Anthropology Quotes

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

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

A human being is an animal suspended in webs of significance which he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz

Anthropology holds up a great mirror to man and lets him look at himself in his infinite variety.

Clyde Kluckhohn

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.

Bob Marley

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Clifford Geertz

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

Clifford Geertz

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

Clifford Geertz

Theology is anthropology.

Anselm Feuerbach

Anthropology has always maintained its dirty little secret of ethnographers who crossed into territory where their own bodily experiences made traditional ethnographic modes of representation and interpretation obsolete.

Frank Cushing

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

Sir James George Frazer

Anthropology requires 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.

Margaret Mead

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

Louis Leakey

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

Ruth Benedict

Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.

Ruth Benedict

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.

Susan Sontag

A method that has been often used to reconstruct historical sequences from the purely descriptive material of cultural anthropology is one that may be termed seriation of cultural elements in order of complexity.

Edward Sapir

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

Margaret Mead

Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.

Margaret Mead

The time when we could tolerate accounts presenting us the native as a distorted, childish charicature of a human being are gone. This picture is false, and like many other falsehoods, it has been killed by Science.

Bronislaw Malinowski

The magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed on myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility.

Bronislaw Malinowski

In the field one has to face a chaos of facts, some of which are so small that they seem insignificant; others loom so large that they are hard to encompass with one synthetic glance. But in this crude form they are not scientific facts at all; they are absolutely elusive, and can be fixed only by interpretation, by seeing them sub specie aeternitatis, by grasping what is essential in them and fixing this. Only laws and gerneralizations are scientific facts, and field work consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in subordinating it to general rules.

Bronislaw Malinowski

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.

Clifford Geertz

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