Anthropology Quotes
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
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
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.
Clifford Geertz
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
Octavia Butler
