Quotes About Anthropology

man lived in societies for thousands of years before he knew of the State

He distinguished three basic types of knowledge: educational knowledge, knowledge of salvation, and knowledge of domination, corresponding to the three main anthropologically deducible complexes of interest in education, salvation, and domination.

In his treatise on the battles between the gods underlying ancient Dionysian theatre, the young Nietzsche notes: 'Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them.' Similarly, an anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution, beyond affirmation and denial.

If I wasn't doing this, I'd be in school studying political science or socioeconomic something. I love visiting different cultures and finding out how they make up a society.

I wasn't a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.

Can fiction teach us? Absolutely. Fiction has the power to illustrate place, era, and atmosphere in vivid detail. But it is not Anthropology for Dummies.

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

Could we kiss for a little bit? ... Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with kips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.

In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

It must be said that almost all primitive people think themselves divinely wrought, singled out and special. Often their names translate simply as "the people" or, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, the first people. But this is a symptom of primitiveness; attempting to prove divine biology in the nineteenth century is the anthropological equivalent of a society regressing to sleeping with the lights on.

from a time when there were at least four human species on Earth right up to the kings of Europe into the eighteenth century.

Homo sapiens comes into being from 300,000 years ago, according to specimens from Morocco and east Africa, and by 100,000 years ago we have bodies pretty much the same as we do today.

It is the oldest depiction of the human body.

We have good evidence that Homo erectus, that highly successful human who walked all over the Earth from 1.9 million years ago until around 140,000 years ago, was a fire user in some capacity. The dates when they first utilised fire remain disputed.

According to traditional paleoanthropology based on bones, by the time Homo sapiens reached Europe, probably around 60,000 years ago, the Neanderthals were already there and well established, albeit in small communities.

Not only were we diverse in our skin color long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin color before we were our own species.

Some researchers suppose that the presence of tools represents the boundary between the genus Homo and what came before, meaning that humans are actually defined by tool use.

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.

Not only ordinary individuals, but even specialists—say, anthropologists or sociologists or geneticists—cannot present a convincing rationale for distinguishing among human groups by physical characteristics. Our "second nature," our "common sense" about race, it turns out, is deeply uncertain, almost mythical.

The pre-frontal region of the Peking man resembles that found in some parts of the Middle West.

Attending the Sun Dance] There was a smattering of tourists, both serious and recreational. Professors of anthropology and ethnology. Writers of fact and other fiction. A family from Wisconsin pausing on their long, sacred pilgrimage to The Land of Disney.

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion.

The raw data of anthropologists can be misleading; it can make the differences in values between cultures appear greater than they are...It is only that life forces upon them choices that we do not have to make.