Quotes About Anthropology

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

Anthropologists can speculate about human behavior; archaeologists, about patterns of settlement; philosophers and theologians, about the motivations of "humanity" as an undifferentiated mass. But the historian's task is different: to look for particular human lives that give flesh and spirit to abstract assertions about human behavior.

The biological anthropologist Stephen McGarvey has speculated that the people who survived these voyages tended to have a higher percentage of body fat before the voyage began and/or more efficient metabolisms, allowing them to live longer on less food than their thinner companions. (McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern-day Polynesians suffer from a high incidence of obesity.)

The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about 5,400 years ago, well before the advent of agriculture

According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, "lots" of researchers believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.

What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the "New World.

Holmberg's Mistake.

Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.

Writing in 1934, Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the founders of American anthropology, theorized that the Indians in eastern North America could not develop—could have no history—because their lives consisted of "warfare that was insane, unending, continuously attritional

Now, these were hungry people who were very interested in acquiring protein. The simplest explanation for the lack of passenger pigeon bones is a lack of passenger pigeons. Prior to 1492, this was a rare species.

glottochronology

The Foxhall jaw has now been missing for many years.

Another cost of adopting a cereal-based diet may be that human brain size has decreased progressively in the past 10 000 years. The decline began at precisely the moment when humans began to raise their children on cereals and grains and less animal produce.

Dental remains show that farmers suffered from tooth decay, unheard of in hunter-gatherers, because the carbohydrates in the farmers' cereal-heavy diets were reduced to sugars by enzymes in their saliva as they chewed.

In effect, hunter-gatherers work two days a week and have five-day weekends.

Why we Americans should be so dendrophilic in our homes, and so dendrophobic in our business-districts is another subject of study which should be referred to our anthropologists.

If Auschwitz is unthinkable, then we must rethink the bases of our anthropology (Hannah Arendt). If Auschwitz is unsayable, then we must rethink the bases of testimony (Primo Levi). If Auschwitz is unimaginable, we must give the same attention to an image as we do to what witnesses say.

Chad is a slim blond boy with a strange witch-doctor face that goes with his interest in anthropology and prehistory Indians, His nose beaks softly and almost creamily under a golden flare of hair; he has the beauty and grace of a Western hotshot who's danced in roadhouses and played a little football. A quavering twang comes out when he speaks.

When the Common Era began—by the year one, that is—eight out of every ten humans lived between the Atlantic coast of Europe and the shores of the South China Sea.

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist. What I say is that human societies are very different from what specialists call 'animal society' because the former have religion.

We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are 'good to eat' but because they are 'good to think.'

With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.