it has been shown that certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.

Robert Trivers

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

Jared Diamond

Without the vision of a goal, a man cannot manage his own life, much less the lives of others.

Jack Weatherford

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

Ernest Becker

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.

Ruth Benedict

Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.

Loren Eiseley

Seek and see all the marvels around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else. - Don Juan

Carlos Castañeda

When Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west -- that cloud field of the sky -- to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.

Zora Neale Hurston

The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.

James C. Scott

The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any.

Thomas Henry Huxley

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

Loren Eiseley

But I find it necessary to repeat in this particular place that the division into classes, which is so salient a part of modern demonology, had, and has, little significance for primitive man or for the peasant in a comparatively low state of mental development. To such people, spirits of all kinds - fairies, the ghosts of the dead, and even witches and water-kelpies - are all creatures of the supernatural class between which he scarcely differentiates.

Lewis Spence

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.

Zora Neale Hurston

If you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it.

Jack Weatherford

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.

Max Gluckman

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