Anthropology Quotes

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

Commitment, belief and positive attitude are all important if you're going to be a success, whether you're in sports, in business or, as in my case, anthropology.

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately.  There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way.  It's hard to escape your culture.

Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.

Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together

Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal.

The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.

We can reproduce within our own minds the way that the world is put together for other people. This is the extraordinary privilege and adventure of anthropology.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over-except when they are different.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

If you want to be an anthropologist, you need to study physical anthropology specialized in bones. If you want to be a forensic chemist, get a degree in chemistry. Do you want to do DNA work? Get a degree in microbiology. And do well. Study hard and go to graduate school.

Geneticists believe that anthropologists have decided what a race is. Ethnologists assume that their classifications embody principles which genetic science has proved correct. Politicians believe that their prejudices have the sanction of genetic laws and the findings of physical anthropology to sustain them.

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.

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

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.

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)

...to make the world safe for democracy.

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

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

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

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

See how exciting Anthropology is? He’s a leading expert in ancient Greece. Now you should all change your majors so that you can ogle men like him all day long. Or better yet, uncover naked male statues. (Tory) Was that necessary? (Acheron) Hey, I live to recruit students for the department. If I can make you good for something, then by golly I’m going to do it. (Tory)

I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.

More and more clearly every day, out of biology, anthropology, sociology, history, economic analysis, psychological insight, plain human decency and common sense, the necessary mandate of survival that we shall love all our neighbors as we do ourselves, is being confirmed and reaffirmed.

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

This is an extremely ambitious book. In addition to science and mathematics, Byers brings to bear insights from literature, philosophy, religion, history, anthropology, medicine, and psychology. The Blind Spot breaks new ground, and represents a major step forward in the philosophy of science. The book is also a page-turner, which is rare for this topic.

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.

My first job was actually as a social worker. And then later, I got my PhD in anthropology. And I've always been interested in humans as well as primates. We are all kind of have the same emotions, the same goals and lives really. But to me, when I first got to Madagascar I realized that the lemurs lives are very closely related to what the humans are doing; partially because they've got both looking for natural resources. And if we can make some way that both humans and lemurs can live together peaceably and happily, that would be my goal for Madagascar.

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.

Man is a free moral agent and can be magnanimous and deal disinterestedly, humanity is a definite goal, social justice is desirable and possible, individual lives may be gloriously diversified, uniquely individualized, and yet socially useful; or, these are mere phrases, snares to catch gulls, soothing syrup for our troubled souls.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.

In a world where concepts are so often deployed in an ad hoc fashion, half explored before being displaced by others, it is immensely refreshing to encounter such serious and sustained attention to the building blocks of inquiry—and to the responsibilities thereby incurred. Designs on the Contemporary is a work of profound importance to the philosophy of anthropology. In conjunction with Rabinow’s other works, it creates a nonpareil, a configuration of thought with no equal.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

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.

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.

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

I wanted to be a car mechanic and I wanted to race cars and the idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn't really a priority. But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school. I got great grades. Eventually I got very excited about anthropology and about social sciences and psychology, and I was able to push my photography even further and eventually discovered film and film schools.

Theology is Anthropology... [T]he distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity.

I have been accused of having believed when I wrote Sex and Temperament that there are no sex differences... This, many readers felt, was too much. It was too pretty. I must have found what I was looking for. But this misconception comes from a lack of understanding of what anthropology means, of the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder, that which one would not have been able to guess.

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?

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it