Quotes About Ethnographer

My father was already training me to be an ethnographer, a 'participant observer,' but I was by nature much more of an observer than a participant. And an arrogant little observer at that.

Ethnographer Clifford Geertz says: "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs."93

In Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez recounts the story of an ethnographer posing a riddle to an elder among the Nunamiut, a tribe in northern Alaska. At the end of his life, the researcher asked, who knows more about life in Alaska—how to escape a blizzard, how to find caribou, how to survive on such a harsh landscape—a wolf or a man? "The same," the elder replied. "They know the same.