Anthropology Quotes - Page 3

• I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

  Margaret Mead

  Truth, Believe, Add

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 9 Aug. 1964

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Analysis, Incomplete

  Clifford Geertz (1973). “The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays”, p.29, Basic Books

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• 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.

  Ruth Behar

  Reality, Voice, Roots

  Ruth Behar (2014). “The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart”, p.26, Beacon Press

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• 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.

  Margaret Mead

  Reflection, Ideas, Political

  "Continuities in Cultural Evolution". Book by Margaret Mead, 1964.

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• Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.

  Aleister Crowley

  Love, Sex, Philosophical

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• When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

  Donald Johanson

  Years, Choices, Fossils

  "The Quest for Human Origins". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. January 25, 1991.

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

  Clifford Geertz

  Feminist, Female, Scholar

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• The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Teaching, Men, Secret

  H.P. Blavatsky (2016). “The Secret Doctrine”, p.1206, Penguin

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• Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

  Jonathan Raban

  Discipline, People, Society

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.53, Pan Macmillan

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• When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. "This is often considered to be man's first attempt at a calendar" she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. 'My question to you is this - what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar. It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women's contributions?

  Sandi Toksvig

  Women, Past, Feminist

  "Sandi Toksvig's top 10 unsung heroines" by Sandi Toksvig, www.theguardian.com. October 28, 2009.

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• There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.

  Paul Ricoeur

  Philosophy, Decision, Joining

  Paul Ricoeur (2005). “The EPZ Conflict of Interpretations”, p.396, A&C Black

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• In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

  Alan Dundes

  Trying, Students, Genre

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• The essence of cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing responses than with sending messages. It is more important to release the right response than to send the right message.

  Edward T. Hall

  Communication, Essence, Important

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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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• Man is a multi-sensorial being. Occasionally he verbalizes … and we must seriously examine the implications of the fact that man does not communicate by word alone.

  Ray Birdwhistell

  Communication, Being Alone, Men

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• 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.

  George Lucas

  Psychology, Doe, Culture

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• This missing science of heredity, this unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and indsutrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered.

  George Herbert

  Plato, Knowledge, Science

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• Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: 'What is the scientific status of the claims?' 'What social or ideological needs do they serve?'

  Noam Chomsky

  Two, Needs, Racist

  Noam Chomsky (2003). “For Reasons Of State”, p.318, Penguin Books India

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• Modern anthropology ... opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.

  John Carroll

  Believe, Mean, Goal

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.121, Taylor & Francis

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• No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Morning, Block, Ice

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

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Opportunity, Palm Sunday

  Kurt Vonnegut (1981). “Palm Sunday: an autobiographical collage”

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

  Gregory Keyes

  Degrees, Apes

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

  Kent V. Flannery

  Branches, Study, Process

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• Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Faith, Religious, Mistake

  "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". "The American Biology Teacher", Volume 35, (pp. 125-129), March 1973.

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• If we study history and anthropology we will find that all over the world the original people are Black people who migrated from Africa. This is confirmed by recent DNA studies. The only reason that we don't readily accept this is because we are indoctrinated to believe that Africa is the worst place that has ever been. If we had a more positive attitude about Africa we would run to it instead of running from it.

  Runoko Rashidi

  Running, Attitude, Believe

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