Quotes from Sherry B. Ortner

Ethnography of course means many things. Minimally, however, it has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self - as much of it as possible - as the instrument of knowing.

In other words, woman's consciousness- her membership, as it were, in culture - is evidence in part by the very fact that she accepts her own devaluation and takes culture's point of view.

Woman is not "in reality" any closer to (or further from) nature than man - both have consciousness, both are mortal.

M]ountaineering as a sport both emanates from and addresses itself back to (and back against) the normal patterns of middle class life. One of the dominant discourses of mountaineering [...] positions it critically against "bourgeois" existence, even as the sport demands the resources made possible by such an existence.