Quotes About Anthropology

Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task.

We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?

For anthropologists, even the exotic's not exotic, let alone the everyday.

To the anthropologist, as I explained before, it's generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones. To the anthropologist, there's no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon—only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.

While the Bible declares that man is made in the image of God, anthropologists say that men make their gods after their own image: and the truth is that every God-conception is characteristic of the man who holds

Why do humans make art? It's how we evolved.

I studied anthropology and art history, as I have always been captivated by living traditions.

In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.

In her life Josie had heard only one or two people apologize. Wasn't that something? Wouldn't that be significant to future anthropologists? This was a time in history when no one was sorry. Sorry took too much courage, too much strength and faith and rightness to have a place in this cowardly century.

Anthropologists and insects can reveal the truth about a crime, but they can't force the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, and they can't guarantee that justice will be done. All they can do is serve as a voice for victims, and hope that voice is heard.

Dr. Neil Roach, of George Washington University, lead author of a 2013 study that tackles the mystery of why, out of all other primates on the planet, we're the only ones who can kill prey with a lethal throw.

Even your breakfast burrito plays a role; Lieberman's investigations had revealed that as our diet shifted over the centuries from chewy stuff like raw roots and wild game and gave way to mushy cooked staples like spaghetti and ground beef, our faces began to shrink. Ben Franklin's face was chunkier than yours; Caesar's was bigger than his.

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

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

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together

primitive man has never existed; he is nothing but a poetical creation of monistic imagination

Theology has, since Kant's time, become a theology of consciousness and experience and thus loses itself in religious anthropology.

Too often, the anthropologist takes on the role of police detective, discovering what is "hidden," assembling "evidence" to make a strong "case"... But sometimes what is called for is not an "investigator" at all, but an attentive listener.

Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.