Quotes About Anthropology

I just love drawing on past human cultures; that's a thrill for me.

In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples.

Come mai l'Italia, che grazie agli italiani d'un tempo si meritò il nome di 'giardino d'Europa', sta facendo scempio di se stessa? Quello che sta accadendo è un'involuzione culturale passeggera o una profonda mutazione antropologica? Siamo accecati solo davanti al paesaggio, o anche alla tutela del patrimonio culturale, alle esigenze della scuola, dell'università, della ricerca, dell'arte e della scienza, della musica, insomma della cultura?

I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.

I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alone in my conviction that, in all its primitivity, this anthropology continues to color the ways in which we conceive of human nature.

We smugly assume that we are the tallest humans to ever grace the earth. Quite the contrary. The Cro-Magnon people living thirty thousand years ago were about our size and 10 percent more muscular. Hunting, gathering, when food sources were abundant, was an exquisitely healthy lifestyle.

Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.

I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.

Dr. John Montague was a doctor of philosophy; he had taken his degree in anthropology, feeling obscurely that in this field he might come closest to his true vocation, the analysis of supernatural manifestations. He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education.

To combat cultural genocide one needs a critique of civilization itself. -Gary Snyder

Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)

I was astounded to learn that Alaskan caves might be hiding secrets about the earliest people ever to enter the Americas. That's when I began to picture a story that would start with kayaking and lead into the caves.

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years.

First, in terms of the observations of the cultural anthropologists who developed relativism, the degree of moral diversity is overstated and the high degree of moral consensus is understated.

The first day of a new team on a short deadline is fascinating anthropology. Everyone tries to figure everyone else out—who is talented, who has the same taste, who is easy or hard to work with, who has status—all at the same time they're trying to figure out the project itself.

In anthropology terms, this superficial mimicry is called a cargo cult, a reference to the misguided worship of abandoned airplane landing strips among tribes hoping for the goods that airplanes had delivered to return.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull." Sherlock

Wrangham estimated that around thirty per cent of adult male chimpanzees had died as the result of violence by another member of their own species.

Although the spoken word is over six million years old

In the end, Harrington documented more than 130 languages, including Chemehuevi, Mohave, Serrano, Paiute, even K'iche'. Many of them are no longer spoken anywhere on this planet. They are preserved only in Harrington's careful records and perhaps in the fading childhood memories of the descendants of their last surviving speakers.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

The evidence points to central Asia as man's original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward.