Quotes About Anthropology

For me, a bit of anthropology in the evening is always better than staying and watching the telly.

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

I love Anthropology for kitchenware - they make the best bowls, plates, cutlery etc.

I'm always looking for instances of people doing things for and with each other for pleasure, for passion, for camaraderie, from kindness. It's the anthropology of people figuring how to punctuate life with the lyrical.

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

I was born in Middletown, Connecticut, while my dad was getting his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and anthropology at Wesleyan University.

The juke joint, the honky tonk, and the ballroom also represent one more thing, anthropologically speaking: a ceremonial context for the male-with-female-duet dance flirtation and embrace, upon which the zoological survival of the human species has always been predicated.

I am convinced that we have entered an era when anthropology will become a more relevant tool than political science. We will have to radically change our interpretation of events, stop thinking as products of the Enlightenment, and finally envisage the radical nature of violence; this will produce a quite different kind of rationality as required by events.

On Earth, when anthropologists can't find instant meaning in any cultural artifact, they say "This obviously had deep religious significance.")

Remember, anthropologically, religion begins with the making of a distinction between the pure and the impure. Jesus consistently ignores such a distinction. In fact, it is at the heart of almost half of his gospel actions!

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person - the person's origins and destiny. There is an implicit anthropology and an implicit theology in every economics.

It is characteristic of the ethnocentrism of anthropology that whereas the rationality of claims by African and other primitive diviners to be able to see what is not visible to the ordinary eye has long seemed to be a proper subject of investigation, the occult powers of our own diviners have been taken for granted. Magic has been regarded as a bizarre phenomenon, the artness of art has not.

Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.'

Our word "Phoenician" comes from ancient Greek. Phoinikes, "red people," was what the Greeks called them, probably in reference to their copper skin color.

Todo esto empieza a hacer que el hábito de los antropólogos de colocar a los nobles yurok o a los artistas kwakiutl juntos en el saco de forrajeadores opulentos o cazadores-recolectores complejos parezca un tanto estúpido: el equivalente a afirmar que un ejecutivo petrolero de Texas y un poeta egipcio medieval son agriculturalistas complejos porque comen un montón de trigo.

Alcohol was the reason we formed complex civilizations, and having to deal with the complexities of civilization is the reason most of us need alcohol.

The Peking man was a thinking being, standing erect, dating to the beginning of the Ice Age.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

Les premiers restes de néandertaliens furent découverts en 1830 dans la caverne d'Engis près de Liège (Belgique) et en 1848 dans la carrière Forbes à Gibraltar.

Le développement de l'encéphale s'est surtout accéléré au cours des derniers 500 000 ans pour donner à Néandertal le plus gros cerveau qu'un hominine ait jamais possédé. Les 1 400 à 1 500 cm3 du cerveau de nombreux néandertaliens dépassent les 1 350 cm3 de la moyenne actuelle.

Some anthropologists argue, in fact, that the human species needs infatuation as a reproductive tool in order to keep us reckless enough to risk the hazards of pregnancy so that we can constantly replenish our ranks.

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

I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head