Anthropologist Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Clyde Kluckhohn

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.

The universalist approach is roughly: 'What is good and right can be defined and always applies.' In particularist cultures far greater attention is given to the obligations of relationships and unique circumstances.

Fons Trompenaars

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

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

Joseph Campbell

I think at the moment we did not even want to break the seal [on the inner chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamen], for a feeling of intrusion had descended heavily upon us... We felt that we were in the presence of the dead King and must do him reverence, and in imagination could see the doors of the successive shrines open one.

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.

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.

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.

Hominids typically haven't so much adapted to change, as they have accommodated to it.

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

Each mountain ridge in this landscape has a distinct contour, with various peaks whose heights reflect evolutionary time. That is, within humankind's evolutionary landscape there are several naturally selected systems that contribute to channeling human experience toward religious paths. In the processing of human experience, these systems, and their components, interact and develop interrelated functions - as do geological, hydrological, and organic systems in the drainage process.

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.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

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

Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the Christian.

George Amos Dorsey

That "ol' black magic" is a fickle force. The chemistry of romantic love can trigger the chemistry of sexual desire and the fuel of sexual desire can trigger the fuel of romance. This is why it is dangerous to copulate with someone with whom you don't wish to become involved. Although you intend to have casual sex, you might just fall in love.

Helen Fisher (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!

Everyone's gone mad, typing to themselves all day long like mindless robots.

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

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

First understand infinity then you will understand God and how evolution is intelligent design.