Quotes About Anthropology

Vailala Madness

They'd come in '31 to study two New Guinea tribes. But because Bankson was on the Sepik River, they'd gone north, up the mountains to the Anapa, with the hope that when they came back down in a year he'd be gone and they'd have their pick of the river tribes, whose less isolated cultures were rich with artistic, economic, and spiritual traditions.

Anthropological contribution, they called it in the OSS. A generous epithet for scientific prostitution.

You're here every night, you join in, but you always seem to be - I don't know - more of a spectator than a participant, as if you are studying us, possibly for some sort of anthropological purpose. Do you even like us?

The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology.

The last time I saw a brow that low I was watching slides in anthropology class

Charlotte was lost for words. What did one say to a man in a fake marsupial head, wearing a grass loin-pouch and trying to debate ethnobotany in the middle of a lost world that was supposed to be inaccessible by foot?

Karen told me about an old woman who was the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands. She was the only one left who could speak her tribe's language, but the anthropologists didn't realize it and never bothered to learn it from her. When the old woman died, the language died with her.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

I feel like I studied anthropology in college for a reason.

Maybe if I'd studied writing instead of anthropology, I'd be more sensible. You know - pick a genre, follow the rules, stay in the box - but let's face it. Sensible people don't major in anthropology.

If you want to be an anthropologist, you need to study physical anthropology specialized in bones. If you want to be a forensic chemist, get a degree in chemistry. Do you want to do DNA work? Get a degree in microbiology. And do well. Study hard and go to graduate school.

When historians of early America turned from the pursuit of past politics, they devised a category known in the academy as 'social and intellectual history.' In it, they stuffed nearly everything except politics on the assumption, which the anthropologists assured them was correct, that it would all fit together. Somehow it did not.

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is.

To paraphrase the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, "Men are one long breeding experiment run by women.

Using "the spy-glass of Anthropology," her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that "both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.

Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man is both amusing and horrifying when it recounts how nineteenth century anthropologists pursued craniometry

If an Aztec and a Roman were transported to the twenty-first century the Aztec might be the less mystified. He would know why people were smoking.

For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology's turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider's perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today.

Knowledge of yourself may involve, if we are learning at the present time, a knowledge of the way of thinking of your society and to realise that you are probably its product, and that this knowledge can be attained in fact by such anthropological and psychological observations made by the Sufis in the course of their teaching how to pursue new and more promising extra perspectives.

Archaeologists estimate that Washington was among the first populated zones in North America—human remains in the state date back 13,000 years.

Work could be anything that aroused your curiosity: the natural world, music, anthropology, the stars, or even sewing or gardening. When we were little girls we would invent dresses the Queen of Egypt might wear, or have a special garden where we ordered seeds for vegetables or flowers we had never heard of.

The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself," a novel "imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.

I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.