Quotes About Anthropology

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

Even if severe wounds are given, the Indian has many chances in his favor, for his organization is somewhat different from that of white men, and he recovers easily from wounds that would kill any European outright.

The study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic.

Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

You'll like it here, she said. Pix is nice. She's an archaeologist? And anthropologist. She collects teeth. Who doesn't? he said.

One of the many pieces of advice his father had given him—besides the importance of antivenom and the need for a good, sturdy blade—was that field anthropology was ninety percent preparation, and ten percent trying desperately to recover when you didn't prepare properly.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

As an anthropology major, I wanted to understand the cultural significance of poverty - why it exists and why some countries can rise above it while others can't.

O fotógrafo é um superturista, um prolongamento do antropólogo, que visita os nativos e regressa com notícias dos seus costumes exóticos e estranhos ornamentos. O fotógrafo procura sempre colonizar novas experiências ou encontrar novos modos de olhar para temas familiares - para lutar contra o tédio.

People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.' Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976

the average Neanderthal cranial capacity was greater than that of modern humans.

El capitalismo no es un mero sistema económico, sino que posee una visión totalizadora y articulada del hombre, una antropología corrosiva que se funda no sólo en la liberalización del consumo, sino también de las costumbres

ethnographic

My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It's the only way to ignore that the rest of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft.

Today in our late modern culture we find a growing dissatisfaction with the denigration of human embodiment and sociality that characterized so much ancient and early modern anthropology. These concerns have arisen in connection with what I call the philosophical "turn to relationality.

Beast had once informed me that humans were hunters only by luck and because they had opposable thumbs.

The fundamental reality of any civilization must be its geographical cradle. Geography dictates its vegetational growth and lays down often impassable frontiers. Civilizations are regions, zones not merely as anthropologists understand them when they talk about the zone of the two-headed axe or the feathered arrow; they are areas which both confine man and undergo constant change through his efforts.

Anthropologists speculate that previously there was another species of human-like primates that did not have the brand gene. These proto-humans walked upright and developed primitive tools, but couldn't tell Jif from Skippy, and believed Evian and Crystal Geyser were pretty much the same stuff. Scientists marvel at their survival.

Scientists have named this newly discovered species "Nebranderthal Man" (Homo nebranderthalensis.)

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

I attended classes and taught classes, in Food Anthropology at Pace University, with an anthropology professor. You can trace history by the architecture and food of a place. Food is one of those things that transcends and stays in the culture.