Anthropologist Quotes

Alfred Russel Wallace

Thor Heyerdahl

Pierre Bourdieu

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

Rudolf Virchow

Jane Goodall

Howard Carter

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.

The clarification of concepts... directly gauges scientific progress.

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)

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for "[intelligent] design." If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

If it's working, keep doing it. If it's not working, stop doing it. If you don't know what to do, don't do anything.

And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees - it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.

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

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

Napoleon Chagnon

Man harvest the sea as he harvests the land; let us therefore not fool ourselves by relying on the depth of the ocean, anymore than we rely on the depth of the land.

Since science has no value agenda of its own it is always subject to hijacking by fanaticism and idealism.

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...

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.

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

Melville J. Herskovits

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

Joseph Campbell

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

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?

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

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