Quotes About Anthropology

Live fire cooking and barbecue have been so intimately linked with human evolution and history and politics. Everything we do, barbecue informs it in some way.

And at that pivotal moment, the University of Tennessee came calling. So did forensic anthropology. My career as "Indian grave-robber number one" was over. My true vocation—as a forensic scientist—was about to begin.

If possible, you also want to determine the cause of death (technically, only medical examiners can determine cause of death; we anthropologists call things like stab wounds and gunshots "manner of death"). But

But before you can tell who someone was and how they died—and you won't always be able to tell—you start with the Big Four: sex, race, age, and stature. Whenever

One of the puzzling things about all the theories about the origins of money that we've been looking at so far is that they almost completely ignore the evidence of anthropology. Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actually worked.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term "human economy," what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people's days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this.

Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

For at least a century, anthropologists have largely played the role of gadflies: whenever some ambitious European or American theorist appears to make some grandiose generalizations about how human beings go about organizing political, economic, or family life, it's always the anthropologist who shows up to point out that there are people in Samoa or Tierra del Fuego or Burundi who do things exactly the other way around.

Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening.

The result has been strangely paradoxical: anthropological reflections on their own culpability has mainly had the effect of providing non-anthropologists who do not want to be bothered having to learn about 90% of human experience with a handy two or three sentence dismissal (you know: all about projecting one's sense of Otherness into the colonized) by which they can feel morally superior to those who do.

No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."16

The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

History is the zoology of the human race.

Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.

Surely common sense as well as anthropological evidence documents the universal need to pray, to hope, and to lament or carouse through song.

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax.

Being in an area of the planet where scientists believe mankind started is quite amazing.

Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.

Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.