Anthropologist Quotes

Alfred Russel Wallace

Thor Heyerdahl

Pierre Bourdieu

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

Rudolf Virchow

Jane Goodall

Howard Carter

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

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

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.

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

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

Johnnetta B. Cole

The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland.

Edward Burnett Tylor

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

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

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?

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!

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

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.

Ellen Dissanayake

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

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

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

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?

History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened.

In the relentless search for advancement and material progress we have perhaps alienated ourselves from our Earth. I feeltingly witnessed this innate appreciation of belonging when the Colombian Indians greeted strangers on a street in Bogatá. Tribal people are the beacons that illuminate the importance of these connections. If we destroy them, we smother these lights, and so make our future far less human. I believe their survival, far from being a fringe concern, is one of the greatest humanitarian concerns of our time.

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.

The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. It provides further evidence that all great civilizations and races are heavily indebted to one another and that no race has a monopoly on enterprise and inventive genius.

Ivan Van Sertima

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

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.

Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people - not merely their language - from the steppe appears to be true.

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.