Anthropology Quotes

The classical anthropological question, What is man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"...

What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and...

[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen a...

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case ...

It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history,...

It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.

We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. I...

I remember taking an anthropology class in college and the professor was explaining that there is li...

Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nat...

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely ...

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history...

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

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

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most inst...

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

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It ...

Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition,...

I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other s...

Studies [on the origin of fairy-stories] are, however, scientific (at least in intent); they are the...

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrific...

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to...

I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, ...

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appoi...