Anthropologists Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• 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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• I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.

  Reggie Watts

  Self, Taught, Self Taught

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• My father is a cultural anthropologist and my mother ran an outpatient clinic and treated a lot of people who had been institutionalised. I was very fascinated with behaviour and criminology and why people do things that don't make any sense. I would probe my mother: "Why? Why would somebody do this?" And look for some causality between someone's mental state and their behaviour. I think it had a lot of influence on me.

  Eliza Hittman

  Mother, Father, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Thinking, Mind, Intellectual

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• It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

  David Sedaris

  Mistake, Shoes, Population

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

  William Gibson

  Memories, Culture, Fifteen

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• The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.

  Pete Seeger

  Teamwork, Community, Rich

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• To paraphrase something the anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said, the way I change my life is to act as if I'm the person I want to be. This is, to me, the simplest, wisest advice you can give anyone. When you wake up and act like a loving person, you realize not only that you are altered, but that the people around you are also transformed, because everybody is changed by the reception of this love.

  Bernie Siegel

  Love You, People, Giving

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• It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

  Gregory Bateson

  Years, Sphinx, Fifty

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• The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Sports, Believe, Games

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• What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.

  Jared Diamond

  Easter, Tree, Lasts

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• Most Kikuyu marriages were arranged on the basis of what is described by anthropologists as the bride price.

  Louis Leakey

  Swag, Brides, Bases

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• Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. Its just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.

  Carlos Barrios

  Writing, Names, People

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• I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

  Ken Burns

  Film, Grew Up, Certain

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• Several Southeastern tribes have long said that their ancestors received immigrants from Mesoamerica and that these immigrants introduced many cultural changes. Far too few anthropologists were listening.

  Richard Thornton

  Long, Listening, Tribes

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• We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way

  Christopher Hitchens

  Stupid, Medicine, Long

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.772, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Nothing is more detestable to the physical anthropologist than... the wretched habit of cremating the dead. It involves not only a prodigal waste of costly fuel and excellent fertilizer, but also the complete destruction of physical historical data. On the other hand, the custom of embalming and mummification is most praiseworthy and highly to be recommended.

  Earnest Hooton

  Hands, Data, Historical

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• Beyond Bookchin”, David Watson, of Fifth Estate, argues that aboriginal society represents a viable Utopia. He quotes favourably the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins; “We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything, perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.

  Marshall Sahlins

  Thinking, Hunters, Arguing

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• How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern.

  Edmund Leach

  Hope, Math, Thinking

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• The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.

  Edith Hamilton

  Flower, Cutting, Science

  Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub

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• As a social anthropologist, I naturally accept and even stress the fact that there are major differences, both mental and psychological, which separate the different races of mankind. Indeed, I would be inclined to suggest that however great may be the physical differences between such races as the European and the Negro, the mental and psychological differences are greater still.

  Louis Leakey

  Stress, Race, Differences

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• In the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.

  Steven Pinker

  Past, Data, Two

  "The Blank Slate". Book by Steven Pinker, 2002.

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• Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.

  Lloyd deMause

  War, Simple, Peaceful

  "The Emotional Life of Nations". Book by Lloyd deMause, 2002.

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• We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for this reason that anthropologists have not shown much interest in these models, unlike economists, for example, for whom the use of mathematics poses no problem. However, one could reach the same conclusions by using just a bit of common sense.

  Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

  Common Sense, Example, Use

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