American Anthropologist Quotes

Margaret Mead

Joseph Campbell

Ruth Benedict

Edward Sapir

Alfred L. Kroeber

Kathy Reichs

Marvin Harris

For the heart to truly share another's being, it must be an embodied heart, prepared to encounter directly the embodied heart of another. I have met the other in this way, not once or a few times, but over and over during years spent in the company of persons like you and me, who happen to be nonhuman.

Most of the sacrifices involved tearing out the heart, offering it to the sun and, with some blood, also to the idols

The world's most 'primitive' people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation.

Marshall Sahlins

In the past even scientists have been led to believe that only human beings have thoughts or emotions. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth... After all, thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

At the end of a long day's march, one of the soldiers, hot, thirsty and utterly weary, was heard to exclaim: "What did God Almighty make such a country for?" To which one of his companions made the reply that "God Almighty made the country good enough, but it's this infernal geology that the professor talks about that has spoiled it all."

George Bird Grinnell

The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wildnerness?

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.

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!

It must be made possible for the one to live vicariously the life of the many from the beginning.

Victory did not come to the one who played by the rules; it came to the one who made the rules and imposed them on his enemy.

Jack Weatherford

It is frustrating to know, on the one hand, that every living thing on earth will have had a single, unique history—whether it be the life of an individual, of a civilization, of a species, of a diverse evolutionary group—and, on the other, to be constantly in the position of trying to discover it.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz

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

To gather and describe antiquities, although thoroughly and intelligently done, is by no means all of archaeology. True, these are to archaeology what the unfashioned and unadjusted materials of which the house is to be built are to the house, but they are not the house.

A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

Mary Catherine Bateson

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.

Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.

Elsie Clews Parsons

Science, like organic life, has ramified by expanding into unoccupied areas and then adapting itself to the special requirements encountered there.

Harry L. Shapiro

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

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

The residue of possible findings is a sort of condensed social history.

Alfred L. Kroeber

By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression.

Manning Marable

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

Archaeologists are, by necessity, masters of inference. From the meanest, most innocuous of things-discarded oyster shells, broken pots, the subtle bands of color and texture in an excavation wall—we try to re-create an entire world and its inhabitants.

A scientist who is no longer capable of framing a hypothesis — or never was — is not a scientist but a methodological fossil.

Alexander Goldenweiser (anthropologist)