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Anthropology Quotes

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Anthropology Quotes

“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 Appears in the introduction of "Tracks Along the Left Coast" by Andrew Schelling”

HistoryCaliforniaIndigenousAnthropologyLinguisticsNative AmericaEthnographyTurtle IslandJaime De Angulo
Author:Jaime de Angulo
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“You say that to (Franz) Boas science is "austere and impersonal." You know, that is just the thing that gets my goat. They have managed to take all the life out of science. Why be ashamed of the joy and the exaltations that are the blood of knowl-edge? Why pretend that you have no emotions? In another century they will look aghast at the funereal aspect of our science. They will say: those people were doing penance for something! ... We have driven our libido underground.” — Jaime de Angulo, written in a letter to his friend and mentor, the linguist Edward Sapir (Appears in the introduction to "Tracks Along the Left Coast" by Andrew Schelling)”

NatureHistoryCaliforniaIndigenousAnthropologyLinguisticsEthnographyTurtle IslandJaime De AnguloAndrew Schelling
Author:Jaime de Angulo
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“Ma d'altra parte, il linguista che voglia interpretare un testo oggi deve fare i conti con la frattura che esiste tra l'archeologia e la filologia in America. Il punto di vista filologico, con il suo dotto interesse per i testi come tali, è diventato ostico e incomprensibile per l'archeologia americana moderna, altamente sviluppata scientificamente per quel che riguarda la correlazione logica di prove strettamente materiali, ma la cui popolarità e i cui finanziamenti sono strettamente connessi con interessi estetici o legati alla concretezza della sua materia, i prodotti dell'uomo, in particolare di tipo esotico.”

AnthropologyAcademiaLinguisticsPhilologyArchaeologyologyBenjamin Lee WharfEdward Sapir
Book:Language, Thought, and Reality; Selected Writings
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“Neoliberalism has, to a great extent, succeeded in replacing in-depth, critical, and independent social science with research funded by corporations to serve corporate interests. We are seeing a sharp decline of independent writers and researchers and a sharp rise of UX (user experience) jobs that are often narrow in scope, and solely focused on understanding users not to create a more informed and critical society, but simply to increase numbers, get users to consume more, and to increase profits for the few at the top.”

KnowledgeCapitalismAnthropologyEducation SystemSocial ScienceNeoliberalismUser ExperienceRuling ClassEthics And Science
Author:Louis Yako
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“But what is Pacem in Terris’s most important contribution in the context of the genesis of Gaudium et Spesis its repeated recourse to‘the signs of the times’ as measures and tools with which to comprehend the reality of a constantly changing world. The innovation of this approach lies in its implied recommendation to study in all seriousness contemporary reality and society in order to determine in which way the values of the Gospel have materialized in today’s world. Rather than relying on pre-established and traditional doctrine to judge present-day reality, Catholic believers are enjoined to place trust in investigatory methods that could be described as sociological, historical, and anthropological, before making value judgements on the phenomena of today’s world”

ValuesHistorySociologyAnthropologyVatican IiPacem In Terris
Book:The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties
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“The toothless or peg-legged buccaneer hoisting a flag of defiance against the world, drinking and feasting to a stupor on stolen loot, fleeing at the first sign of serious opposition, leaving only tall tales and confusion in his wake, is, perhaps, just as much a figure of the Enlightenment as Voltaire or Adam Smith, but he also represents a profoundly proletarian vision of liberation, necessarily violent and ephemeral. Modern factory discipline was born on ships and on plantations. It was only later that budding industrialists adopted those techniques of turning humans into machines into cities like Manchester and Birmingham. One might call pirate legends, then, the most important form of poetic expression produced by that emerging North Atlantic proletariat whose exploitation laid the ground for the industrial revolution.”

AnthropologyPiratesMadagascar
Book:Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
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“Their synchrotron, a super-powerful x-ray machine, can harness the radiation of überfast subatomic particles in order to -- among many other things -- look inside solid objects. It's spectacular science, but sometimes I prefer not to think about all that energy and chaos around my precious findings.”

HistoryStemFossilsAnthropologyHistory Of MankindPaleontologyHomo NalediSynchrotron
Book:Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins
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“Ri, here's a question for you,” Stella started. She opened it up to everyone else, as well. “When do your kids stop being pets and start being people?” The room went silent, except for Gloria trying to stifle her giggles. Stella looked around and felt pleased that she'd gotten the desired reaction. “What are you talking about? How could you call children pets?” Shannon demanded before Bernadette had the chance to. “No, this is an honest question.” Stella insisted. “You have them, you name them. They're helpless, and you teach, or train, them. Feed them, water them, whatever. And as they grow up, you just hope that they grow up well and don't spend their time clawing your nice sofa or humping your leg." Stella, "Sugar and Spies: Spy Sisters Book 1”

ChildrenAnthropologyPetsClassic Stella
Author:Rebekah Martin
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“When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance to American anthropological history, and that the best place to start was with museums— where the story began. The more I delved into the archives, the more I was fascinated. I was hooked.”

ScienceHistoryMuseumsAnthropology
Book:Anthropology Unmasked: Museums, Science, and Politics in New York City - Volume I: The Putnam-Boas Era
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“These are quite obviously the books that nobody reads,’ said Rocky, studying their titles. ‘But it’s a comfort to know that they are here if you ever should want to read them. I’m sure I should find them more entertaining than the more up-to-date ones. Wild Beasts and their Ways; Five Years with the Congo Cannibals; With Camera and Pen in Northern Nigeria; Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia. I wish people still wrote books with titles like that. Nowadays I believe it simply isn’t done to show a photograph of “The Author with his Pygmy Friends”—we have become too depressingly scientific.”

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Book:Excellent Women
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“All science is an attempt to cover with explanatory devices-and thereby to obscure-the vast darkness of the subject. It is a game in which the scientist uses his explanatory principles according to certain rules to see if these principles can be stretched to cover the vast darkness. But the rules of the stretching are rigorous, and the purpose of the whole operation is really to discover what parts of the darkness still remain, uncovered by explanation. But this game has also a deeper, more philosophic purpose: to learn something about the very nature of explanation, to make clear some part of that most obscure matter-the process of knowing. (Epilogue, 1958)”

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Book:Naven, Second Edition
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“Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture. This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development.”

LanguageEvolutionDanceAnthropologyPrimalBody LanguageNon Verbal Communication
Book:The Principles of Art
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“It appears now to be universally admitted that, before the exile, the Israelites had no belief in rewards and punishments after death, nor in anything similar to the Christian heaven and hell; but our story proves that it would be an error to suppose that they did not believe in the continuance of individual existence after death by a ghostly simulacrum of life. Nay, I think it would be very hard to produce conclusive evidence that they disbelieved in immortality; for I am not aware that there is anything to show that they thought the existence of the souls of the dead in Sheol ever came to an end. But they do not seem to have conceived that the condition of the souls in Sheol was in any way affected by their conduct in life. If there was immortality, there was no state of retribution in their theology. Samuel expects Saul and his sons to come to him in Sheol.”

ScienceBeliefHeavenHellEvidenceProofPunishmentAnthropologyRewardErrorSimulacrumIsraelitesSaulSamuelSheol
Book:The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study
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“The oils we used on our torches and in our lamps have kept the darkness of night and predators at bay in our corporate and singular lives. Residual oil was even found in our ancestors’ campfires that were most likely from a meal shared in common around said fire. Oil was in one sense a residual and sign of community and social and cooperative sharing.”

LightCommunityOilSharingAnthropologyAncestorsPrehistoryCaveman
Book:The Liturgical Sacramentary of Bealtaine
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“One of the hallmarks of lamentation is its excess. Talking becomes screaming, singing becomes wailing. Mourners act out their pain on their own bodies, tearing their clothes and hair, beating their chests, even inflicting injuries. This intensity sets it apart from other forms of public witnessing. Lamentation is communication as it reels toward the unsayable, the inexpressible pain of loss. I see in practices of exhumation, in the lengths gone to recover the dead after annihilating violence, something of this excess. The enormous forensic undertakings are scientific and legal efforts, but they are also expressions of pain and acts of faith. As a postcard pinned to an office door at the FAFG forensic laboratory says: “Archeology is my religion.”

WarDeathGriefActivismAnthropologyArchaeology
Author:Alexa Hagerty
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“When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. "This is often considered to be man's first attempt at a calendar" she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. 'My question to you is this - what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar. It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women's contributions?”

MenNeedsFirstsHumansMomentsPastRememberWomenChangedStudentsTaughtMarkFeministBonesContributionProfessorsAttemptingAnthropologyCalendarsChanged My LifeOverlookedCambridgeCarvingContribution To Society28 Days
Author:Sandi Toksvig
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“For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.”

NeedsHumansIdeasPoliticalTermMoralSawsCenturyEvolutionDemandProjectsReflectionFoundationFamiliarExcellentHuman LifeEngagedAmbitiousGroundedLecturesTwentieth CenturyContinuityAnthropologyMead
Author:Margaret Mead
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“Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn.”

HumansMayYoungMillionsTeacherStudentsDisciplineCivilizationModelsIndependentRemainsUnityPatternsInsightFearlessAnthropologyMead
Author:Margaret Mead
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“Mead's anthropology had many other red, white and blue- blooded virtues. One was the common anthropological conceit, out of which she made a career, to the effect that the ultimate value of studying other cultures was the use we could make of them to reconstruct our own - a heady kind of intellectual imperialism, as if the final meaning of others' lives was their significance for us.”

IfsKindMadeUseValuesCultureWhiteCommonCareersVirtueStudyEffectsIntellectualRedUltimateBlueFinalsSignificanceImperialismConceitAnthropologyOther CulturesMeadRed White And Blue
Author:Margaret Mead
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“In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.”

MenWayFactsHumanityIndividualSubjectsPhilosophicalConsideringWholenessAnthropologyInvestigators
Book:On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity
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“Anthropology has reached that point of development where the careful investigation of facts shakes our firm belief in the far-reaching theories that have been built up. The complexity of each phenomenon dawns on our minds, and makes us desirous of proceeding more cautiously. Heretofore we have seen the features common to all human thought”

MindHumansHas BeensFactsBeliefCommonTheoryDevelopmentBuiltCarefulFirmDawnFeaturesComplexityShakesReachingPhenomenonInvestigationAnthropologyProceedingHuman ThoughtFirm Beliefs
Book:A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911
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“Modern anthropology ... opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.”

BelieveMeanImportantEndsLife IsGrowsGoalEconomicModernProductsActivityAchievementSeriesFinishedSeedsPrimariesAssumptionCyclesIsolatedPrimitiveJustifiedProgressionAnthropologyLinearCultivatingUtilitarianEnds And Means
Book:Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
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