Quotes About Anthropology

The 'racial types' they posited are of relatively recent origin, having been replaced over and over by other types of populations in previous centuries.

Jij bent echt anders. Je zit als het ware in je eigen wereldje opgesloten en bekijkt ons vanaf de zijlijn maar je raakt er nooit echt bij betrokken. Je lijkt wel zo'n antropoloog die ons als een primitieve stam bestudeert. Daar krijgen mensen de kriebels van. - Donna (tegen Claire)

Archaeologists made a haunting discovery that lends a little weight to this conjecture. Amongst the shells and fish bones of one midden, human fingers had been deliberately placed on seal flippers. This powerful note of identification with the natural world, the association of the fingers and flippers, may point to a sense of an afterlife, one where the souls of the dead swam with the seals in the deeps of the world.

unintelligence, just some more of the rubbish of fantastic Pagan superstition. It will therefore come as a surprise and shock if an intelligent re-examination forces us to realize that in profundity of knowledge and semantic skill in portraying it ancient perspicuity so far surpassed our own in this field of anthropological science that we

If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

My mother wanted me to be a reader. She was a reader. Even though she had an 11th-grade education, she was curious about all kinds of things - archeology, anthropology.

I love watching the National Geographic channel. That show 'Taboo'? I love it!

Many anthropologists work with a concept called embodied knowledge - tacit, nonscientific knowledge - and look for ways to incorporate such information into product design.

Dan Perkins is in a silk shirt and pants with the sleeves rolled up. Business casual. He has gray hair and slightly funny eyes. Really, he looks less like a businessman than a gray-haired anthropology professor who's dipped into the school's ayahuasca supply one too many times.

Hundreds of different hunter-gatherer cultures have been described, and all obtained a substantial proportion of their diet from meat, often half their calories or more.

The weight of our guts is estimated at about 60 percent of what is expected for a primate of our size: the human digestive system as a whole is much smaller than would be predicted on the basis of size relations in primates. Our small mouths, teeth, and guts fit well with the softness, high caloric density, low fiber content, and high digestibility of cooked food.

In addition to having a small gape, our mouths have a relatively small volume—about the same size as chimpanzee mouths, even though we weigh some 50 percent more than they do. Zoologists often try to capture the essence of our species with such phrases as the naked, bipedal, or big-brained ape. They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape.

Are we just an ordinary animal that happens to enjoy the tastes and securities of cooked food without in any way depending on them? Or are we a new kind of species tied to the use of fire by our biological needs, relying on cooked food to supply enough energy to our bodies?

the implication is clear: there is something odd about us. We are not like other animals. In most circumstances, we need cooked food.

The evidence that Homo sapiens have been self-domesticating for three hundred thousand years, and how it happened, suggests that we are a thoroughly unusual primate.

The control of fire and the practice of cooking are human universals.

Under this system, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment in such societies. Cofeeding is often the only marriage ceremony, such that if an unmarried pair are seen eating together, they are henceforward regarded as married.

Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs.

Rejection of science and free discussion are, of course, characteristic of all totalitarian movements; thus, nonbiblical astronomy was heretical to the Inquisition, unpalatable anthropology was Jewish to the Nazis, unsatisfactory biology was banned as bourgeois in Stalin's Russia and irritating ethology is sexist (and unpleasant psychology is chauvinist) to these ladies.

The perspective of anthropology and of ethnomethodology, and of this book, is like the perspective of a cosmopolitan art critic. It asks us to try many reality-windows instead of standing hypnotized at our habitual window all our lives.

To review: Each individual has a neurological system, or game, different from other members of the same society. In accord with Einstein's physical relativism, and anthropology's cultural relativism, we call this neurological relativism.

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