Best 197 quotes in «anthropology quotes» category

Most of culture lies hidden and is outside voluntary control, making up the warp and weft of human existence. Even when small fragments of culture are elevated to awareness, they are difficult to change, not only because they are so personally experienced but because people cannot act or interact at all in any meaningful way except through the medium of culture.

Mouths don't empty themselves unless ears are sympathetic and knowing.

One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. Over the few decades, we have invented countless time saving machines that are supposed to make like more relaxed - washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

No human utterance could be seen as innocent. Any set of words could be analysed to reveal not just an individual but a historical consciousness at work.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

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?

One could imagine that a group of anthropologists and scientists sent off to study a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe today might be bound by similar strictures [not to reproduce with natives]. But suppose some of them disagreed? Suppose some of them "went native"--as used to be said of colonialists in the days of the British Empire who allowed themselves to get too close to indigenous populations they interacted with. Is that perhaps what happened to the troop of two hundred "Watchers" on Mount Hermon? Somewhere around 10,900 BC, did they break the commandments of their own culture and "go native" among the hunter-gatherers of the Near East? And were the first chance encounters with the fragments of a giant comet a century later in 10,800 BC--encounters that devastated the world--somehow blamed upon their moral lapse?

One of the many pieces of advice his father had given him—besides the importance of antivenom and the need for a good, sturdy blade—was that field anthropology was ninety percent preparation, and ten percent trying desperately to recover when you didn’t prepare properly.

People don't like to think of themselves as sinful. They don't want to believe that they are selfish, evil people who would act much worse if unrestrained by society... Because they believe they act from pure motives, many people live by their own moral code and can always justify their behavior. When that strategy fails they can always think of someone worse than themselves.

Only from our position of power can we afford to ignore where things really come from, because we know that all things drain, like syrup through a pipeline, from the edges of the world into the centre. What we want will appear, as if by magic, on the shelves of our supermarkets because were have the money to pay for it. We don’t have to know - other people grow it and process it, and buy it and sell it until all we see is the brand, a language we understand without effort. All those strange substances are fuzed together for our convenience, our health, our pleasure.

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?

-Paint- My girlfriend is so besotted that she can't take her eyes off me. After we've turned out the light she puts on her night-vision goggles, and watched me as I sleep. Quite often I am woken by her sighing and involuntary yelps of happiness. This has been going on for years, and is showing no sign of abating. Once I asked her to stop all this infra-red activity, but it didn't really work; I'd wake up to find her covering me in luminous paint, and softly whispering, 'Sometimes I wonder if you know how much I love you.

People often ask, Why is infidelity such a big deal today? Why does it hurt so much? How has it become one of the leading causes of divorce? Only by taking a brief trip back in time to look at the changes of love, sex and marriage over the last few centuries can we have an informed conversation about modern infidelity. History and culture have always set the stage for our domestic dramas. In particular, the rise of individualism, the emergence of consumer culture, and the mandate for happiness have transformed matrimony and its adulterous shadow. Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.

She lived in an environment that few people in the world have ever been able to survive. What knowledge did she have that made that possible? How did she survive for so long in a place that would kill most of us within days? Soon after my visit the old woman died, and now we may never know.

People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.

People who have made comparative studies of many different societies, know that when status is ascribed, rather than achieved, individual efforts towards excellence are not directed through any form of innovation; rather, the enhancement of status occurs only through the realisation of a previously well defined role position. It is only with social change, or when some form of continual dynamic disequilibium occurs in a society, that we begin to observe the development of achievement motivation in its modern form.

Relatedness - whether imagined or lived out face-to-face - is a social fact, and it is not limited to "kinship" as mapped in the traditional genealogical chart. It is precisely the term's flexibility that makes it so analytically useful.

Scholars in a great many disciplines focus their studies on human beings. The main differences between the disciplines are not the objects of their study nor even the methods they use, but the points of view that guide their inquiries.

See,' said (Liberty Hyde) Bailey, 'how the leaves of this small plant stand forth extended to bathe themselves in the light. ... THese leaves will die. They will rot. They will disappear into the universal mold. The energy that is in them will be released to reappear, the ions to act again, perhaps in the corn on the plain, perhaps in the body of a bird. The atoms and the ions remain or resurrect; the forms change and flux. We see the forms and mourn the change. We think all is lost; yet nothing is lost. The harmony of life is never ending.' The economy of nature provides that nothing be lost.

Quand une ferme et ses habitants connaissent une crise grave, l'une des réponses possibles est la sorcellerie. Il est communément admis (du moins en privé, car en public on le désavoue) d'invoquer les "sorts" pour expliquer une catégorie particulière de malheurs, ceux qui se répètent sans raison dans une exploitation : les bêtes et les gens deviennent stériles, tombent malades ou meurent, les vaches avortent ou tarissent, les végétaux pourrissent ou sèchent, les bâtiments brûlent ou s'effondrent, les machines se détraquent, le ventes ratent... Les fermiers ont beau recourir aux spécialistes — médecin, vétérinaire, mécanicien... —, ceux-ci déclarent n'y rien comprendre. Tous ces malheurs sont considérés comme une perte de "force" pour le chef d'exploitation et de famille. C'est à lui seul que s'adresse l'annonce rituelle de l'état d'ensorcellement — "N'y en aurait-il pas, par hasard, qui te voudraient du mal ?" —, c'est lui qu'on dit ensorcelé, même s'il ne souffre personnellement de rien. Vaches, betteraves, tracteurs, enfants, porcheries, épouses et jardins ne sont jamais atteints pour eux-mêmes, mais pour leur relation au chef d'exploitation et de famille, parce que ce sont ses cultures, ses bêtes, ses machines, sa famille. Bref, ses possessions.

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...) (The interpretation of cultures)

Respect is love in action.

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

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up, Ian Tattersall, the bearded and friendly curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, replied when I asked him the size of the total world archive of hominid and early human bones. The shortage wouldn't be so bad if the bones were distributed evenly through time and space, but of course they are not. They appear randomly, often in the most tantalizing fashion. Homo erectus walked the Earth for well over a million years and inhabited territory from the Atlantic edge of Europe to the Pacific side of China, yet if you brought back to life every Homo erectus individual whose existence we can vouch for, they wouldn't fill a school bus. Homo habilis consists of even less: just two partial skeletons and a number of isolated limb bones. Something as short-lived as our own civilization would almost certainly not be known from the fossil record at all. In Europe, Tattersall offers by way of illustration, you've got hominid skulls in Georgia dated to about 1.7 million years ago, but then you have a gap of almost a million years before the next remains turn up in Spain, right on the other side of the continent, and then you've got another 300,000-year gap before you get a Homo heidelbergensis in Germany and none of them looks terribly much like any of the others. He smiled. It's from these kinds of fragmentary pieces that you're trying to work out the histories of entire species. It's quite a tall order. We really have very little idea of the relationships between many ancient species which led to us and which were evolutionary dead ends. Some probably don't deserve to be regarded as separate species at all.

So before he left he made most of his life insurance over to us. That's in case he doesn't come back—those trips are dangerous of course.” “I should think so,” I said, ”especially with three anthropologists.

Somewhere beyond Tibet, among the icy peaks and secluded valleys of Central Asia, there lies an inaccessible paradise, a place of universal wisdom and ineffable peace called Shambhala . . . It is inhabited by adepts from every race and culture who form an inner circle of humanity secretly guiding its evolution. In that place, so the legends say, sages have existed since the beginning of human history in a valley of supreme beatitude that is sheltered from the icy arctic winds and where the climate is always warm and temperate, the sun always shines, the gentle airs are always beneficent and nature flowers luxuriantly.

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.

...tales in search of an excuse for their telling.

Studying anthropology tends t change the way you look at the world. It leaves a distinctive chip in your brain, or lens over your eye. Your mind-set becomes instinctive: wherever you go to work, you start asking questions about how different elements of society interact, looks at the gap between rhetoric and reality, noting the concealed functions of rituals and symbols, and hunting out social silences. Anyone who has been immersed in anthropology is doomed to be an insider-outside for the rest of their life; they can never take anything entirely at face value, but are compelled to constantly ask: why?

The basis of tourism is perception of otherness, of something being different from the usual.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other.

THE attention of the writer having been called to the fact that all Indo-Germanic nations have worshipped crucified Saviours, an investigation of the subject was made. Overwhelming proof was obtained that the sun-myths of the ancient Aryans were the origin of the religions in all of the countries which were peopled by the Aryans. The Saviours worshipped in these lands are personifications of the Sun, the chief god of the Aryans. That Pagan nations worshipped a crucified man, was admitted by the Fathers of the early Christian Church.

The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.

The body is given meaning and wholly constituted by discourse. The body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes instead a socially constituted product which is infinitely malleable and highly unstable.

[T]he choice of human groupings for cultural comparisons is not a natural or scientific choice, but a political one.

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.

The fewer things you have, the better. Reduce your baggages as much as possibly can. When you get ride of your things, you get easier in yourself, and you decrease your suffering more and more. But 'I want, I want...' that's the beginning of suffering. - Murata

There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.

The idea that foods and diets will “just mix” when they come into contact is clearly a vast oversimplification.

The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. They are usually so intent on solving a particular problem or untangling some thorny scientific or engineering dilemma that they don't see the broader implications of their work. The users of the technology are also usually oblivious to its ethic. They, too, are concerned with the practical benefits they gain from employing the tool. Our ancestors didn't develop or use maps in order to enhance their capacity for conceptual thinking or to bring the world's hidden structures to light. Nor did they manufacture mechanical clocks to spur the adoption of a more scientific mode of thinking. These were by-products of the technologies. But what by-products! Ultimately, it's an invention's intellectual work ethic that has the most profound effect on us.

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.

The notion that someone who does not hold your views holds the reciprocal of them, or simply hasn't got any, has, whatever its comforts for those afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it, not conduced to much in the way of clarity in the anti-relativist discussion, but merely to far too many people spending far too much time describing at length what it is they do not maintain than seems in any way profitable.

The paradox of anthropology: to see something, you had to be outside of it, but when you were outside of it, you couldn't see it for what it was.

The pure products of America go crazy... ...[] No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car

[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.

The inevitable result of any search for authenticity is that you always end up with something completely modern in intent, since the purpose of the performance lies in the present, not the past.

The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

The peculiar situation of the anthropological fieldworker, participating simultaneously in two distinct worlds of meaning and action, requires that he relate to his research subjects as an "outsider," trying to "learn" and penetrate their way of life, while relating to his own culture as a kind of metaphorical "native." To both groups he is a professional stranger, a person who holds himself aloof from their lives in order to gain perspective.