Quotes About Anthropology

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.

As one of the admirers of Carlos Castaneda puts it: If the account is a documentary truth, then Castaneda is a great anthropologist; if it is an imaginative tale, then he is a master fiction writer. In either case he wins. How can we reply to this argument?

As a paleontologist, [...] I ask the question--why weren't there humans here earlier? I mean, we have dispersal of Eurasian animal species into North America and dispersal of North American species into Eurasia at earlier times. So why shouldn't humans have been here as well? [Quoting Tom Deméré]

Of all the human figurines discovered so far from 30,000-3,000BC, 92% are of the female form. This is not to say there was any kind of matriarchy or worship of a mother goddess - far from it - but women are conspicuous by their presence.

I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England.

I like the ritual, the liturgy of a well-crafted, emotional fashion show. I will never be jaded with this side of fashion. The catwalk is pure anthropology, something like an esoteric encrypted parade. It can totally be replaced but it will be missed.

The last time I saw a brow that low I was watching slides in anthropology class

Taking all vegetable-eating nations together . . . they are a larger and much better formed race than the flesh eaters.

We can reproduce within our own minds the way that the world is put together for other people. This is the extraordinary privilege and adventure of anthropology.

Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.

I'd called [Stanley Garn] because he wrote an American Anthropolgist 's paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. Your cows, he said, are much more efficient. But I am not so much interested in cultures eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures eating their own dead, the practical Why not? model of cannibalism, eating the meat of fresh corpses because it's there and it's a nice change from taro root.

An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds. Just

An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds.

Revenge has probably been the most regular and prominent cause of fighting cited in anthropological accounts of pre-state societies. Violence was activated to avenge injuries to honour, property, women, and kin. If life was taken, revenge reached its peak, often leading to a vicious circle of death and counter-death.

Forty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that human beings are "unfinished animals." What he meant is that it is human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society that surrounds us. That human nature is more created than discovered.

Hebrew anthropology was not dualistic (body and soul) but unitary. Nephesh means something like life force or even breath. It is not a substance that can leave a person and exist independently of the body. It is the thing that makes bodies live. When the body stops breathing, it becomes dead matter. In modern terms, when you stop breathing, your breath doesn't go somewhere. It just stops. So too with the Hebrew nephesh . The person is then dead.

There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language.

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

If contemporary humans seem irrational, don't blame the hunter-gatherers.

A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer. A blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group... While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth; they are trying to antagonize liberals and to display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.

In books such as Isis Unveiled (1877) or The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky covers everything from archaic mystery cults to modern paranormal research, giving one the sort of global perspective found in anthropology classics such as James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890).

So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.

I have a book of buildings from 25,000 BC. These are huts built out of mammoth bones. These buildings were beautifully made, from the bones of the body into shelter.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.