Quotes About Anthropology

These men are accustomed to bore holes in their lips and cheeks, and in these holes they place bones and stones;

More troubling, the Indians practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice in the course of their battles

Out in Africa examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same sex desire, as it is at odds with an apparent context of heteronormativity and emphasis on reproduction, in a pan-African context, from the nineteenth century to the present.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.

The pioneering anthropologist Louis Leakey once stated, "Without an understanding of who we are, we cannot truly advance.

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.

In our case, finding a Lucy is unique. No one will ever find another Lucy. You can't order one from a biological supply house. It's a unique discovery, a unique specimen.

For humans, gift giving is a universal ritual laden with evolutionary implications.

According to the now almost universally accepted theory, all the races of mankind had a common origin.

I originally worked as an archaeologist in North Carolina, and when bones were found police would take them out to the bones lady at the university, and that was me.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: 'What is the scientific status of the claims?' 'What social or ideological needs do they serve?'

This was the most important discovery I had ever made in my life. It was a discovery which has irrevocably changed my whole life's direction. It immediately elevated me to the status of one of the world's leading anthropologists.

Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant. But these are natural limitations inherent to the science. It is the artificial limitations that hamper us—and, through us, you.

It's all part of their system of totems. We've always tried to play along with it, and act as if we believed it.' 'How condescending of you,' said Ender. 'It's standard anthropological practice,' said Miro. 'You're so busy pretending to believe them, there isn't a chance in the world you could learn anything from them.

Indeed, where would modern anthropology be without the pioneer work of salacious travel writers?

The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.

By the very cogent anthropology of Judeo-Christianity, whether or not one agreed with it, human existence was by no means to be understood as the transaction of a higher organism satisfying this or that need from its environment, by being "creative" or enjoying "meaningful relationships," but as the journey of a wayfarer along life's way. The

Reside en una iluminación profana, en una inspiración materialista, antropológica, para la que el hachís, el opio, o lo que sea, puede representar la escuela preparatoria.

The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the leading roles played by Émile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.3

If the African anthropologist made a point of examining European races "under the magnifying glass," he would be able to multiply them ad infinitum by grouping physiognomies into races and subraces as artificially as his European counterpart does with regard to Africa. He would, in turn, succeed in dissolving collective European reality into a fog of insignificant facts.

Some anthropologists divide cultures into shame cultures and guilt cultures. According to this perspective, shame is an outward mechanism, and guilt is an inward one which alludes to a human mechanism that produces strong feelings of remorse when someone has done something wrong, to the point that he or she needs to rectify the matter.

A la inmodestia de su objetivo, que se extravía tanto en lo ecológico como en lo antropológico (comprobable lo primero y filosóficamente mostrable lo segundo), el principio de responsabilidad contrapone una tarea más modesta, decretada por el temor y el respeto: preservar la permanente ambigüedad de la libertad del hombre, que ningún cambio de circunstancias puede jamás abolir, preservar la integridad de su mundo y de su esencia frente a los abusos

It is no accident that, in every human culture known, there is language that distinguishes male from female. It's a human universal.