Quotes About Anthropology

A cultural ecology of violence!

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

My work has gotten more political over time, but once you start exploring food, you find you're up against economics and politics and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to deal with.

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error.

Alternatively, it may be that a form of early Indo-European arrived with the first farmers

He invited anthropologists to study research into the European trials, and termed their recent neglect of this 'even more disconcerting' than the loss of interest by historians of Europe in African parallels

historians have largely ignored the opportunity for a new dialogue, and anthropologists have largely ceased to offer it.

WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as 'someone who causes harm to others by mystical means'.

Anthropology was the study of humanity. Susannah's interest lay in the way human beings related to each other and their environments at various periods of history.

The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good microphones)

WEIRD people, they argue, are "the weirdest people in the world.

For a million years the sound of making handaxes provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world would have to include a handaxe.

Despite the theories traditionally taught in high-school social studies, the truth is: the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life.

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar represents one exception to the otherwise typical neglect of intoxication. Dunbar and his colleagues see the physiological effects of alcohol, in particular, as a crucial component in social rituals. Specifically, they point to the endorphin release triggered by booze, especially when drinking is combined with music, dance, and ritual, as a crucial factor allowing humans to cooperate on a scale unattainable by our monkey or ape relatives.

Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

The study of man is the study of his extensions.

anthropologists speak of ritual leadership and ritual space.

We have shown that the substance and object of religion is altogether human; we have shown that divine wisdom is human wisdom; that the secret of theology is anthropology; that the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind.

I kept an open mind on the question of whether a hominid had been present in Europe in the early Pleistocene.

I think that by following the route that I have tried to outline, one gets into a much more interesting and productive series of questions than those that result from saying simply that Chinese don't like milk because they don't like milk.