Anthropologist Quotes

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: 'When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?'

Everything that is really Mexican is either Aztec or Spanish.

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

The world in which you were born is just one model of reality.

Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.

There comes a time in the spiritual journey when you start making choices from a very different place. And if a choice lines up so that it supports truth, health, happiness, wisdom and love, it's the right choice.

Faced with what seems like an impossible task, a group of folks will do well to remember the African proverb: When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion.

The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.

The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.

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, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Commitment, belief and positive attitude are all important if you're going to be a success, whether you're in sports, in business or, as in my case, anthropology.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else;

it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

The roots of all living things are tied together.

Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.

The four Ways reflect a pervasive belief that life will be simple if we practice four basic principles: Show up or choose to be present, Pay attention to what has heart and meaning, Tell the truth without blame or judgment, and Be open, rather than attached to, the outcome.

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has.

Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

I think if the general exodus that seems to be going on occurs it's going to be a disaster,.

Agency has become a catch word. In a way, this intoxication with ‘agency’ is the product of liberal individualism. The ability of individuals to fashion themselves, to change their live, is given ideological priority over the relation within which they themselves are actually formed, situated, and sustained.

You can't really discover the most interesting conflicts and problems in a subject until you've tried to write about them. At that point, one discovers discontinuities in the data, perhaps, or in one's own thinking; then the act of writing forces you to work harder to resolve these contradictions.

We can reproduce within our own minds the way that the world is put together for other people. This is the extraordinary privilege and adventure of anthropology.

What you give ought to be in direct relationship to what you've received.

If you have been blessed with a great deal, then you have a lot of giving to do.

School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

We must shift our allegiances from fear to curiosity, from attachment to letting go, from control to trust, and from entitlement to humility.

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

People don't show up here (at the courtroom) because they believe evolution is bad science. They show up because they believe that if they accept evolution, then they are abandoning their religious beliefs. They see it as an either/or proposition: Either evolution happened, or God loves you.

The real world is simply too terrible to admit.

it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this,makes man seem important,vital to the universe. immortal in some ways

There is a solitude, or perhaps a solemnity, in the few hours that precede the dawn of day which is unlike that of any others in the twenty-four, and which I cannot explain or account for. Thoughts come to me at this time that I never have at any other.

Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist.

An education that teaches you to understand something about the world has done only half of the assignment. The other half is to teach you to do something about making the world a better place.

Many of the tribal peoples of the world recognize that there are four places in nature where you can find deep peace and remember who you really are. One is in the deep woods; one is in the desert; one in the mountains and one near the ocean

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

You cannot fully understand your own life without knowing and thinking beyond your life, your own neighborhood, and even your own nation.

Man is a multi-sensorial being. Occasionally he verbalizes … and we must seriously examine the implications of the fact that man does not communicate by word alone.

Both magic and religion are based strictly on mythological tradition, and they also both exist in the atmosphere of the miraculous, in a constant revelation of their wonder-working power. They both are surrounded by taboos and observances which mark off their acts from those of the profane world.

You're 40 and he's 22. Do you have to marry him? Couldn't you just adopt him?

One day, a woman found herself standing at Heaven's gate.

The angels' only question to her was, "Zusai, why weren't you Zusai?" Within that simple question lies the heart of all our soul work. If you are David, why aren't you fully David? If you are Susan, why aren't you completely Susan? We are here on Earth to become who we are meant to be.

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?

Compassionate action emerges from the sense of openness, connectedness, and discernment you have created.

Horror alone brings peace of mind.

Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.

The portal of healing and creativity always takes us into the realm of the spirit.

We live in a time when science is validating what humans have known throughout the ages: that compassion is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our well-being, resilience, and survival.

There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic.

Nor are there, it must be added at one, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

Show me someone content with mediocrity and I'll show you someone destined for failure.