20th-century Anthropologist Quotes

Pierre Bourdieu

Thor Heyerdahl

Jane Goodall

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Margaret Mead

Joseph Campbell

Michel Leiris

Certainly the Thracians and the Illyrians were non-Greek speakers, but in the northwest, the peoples of Molossis (Epirot province), Orestis and Lynkestis spoke West Greek. It is also accepted that the Macedonians spoke a dialect of Greek and although they absorbed other groups into their territory, they were essentially Greeks.

The smell of roasting meat together with that of burning fruit wood and dried herbs, as voluptuous as incense in a church, is enough to turn anyone into a budding gastronome

Anthropology, abstractly conceived as the study of man, is actually the study of men in crisis by men in crisis.

Stanley Diamond

There are no closed frontiers between intellectual approaches. Only closed minds which refuse to cross them.

To say of the traditional African thinker that he is interested in supernatural rather than natural causes makes little more sense... than to say of the physicist that he is interested in nuclear rather than natural causes. In fact, both are making the same use of theory to transcend the limited vision of natural causes provided by common sense.

Robin W. G. Horton

It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.

Participants in dance, both dancers and viewers, may experience catharsis and develop a sense of mastery or self-discovery.

Judith Lynne Hanna

The last bastions of resistance to evolutionary theory are organized religion and cultural anthropology.

Napoleon Chagnon

Only a minute to minute relentless struggle can balance one's natural but stupefying insistence to remain unchanged.

If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!

Heaven was not so far away in the eyes of these people (the Maya), who believed that individual, civic and social truths could be revealed by consulting with nature: the shifting of the wind, the arrival of the rain, the appearance of the stars

Science is cumulative. The apprentice in this generation can outdo his master of the last.

Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program.

Nonliterate societies represent the end results of many different experiments carried out by nature.

Clyde Kluckhohn

Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.

Thus, if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.

Mathematics is a kind of primate behavior as languages, musical systems and penal codes are.

Welcome to the field of Southeast Asian linguistics! This welcome comes with a warning: Southeast Asia is the Bosnia of historical linguistics, with a lovely landscape strewn with land mines! … 'Look-alikes' (look less and less alike the more we know about them) abound, as in Malay bĕras and Wr. Tibetan 'bras for 'rice', as do also unlikely-appearing cognate sets such as Thai pu 'grandfather' and Japanese o: i 'nephew'.

Paul K. Benedict

Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature, that they act. Yet, it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them.

Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole.

Wade Davis (anthropologist)

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers.

Both social and biosocial factors are necessary to interpret crosscultural studies, with the general proviso that one's research interest determines which elements, in what combinations, are significant for the provision of understanding.

It takes years for average persons in the nagual's world to remove themselves from their involvement with themselves and be capable of seeing the wonder of it all.

Florinda Donner

What our species needs, above all else, is a generally accepted ethical system that is compatible with the scientific knowledge we now possess.

Socialization consists of those patterns of action or aspects of action which inculcate in individuals the skills (including knowledge), motives, and attitudes necessary for the performance of present and anticipated roles.