Quotes About Anthropology

Did you know that research on gorillas has shown that they communicate using gestures? Now listen to this. An ASL-like language may very well have preceded spoken language in human development. A kind of language with gestures and vocalizations. Gradually the vocalizations took over from the gestures, because it's so much more convenient to speak than gesture.

In claiming to have exhausted the dialectically structured categorial realm, Hegel claims to have completed philosophy. In fact, however, he has completed at best only first philosophy; his system represents at most the highest theoretical knowledge, that which grounds further inquiry. Grounding such inquiry is however quite different from completing it. In complete metaphysics, Hegel provides philosophical anthropology with the point from which it can begin.

I cannot wait until the day I can go back to school... I've already picked my program: anthropology at Columbia. I will not get in, but a girl can dream.

Telling everyone I wanted to go into forensic anthropology was my form of rebellion.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.

The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary.

Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not

Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably none will be. Those not extinct will be 'civilised' — or corrupted, depending on your point of view.

Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.

Die Geschichte ist die wahre Naturgeschichte des Menschen.

To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils.

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

The true science and study of mankind is man.

The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

The first money I ever earned was for drawing stone tools.

The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.

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

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology. Snappy dresser, though.

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.