Anthropologists Quotes - Page 2

• The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.

  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

  Mother, Children, Father

  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (2012). “From the River's Edge”, p.16, Living Justice Press

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• Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put the matter: We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else take it for granted that they are descended from gods.

  Huston Smith

  People, Humanity, Religion

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• Certain anthropologists hold that man, having discovered tools, ceased to evolve biologically. Animals, never having discovered them, continue to fashion drills out of their beaks, oars out of their hind feet, wings out of their forefeet, suits of armor out of their hides, levers out of their horns, saws out of their teeth. Whether this be true or not, all authorities agree that man is the tool-using animal. It sets him off from the rest of the animal kingdom as drastically as does speech.

  Stuart Chase

  Fashion, Animal, Men

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• An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New
  Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not
  new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax.

  David Letterman

  Funny, Humor, Fields

  David Letterman, Andy Breckman (1985). “Late night with David Letterman: the book”, Random House Inc

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• I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist

  Clifford Geertz

  Writing, Thinking, Happens

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• As soon as you take out a pencil and paper with the Indians, you're one thing to them - an anthropologist - and what they tell to anthropologists is always distorted.

  Ruth Beebe Hill

  Paper, Pencils, One Thing

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• The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science

  Franz Boas

  Historical, Development, Domain

  Franz Boas (1989). “A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911”, p.35, University of Chicago Press

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• 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

  Clifford Geertz

  Names, Numbers, Done

  "Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction" by Gary A. Olson, Journal of Advanced Composition 11.2, hypergeertz.jku.at. 1991.

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• Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

  Rob Brezsny

  Children, Games, Culture

  Rob Brezsny (2005). “Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings”, p.88, Frog Books

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• Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.

  Michael Schur

  Country, Cities, Usa

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Space, Special, Doe

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• The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations.

  James C. Scott

  Gossip, Rumor, World

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

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• Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

  Abraham Verghese

  Baptism, President, Use

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• Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.

  David Graeber

  Together, States, Anthropology

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• I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.

  Erykah Badu

  Hurt, Emotional, Thinking

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• I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious.

  Michael Dorris

  Humility, Native American, Past

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• The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.

  Martin Buber

  Philosophical, Men, Doe

  Martin Buber (2003). “Between Man and Man”, p.148, Routledge

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• The loss of body hair is interesting to anthropologists, because it is a feature that distinguishes us from our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees. They have body hair, we don't.

  Mark Stoneking

  Loss, Hair, Interesting

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski", and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.

  Neil Postman

  Time, Book, Simple

  "Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education".

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• What if the book (of Genesis) is describing a dawning awareness of the world? The anthropologist Edmund Leach has argued that the 'bit' or binary digit is the basic unit of pre-logical communication. Genesis is a sprouting of 'bits', ie elementary binary distinctions.

  Charles Hampden-Turner

  Communication, Book, What If

  Charles Hampden-Turner (1982). “Maps of the Mind”, Macmillan Publishing Company

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• When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Worry, People

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• I wouldn't say the anthropologists were making art, but they were definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning, passion, and they were also experimenting with form. There was a sense of trying to be as sincere as possible, whether you were investigating something far away from you or very close.

  Aleksandra Mir

  Art, Passion, Practice

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, believermag.com. January 1, 2004.

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• You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers...damn anthropologists.

  Emo Philips

  Girl, Careers, Damn

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• You can lose a reader in a blink of an eye. If a person is an engineer or chemist or an anthropologist or whatever, you spoil the whole book for that person if there's obviously ignorance here. What's wrong with so much science fiction is that the science is so lousy that it isn't worth paying attention to.

  Robert Caro

  Book, Ignorance, Eye

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• Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

  Lily King

  Writing, Would Be, Form

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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