Best Anthropologists Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

Source: What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday.”

Source: Satin Island

“He saw himself as a hated prier into the homes of strangers, a kind of intellectual charlatan rationalizing his own prurience into scientific curiosity; someone at once lower and more pretentious than a professional social worker.”

Pretentious Academia Social Science Anthropologists Charlatan Social Workers Gawking

Book:Dayspring

Source: Dayspring

“Among most of the peoples that anthropologists are familiar with, true manhood is a precious and elusive status beyond mere maleness, a hortatory image that men and boys aspire to and that their culture demands of them as a measure of belonging.”

Belonging Manhood Anthropologists Maleness

Book:Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity

Source: Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity

“People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?”

Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.”

Humans Doe Values Space Study Special Range Accord Human Society Anthropologists Complementary

Author:Claude Levi-Strauss

“An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax.”

Humor Funny Fields Reports Tides Primitive Tribes Lemons Guinea Anthropologists Field Trip

Book:Late night with David Letterman: the book

Source: Late night with David Letterman: the book

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

People Different Asking Nervous Sociology Anthropology Anthropologists

Author:Clifford Geertz

“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.”

Two States Past Accepting Warm Decades Data Life And Death Stereotype Fuzzy Anthropologists Hobbes Warm And Fuzzy

Author:Steven Pinker

“The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.”

Knows Men Persons Doe Philosophical Wholeness Observers Subjectivity Anthropologists

Book:Between Man and Man

Source: Between Man and Man

“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.”

War Simple Students Taught Notion Myth Peaceful Savages Anthropologists

Author:Lloyd deMause

“Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.”

People Way Country Social Cities Strange Huge Towns Lifetime Patterns Usa Pockets Regions Weird Things Soda Anthropologists

Author:Michael Schur

“Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.”

“The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.”

Children Home Used Mother Father Jokes Used To Be Indian Grandparent Anthropologists Father Child

Book:From the River's Edge

Source: From the River's Edge

“As soon as you take out a pencil and paper with the Indians, you're one thing to them - an anthropologist - and what they tell to anthropologists is always distorted.”

One Thing Paper Pencils Anthropologists

Author:Ruth Beebe Hill

“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.”

Reason Use Problem Bits Interest Common Example Reader Models Advantage Mathematics Common Sense Conclusion Economist No Problem Appreciated Precision Anthropologists

Author:Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

“Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.”

Use President Majors Transformation Critical Ritual Passages Associates Crossings Threshold Baptism Anthropologists

Author:Abraham Verghese

“Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies.”

Groups Males Mysterious Homo Sapiens Mammals Anthropologists

Author:Patricia Marx

“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.”

Hours Greek Scholar Lectures Bulls Anthropologists Iliad Leopards

Book:Modes and Morals

Source: Modes and Morals

“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.”

Source: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“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.”

Subjects Intellectual Intense Fascinated Submit Urban Alienation Anthropology Exotic Anthropologists Repulsion

Author:Susan Sontag

“Certain anthropologists hold that man, having discovered tools, ceased to evolve biologically. Animals, never having discovered them, continue to fashion drills out of their beaks, oars out of their hind feet, wings out of their forefeet, suits of armor out of their hides, levers out of their horns, saws out of their teeth. Whether this be true or not, all authorities agree that man is the tool-using animal. It sets him off from the rest of the animal kingdom as drastically as does speech.”

“Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets.”

Book Matter Secret Anthropologists

Book:I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Second Edition)

Source: I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Second Edition)

“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.”

Ifs Persons Book Whole Eye Loses Attention Fiction Ignorance Reader Science Fiction Pay Attention Engineers Spoil Blink Chemist Anthropologists Blink Of An Eye

Author:Robert Caro

“I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night.”

Years Two Eye Night Morning Harder Two Years Village Seventies Anthropologists Small Villages

Author:James C. Scott

“The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations.”

World Social Scientist Aspiration Gossip Privileged Rumor Temperature Anthropologists

Author:James C. Scott

“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.”

Ifs World Book Bits Awareness Communication Distinction Logical What If Units Describing Genesis Anthropologists Binary Book Of Genesis

Book:Maps of the Mind

Source: Maps of the Mind

“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.”

Trying Art Form Passion Practice Reasoning Sincere Far Away Away From You Investigating Anthropologists

Author:Aleksandra Mir

“You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers...damn anthropologists.”

Knows Girl Careers Damn Anthropologists

Author:Emo Philips

“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.”

Ifs Self America Form Cry Expression Golf Clubs Native Customs Primitive Tribes Chill Spine Self Expression Anthropologists

Author:Dave Barry

“Texans are the only race of people known to anthropologists who do not depend on breeding for propagation. Like princes and lords, they can be made by breath; plus a big hat-which comparatively few Texans wear.”

People Made Bigs Race Known Lord Depends Breaths Hats Plus Breeding Texan Anthropologists Propagation

Author:J. Frank Dobie

“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.”

People Firsts Country Moral Benefits Dogma Complaints Proceeding Relativism Anthropologists Underdeveloped Countries Cultural Relativism

Author:Claude Levi-Strauss

“Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.”

People Years Firsts Kind Form Millions Planets Concern Years Ago Sacred Access Obscure Shamanism Anthropologists

Author:Terence McKenna

“If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.”

Ifs Would Be Lasts Water Fishes Anthropologists

Author:Margaret Mead

“Anthropology... has always been highly dependent upon photography... As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)”

Needs Stills Use Moving Essentials Photography Training Method Photographer Dependent Sophisticated Requirements Anthropology Anthropologists

Author:Margaret Mead

“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.”

Enjoy Records Perspective Photograph Privilege Encounters Makers Traveler Storyteller Tourists Subjectivity Anthropologists Timelines Colonists

Author:Susan Meiselas

“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.”

Firsts Character Jobs Lost Knowing Tough Female Indiana Anthropologists

Author:Rebecca Mader

“Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilisation. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organisation disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present.”

“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.”

Thinking Problem Difficult Oneself Historian Guessing Anthropologists Difficult Problems Personal Knowledge

Author:W. H. Auden

“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.”

Book Minutes Series Ritual Involving Don Juan Anthropologists Juan Hallucinogens Peyote

Author:Michelle Rodriguez

“I was surprised by the level of sophistication of the Special Operation forces. Among them were anthropologists and PhD candidates. I felt because I understand the patterns of nineteenth-century jihad in West Africa that I was definitely going to be more advanced than they were in comprehending what the militant rallying cry was.”

“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.”

People Ifs Thinking Kind Use Company Wonder Gone Study Marketing Phones Innocent Selling Cells Corporations Cell Phone Anthropologists Selling Out Nokia

Author:Lily King

“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.”

Thinking Writing I Can Two Imagine Singers Songwriters Singer Songwriters Anthropologists

Author:Lily King

“Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.”

Ifs Writing Would Be Form Novel Observation Anthropologists

Author:Lily King

“As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects.”

People Study Objects Journalist Conventions Anthropologists

Author:Annia Ciezadlo

“The loss of body hair is interesting to anthropologists, because it is a feature that distinguishes us from our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees. They have body hair, we don't.”

Body Loss Interesting Hair Features Chimpanzees Anthropologists Body Hair

Author:Mark Stoneking

“Our job should be like any other forensic scientist's - we should be truth seekers who are not partisan, who do not have any interest in the outcome, who call it as we see it no matter the consequences. But it seems a lot easier for chemists and anthropologists and pathologists to take that neutral role than it does for psychiatrists.”

Should Doe Matter Seems Jobs Interest Roles Easier Consequence Scientist Outcomes Seekers Psychiatrist Partisans Chemist Anthropologists Forensics Truth Seekers

Author:Park Dietz

“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.”

People Way Humans Different Problem Artist Rights Labor Performances Tables Human Rights Solve Lawyer New Ways Gathering Different Peoples Playwright Organizer Anthropologists

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“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.”

People Writing Worry Fields Ideals Genre Workshops Anthropologists Writing Workshop

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.”

Thinking Giving Feels Humans Hurt Human Beings Emotional Anthropologists Sociologists

Author:Erykah Badu

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Anthropologists Quotes