Anthropologists Quotes

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

  Ruth Benedict

  Science, Differences, Safety

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

  Clifford Geertz

  People, Different, Asking

  17 Copy quote

• I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

  Clifford Geertz

  Thinking, Impact, Feminist

  16 Copy quote

• As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world.

  Helen Fisher

  People, Groups, World

  16 Copy quote

• Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars

  Clifford Geertz

  Feminist, Female, Anthropology

  16 Copy quote

• ...to make the world safe for democracy.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Strong Women, Tyrants, Differences

  Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Stanley Link, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton University (1985). “Papers: Edited by Arthur S. Link and Others”

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• I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night.

  James C. Scott

  Morning, Eye, Night

  "An Interview with James C. Scott | Harry G. West and Celia Plender". Gastronomica Interview, gastronomica.org. March 14, 2017.

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• Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilisation. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organisation disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present.

  Carl Jung

  Spiritual, Impact, People

  11 Copy quote

• God created animals. And they’re loving; they’re beautiful. I feel the way (anthropologist) Jane Goodall does or any of those naturalists. I don’t find my interest in animals weird or strange at all.

  Michael Jackson

  Beautiful, Animal, Doe

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• I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Remember, Found

  Elizabeth Kostova (2010). “The Historian”, p.354, Hachette UK

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• I was surprised by the level of sophistication of the Special Operation forces. Among them were anthropologists and PhD candidates. I felt because I understand the patterns of nineteenth-century jihad in West Africa that I was definitely going to be more advanced than they were in comprehending what the militant rallying cry was.

  Eliza Griswold

  Rallying Cry, Special, Patterns

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.

  Helen Fisher

  Happiness, Romantic Love, Found

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• As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  People, Study, Conventions

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

  Robert Graves

  Links, Fields, Language

  Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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• If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.

  Margaret Mead

  Water, Would Be, Lasts

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• 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.

  Bronislaw Malinowski

  Notebook, Beach, Garden

  Myth in Primitive Psychology ch. 5 (1926)

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• Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets.

  Rigoberta Menchu

  Book, Secret, Matter

  Rigoberta Menchú (2009). “I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Second Edition)”, p.289, Verso Books

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• When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.

  Vine Deloria Jr.

  Men, White Man, America

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• People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?

  Neil Postman

  Book, Writing, People

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.13, Penguin

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• 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)

  Margaret Mead

  Photography, Moving, Training

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• Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

  Susan Sontag

  Intellectual, Exotic, Urban

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• The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.

  Sherry Ortner

  Powerful, Reflection, Assessment

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• Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

  Bernadette Devlin

  Country, Technology, Europe

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• Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

  Clifford Geertz

  Should, Ethnography, Straightforward

  33 Copy quote

• Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Home, Science, Past

  Thomas S. Kuhn (1987). “Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912”, p.364, University of Chicago Press

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