American Anthropologist Quotes

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

Soul food is more than chidins and collard greens, ham hocks and black-eyed peas. Soul food is about a people who have a lot of heart and soul.

What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.

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

Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
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.

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

Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
No branch of anthropology requires more inference, or the weighing of imponderables; in short, the exercise of the scientific imagination, than prehistory.

In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in.

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

Paul Farmer
Paul Farmer
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.

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

Johnnetta B. Cole
Johnnetta B. Cole
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.

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.

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

Alfred L. Kroeber
Alfred L. Kroeber
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.

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.

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.

National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.

Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir
Why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the act of killing in the name of the secular nation, or of democracy, does not?

Archaeology by its formal etymology, is the study of the old; and the old, more often than not, is buried. As a result, archaeologists have traditionally been concerned with the subterranean world. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, they are confronted with the curious underground world, and attempt to understand and explain it.

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

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.

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.