Anthropologists Quotes - Page 3

• I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Greek, Leopards, Bulls

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin.

  James W. Loewen

  Native American, Past, Culture

  James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.117, The New Press

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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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• If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will. If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%? In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of primitive self-expression. In America we call it golf.

  Dave Barry

  Golf, Self, Expression

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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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• 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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• 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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• The selection process has been powerful enough to produce one indisputable outcome: the family is a universal human institution. . . . In virtually every society into which historians or anthropologists have inquired, one finds people living together on the basis of kinship ties and having responsibility for raising children. . . . Even in societies where men and women have relatively unrestricted sexual access to one another beginning at an early age, marriage is still the basis for family formation. It is desired by the partners and expected by society.

  James Q. Wilson

  Family, Powerful, Children

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• I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.

  Lily King

  Thinking, Phones, Cells

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

  Lily King

  Writing, Thinking, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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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• In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of specialists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which offers less than this passion play remains philosophically trivial. Cultural anthropologists suggest the appealing term 'deep play' for the comprehensively absorbing preoccupations of human beings. From the perspective of a theory of the practising life we would add: the deep plays are those which are moved by the heights.

  Peter Sloterdijk

  Philosophy, Passion, Play

  Peter Sloterdijk (2014). “You Must Change Your Life”, p.24, John Wiley & Sons

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• Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution. The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall to a large extent within their jurisdiction.

  Rudolf Virchow

  Fall, Mean, Science

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• Milla Jovovich introduced me to [anthropologist and author of the Don Juan series of books involving shamanic peyote rituals] Carlos Castaneda because I was all into the hallucinogens for a minute.

  Michelle Rodriguez

  Book, Peyote, Juan

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Art is a way you discover the past, and so it brings the past into the present and the future. That's why we have anthropologists who dig up the art from the past. You can see the refinement in the society by the art. And people will see our lack of refinement when they dig up our art.

  Pat Steir

  Art, Past, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

  W. H. Auden

  Thinking, Personal Knowledge, Guessing

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• Thinking is a social process. I talk to everyone from children to anthropologists and philosophers. I try my ideas out on people and they talk back to you. That's how ideas get formed.

  Patricia Piccinini

  Children, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.lucyreesart.com

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• Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.

  Richard Dawkins

  Hypocrite, Feet, Flying

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When I first got the job, I was told nothing about my character. She's an anthropologist and she's tough, she's a female Indiana Jones. That's what I went into [Lost] knowing.

  Rebecca Mader

  Jobs, Character, Knowing

  "Show Tracker". Interview with Patrick Kevin Day, articles.latimes.com. February 12, 2009.

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• The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Country, People, Firsts

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• I'm deeply interested in the photograph as a record of an encounter and enjoy putting myself in a timeline of image-makers, alongside other travelers, such as anthropologists, colonists, missionaries, even tourists. I do that to emphasize subjectivity, rather than privilege any single perspective - I see myself as only one of many storytellers.

  Susan Meiselas

  Perspective, Tourists, Encounters

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• For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

  Samuel Beckett

  Time, Men, Way

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “Watt”, p.56, Faber & Faber

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• I learned from the Macarturos. I had never been at a table with a labor organizer and a playwright and a performance artist and an anthropologist and a human rights lawyer. Usually at most gatherings, it's all writers. But suddenly I was at a table with all these different people and I learned from each of them, learned from the work they're doing, learned new ways to solve my problems.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Artist, Rights, People

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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• The ideal for me is to mix it up. 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.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, People, Worry

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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