Anthropology Quotes

1. "In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed."
Author: Alan Dundes

2. "Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities." - Alfred L. Kroeber"
Author: Alfred L. Kroeber

3. "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."
Author: Clifford Geertz

4. "The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive."
Author: Clifford Geertz

5. "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."
Author: Clifford Geertz

6. "Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."
Author: Clifford Geertz

7. "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."
Author: Clifford Geertz

8. "I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology."
Author: Clifford Geertz

9. "But if all maximizing models are really arguing is that "people will always seek to maximize something," then they obviously can't predict anything, which means employing them can hardly be said to make anthropology more scientific. All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It's called "cynicism." Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it "science."
Author: David Graeber

10. "Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science."
Author: Edward Sapir

11. "I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time."
Author: Franz Boas

12. "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."
Author: H. P. Blavatsky

13. "I've done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can't use it for progress."
Author: Hans Rosling

14. "I like the ritual, the liturgy of a well-crafted, emotional fashion show. I will never be jaded with this side of fashion. The catwalk is pure anthropology, something like an esoteric encrypted parade. It can totally be replaced but it will be missed."
Author: Hedi Slimane

15. "I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology."
Author: Henry Fairfield Osborn

16. "For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology's turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider's perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today."
Author: Ian Tattersall

17. "Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world has potential to function as a window to God and a means of grace from God because God himself affirms materiality as a good thing. We see this not only in creation itself but also in the reaffirmation of it in the incarnation, in which God is happy to inhabit the goodness of flesh. Furthermore, materiality receives an eschatological affirmation in our hope for the resurrection of the body. Even the future kingdom will be a material environment of sacramentality. On the other hand, when an incarnational ontology and anthropology are linked with our earlier affirmation of time and tradition, a catholic postmodernism also affirms a special sacramentality - a special presence and means of grace in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist."
Author: James K.A. Smith

18. "A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion."
Author: James P. Hogan

19. "I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training."
Author: Jan Chipchase

20. "Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world."
Author: Jane Howard

21. "Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life."
Author: Joan D. Vinge

22. "You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past."
Author: John Logan

23. "He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation."
Author: Jon Krakauer

24. "Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology.Snappy dresser, though."
Author: Kathy Reichs

25. "After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

26. "It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can't stand primitive people — they're so stupid."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

27. "I'm on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, "Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That's where the writers are most likely to be."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

28. "I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

29. "Harris loved to read and he shared everything he read. He read to whoever happened to be in the room from whatever paper he happened to be making his way through. Ann Landers and the horoscope, of course, headlines, cartoons, Miss Manners, Heloise, the lives of others, in many forms, long articles on astronomy or anthropology, political pieces, op-ed pieces, book reviews, church bazaars, executions, plane crashes, disco artists, whatever caught his interest."
Author: Lewis Nordan

30. "The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology."
Author: Ludwig Feuerbach

31. "They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed."
Author: Marlena De Blasi

32. "The object is evident in the name of the discipline. Similarly, theology (theologia) is the study of God. The object of theology is not the church's teaching or the experience of pious souls. It is not a subset of ethics, religious studies, cultural anthropology, or psychology. God is the object of this discipline."
Author: Michael S. Horton

33. "Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate."Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man."
Author: Milan Kundera

34. "For me, a bit of anthropology in the evening is always better than staying and watching the telly."
Author: Nick Rhodes

35. "I narrowed my eyes at him. "Stuff that. I'll write a doctoral thesis. Then I can go do what most of the other people with doctoral degrees in anthropology do." "What's that?" asked Calvin."You don't need to encourage her," said Adam seriously, but his eyes laughed at me."The same thing that people with degrees in history do," I said. "Fix cars or serve frnech fries and bad hamburgers."
Author: Patricia Briggs

36. "I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years."
Author: Patrick Rothfuss

37. "The classical anthropological question, What is man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture."
Author: Paul Goodman

38. "Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word."
Author: Peter Gay

39. "In his treatise on the battles between the gods underlying ancient Dionysian theatre, the young Nietzsche notes: 'Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them.' Similarly, an anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution, beyond affirmation and denial."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

40. "The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external' elements of linguistics from the ‘internal' elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects."
Author: Pierre Bourdieu

41. "Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think."
Author: Randy Newman

42. "Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task."
Author: Richard Leakey

43. "The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences."
Author: Ruth Benedict

44. "What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not. But my ideas on this subject were always horribly confused, for my knowledge of men was scant and the meaning of being beyond me."
Author: Samuel Beckett

45. "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)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

46. "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. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."
Author: Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky

47. "I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class."
Author: Tim Robbins

48. "History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology."
Author: W. H. Auden

49. "If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context."
Author: Wilhelm Dilthey

50. "The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")"
Author: William S. Wilson

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