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Anthropology Quotes

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Anthropology Quotes

“Hmmm, it is a small pelvis with a very ample sub-pubic angle; at least ninety degrees...the bones are delicate, fine, graceful...hmmm..." With certainty born of profound expertise and his uncanny ability to dialogue with bones, Romano stated his conclusion without touching anything. "It is a woman." (Arturo Romano Pacheco, physical anthropologist)”

ScienceHistoryAnthropologyArcheologyAncient Sites
Book:The Controversial Mayan Queen: Sak K'uk of Palenque
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“Now there is a modern-day anthropology* for the criminal type: a great number of so-called 'born criminals' have pale faces, large cheekbones, a coarse lower jaw, and deeply shining eyes. How can one not recall this when one thinks of Lenin and thousands like him? How many pale faces, high cheekbones and strikingly asymmetric features mark the soldiers of the Red Army and, generally speaking, also of the common Russian people - how many of them, these savage types, have Mongolian atavism directly in their blood! They are all from Murom, the white-eyed Chud. And it is precisely these individuals, these very Russichi, who gave us so many 'daring pirates', so many vagabonds, escapees, scoundrels and tramps - it is precisely these people whom we have recruited for the glory, pride and hope of the Russian social revolution. So why should we feign surprise at the results?”

CriminalsRussiaSoviet UnionAnthropologySoviet RussiaLeninRed ArmyAnti Communism
Book:Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution
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“The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.”

CultureAnthropologyBarbarismCultural DifferencesSavagerySavageBarbarianCultural RelativismEthnocentrism
Book:Race et histoire
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“They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.”

CitiesHierarchyAnthropologyArchaeologyEgalitarian
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we're likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we're likely to list on a social networking site, it's rare even for city dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred. Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we're all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.”

CommunityGroupsNetworkingAnthropologyAnonymitySocializingStone Age
Book:A History of the World in 100 Objects
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“. . . focusing solely on cultural competency can lead to undesired consequences. . . the term implies that one has learned everything they need to learn about a certain culture or group of people, when in fact learning is a never-ending process.”

CultureAnthropologyLifelong LearningCultural HumilityCultural Competency
Book:A Case of Culture: How Cultural Brokers Bridge Divides in Healthcare
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“But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.”

EvolutionAnthropologySocial Animals
Book:The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
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“Or could it be that there is something about globalisation itself that produces local culture, and promotes the constant formation of new forms of local identity, dress, cuisine, music, dance and language?”

CultureIdentityAnthropologyGlobalFood AnthropologyGlobalisationLocalFood Studies
Book:Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
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“Where religious doctrines exist, for example, they can only become real to the extent that there exist concrete semiotic practices by which they can be enacted, embodied, experienced, and transmitted. But those practices will be subject to such factors as logistics, aesthetics, economics, or prior history, that are independent of the logical, political, or emotional demands of and constraints on doctrine itself. [...] Even textual forms as relatively autonomous, portable, and durable as written scriptures depend for their persistence and power on social dynamics surrounding contextualization and entextualization.”

ReligionAnthropologyReligious LifeContextContextualizationReligious DoctrinesReligious Language
Author:Webb Keane
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“The factors facilitating the global emergence of pathogens shared between humans and animals are of particular importance because the diseases they induce have had major impacts on both human and animal health. This transfer of pathogens has ocurred for thousands, if not millions, of years and continues today.”

EvolutionAnthropologyVirusEvolutionary BiologyZoologyParasitePathogen
Book:Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
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“Our species has co-evolved alongside many others to which we were in contact, especially through scavenging, hunting, and then animal husbandry, all of which would have exposed us to novel pathogens and zoonotic diseases. As a species, we had to adapt to these new pathogens without the benefits of modern medicine. The newly emerging diseases of recent decades, while novel in themselves, are but a repeat of patterns which humans have survived over several millennia.”

EvolutionAnthropologyVirusEvolutionary BiologyZoologyParasitePathogen
Book:Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
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“Today there are almost eight billion people on earth, crowded together and travelling widely -this is 1300 times more than were present when the agricultural revolution began around 10,000 years ago and facilitated the spread of many pathogens.”

EvolutionPopulationAnthropologyDemographicsVirusEvolutionary BiologyZoologyParasitePathogen
Book:Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
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“Humans have always lived surrounded by potential pathogens. Whether they co-exist relatively harmlessly or become a problem, cause acute or chronic disease and spread slowly or in epidemics has been, and still is, influenced by how we have impacted the environments we share with other animals. Pathogens are opportunists within these environments, capable and ready to take advantage of anything that promotes their transmission.”

EvolutionAnthropologyVirusEvolutionary BiologyZoologyParasitePathogen
Book:Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
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“9 Billion Shades of Brown (Black History Month Sonnet) Nothing is black and white in this world, everything is a shade of black, even white is just a pale shade of black, or we should say, brown - nothing is black, nothing is white, everything is a shade of brown, everyone is a shade of brown. Ethnicity is a commodity of fear, prejudice is a commodity of power - Mother Africa is the cradle of humanity, Global South is the cradle of civilization. Everything that white people have ever written consists of only 1 percent of the human condition, yet you confuse it as the entire human condition. There is no black history month, the entire human race calendar is black.”

CivilizationRacismHuman RaceAnthropologyEthnicityDecolonizationIndigenous PeopleBlack History MonthEurocentrismWhite Fragility
Book:Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
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“In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them. Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.”

ReligionAnthropologyEthnographyAmazonia
Book:The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle
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“Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.”

HumanityGlobal WarmingAnimalsEcologyAnthropologyHunter Gatherer
Book:The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
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“Food processors, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and clothes-washing machines have substancially lessened the physical activity required to cook and clean. Air conditioners and central heating have decreased how much energy our bodies spend to maintain a stable body temperature. Countless other devices, such as electric can openers, remote controls, electric razors and suitcases on wheels, have reduced, calorie by calorie, the amount of energy we expend to exist.”

EvolutionAnthropologyObesityHomo SapiensEvolutionary BiologySedentarismFat StudiesErgonomics
Book:The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease
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“In a real sense, the important question is never one of validity or truth. Truth exists in the realm of mathematics and in the philosophy of logic, not in perceptions of reality. For those who would understand the world about them, the question is not one of truth, but of utility. Do our investigations deepen our understanding, further our ability to ask more refined questions, and lead to better predictions of events? If so, then the research is justified. If not, it remains but sophistry.”

CultureAnthropologyFieldworkCultural Anthropology
Book:Mad Dogs, Englishmen, and the Errant Anthropologist: Fieldwork in Malaysia
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“By almost any definition, Homo naledi is not human. But if the present archaeological record reflects the complexity of Homo sapiens accurately, it means that naledi was significantly more complex than sapiens at the time.”

FossilsAnthropologyPaleontologyCultural AnthropologyHomo NalediAfrican FossilsNaledi
Book:Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins
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“I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable--that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme from of such disentanglement. But for that reason it provides us with a window on the process as a whole. What's more, owing to its historical role, slavery has shaped our basic assumptions and institutions in ways that we are no longer aware of and whose influence we would probably never wish to acknowledge if we were. If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It's still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It's just that we can no longer see that it's there.”

WarCapitalismSlaveryPropertyDebtConquestAnthropologySocial ImaginationCommercial Markets
Book:Debt: The First 5,000 Years
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“In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economical, scientific and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations -a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time.”

EvolutionAnthropologyObesityHomo SapiensEvolutionary BiologyIndustrializationSedentarismErgonomics
Book:The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease
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“Something is indeed returning today - but the conventional wisdom that this is religion making its reappearance is insufficient to satisfy critical inquiries. Nor is it the return of a factor that had vanished, but, rather a shift of emphasis in a continuum that was never interrupted. The genuinely recurring element that would merit our full intellectual attention is more anthropological than 'religious' in its implications - it is, in a nutshell, the recognition of the immunitary constitution of human beings.”

ReligionAnthropologyPractisingImmunitary
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“The scientific descriptions of ethnology that we find in books are inevitably dry and do not give the least impression of the mysterious world of the Achumawi, whose life is so inextricably mixed in with the animals, the trees, the plants. But without forming some mental picture of that life, it is, I believe, almost impossible to understand how and to what extent the Achumawi Indian finds himself in a state of direct mystical connection with the universe that surrounds him. Now that is precisely his religion, and his entire religion.” — Jaime de Angulo from "Tracks Along the Left Coast" by Andrew Schelling”

IndigenousAnthropologyLinguisticsNative AmericaTurtle IslandEthnologyJaime De AnguloAchumawi Tribe
Author:Jaime de Angulo
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