Quotes About Culture

I was raised on science as other people are raised on God, or Gods, or the crocodile.

My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years?

It's good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been.

I sat next to a woman called Tadi and I asked her what she would do with the shells she earned and she said her husband would use them to buy another wife. 'I cannot make this bag fast enough,' she said. We all fell over laughing.

You don't struggle with these questions?" "No. But I've always thought my opinion was the right one. It's a small flaw I have." "An American flaw.

Alone was not something you saw among tribes she'd studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it. Not even a possum walks alone was the Tam's most repeated one.

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages?

Americans could surprise you with the things they knew.

And this led to another round of mapping as we separated men from women, finding that while the male ethos usually represented the culture at large, within a culture women offset the ideal.

the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.

I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to BE in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture, but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and reveal it to the world. Bu the world is deaf. The world--and I really mean the West--has no interest in change or self improvement...

Personality depends on context, just like culture,' she said. 'Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, "Your typing makes my brain work better," I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don't always see how much other people are shaping you.

Ik zou het nog niet half zo lang hebben volgehouden,' zei ik, maar toen besefte ik dat hij in veel opzichten op de Dobu leek: zijn paranoïde trekjes, zijn zwarte humor, zijn wantrouwen jegens plezier, zijn geheimzinnigdoenerij. Ik ging als vanzelf aan zijn resultaten twijfelen. Als er maar één kenner van een bepaald volk is, zegt diens analyse dan meer over dat volk of over hem? Zoals gewoonlijk was ik meer geïnteresseerd in het raakvlak tussen die twee dan in andere dingen.

She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown.

Conversations in foreign languages don't linger in my head like they do in English. They don't last.

Personality depends on context, just like culture,' she said. 'Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, "Your typing makes my brain work better," I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don't always see how much other people are shaping you. What are you looking at?

Vailala Madness

missionaries are now rushing in droves to the Solomons to convert their wicked souls.

They'd come in '31 to study two New Guinea tribes. But because Bankson was on the Sepik River, they'd gone north, up the mountains to the Anapa, with the hope that when they came back down in a year he'd be gone and they'd have their pick of the river tribes, whose less isolated cultures were rich with artistic, economic, and spiritual traditions.

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed!

The culture war is between the winners and those who think they're losers who want to become winners. The losers think the only way they can become winners is by banding together all the losers and them empowering a leader of the losers to make things right for them.

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.

In fact,I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don't trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan.