20th-century Anthropologist Quotes

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.

Richard Shweder

We are trying to end poverty in the world by 2030 and we're going to focus especially on the well-being of the bottom 40 per cent of every country.

Only when the stock of wealth can be related to human energy by purchasing living energy as "labor power", offered for sale by people who have no other means of using their labor to ensure their livelihood: and only when it can relate that labor power to purchased machines - embodiments of past transformation of nature by human energy expended in the past - only then does "wealth" become "capital".

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

Everyone's gone mad, typing to themselves all day long like mindless robots.

Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.

We appear to be capable of eating (and liking) just about anything that is not immediately toxic," he wrote in "Sweetness and Power." "What constitutes 'good food,' like what constitutes good weather, a good spouse or a fulfilling life, is a social, not a biological, matter.

Soul is the ability to feel oneness with all black people.

Johnnetta B. Cole

Self-destructive addiction is merely the medium for desperate people to internalize their frustration, resistance, and powerlessness. In other words, we can safely ignore the drug hysteria that periodically sweeps through the United States. Instead we should focus our ethical concerns and political energies on the contradictions posed by the persistence of inner-city poverty in the midst of extraordinary opulence. In the same vein, we need to recognize and dismantle the class- and ethnic-based apartheids that riddle the U.S. landscape.

Philippe Bourgois

First understand infinity then you will understand God and how evolution is intelligent design.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.

There are approximately 125 billion miles of DNA in a human body -- your personal DNA is long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times.

If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.

The main principle by which human beings must guide the future course of their development is love.

In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

Clifford Geertz

The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.

Pierre Bourdieu

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

Joseph Campbell

Needless to say, language and consciousness, which are among the most prized features of Homo Sapiens, leave no trace in the prehistoric record.

That "ol' black magic" is a fickle force. The chemistry of romantic love can trigger the chemistry of sexual desire and the fuel of sexual desire can trigger the fuel of romance. This is why it is dangerous to copulate with someone with whom you don't wish to become involved. Although you intend to have casual sex, you might just fall in love.

Helen Fisher (anthropologist)

Witches try to 'connect' with the world around them. Witchcraft, they say, is about the tactile, intuitive understanding of the turn of the seasons, the song of the birds; it is the awareness of all things as holy...

How can a modern social anthropologist... embark upon generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfying conclusion?... thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as constituting a mathematical pattern.