Peter Farb Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.

Peter Farb
At every moment of his life the Shoshone must be careful to observe the complicated folkways of his group, to do reverence to superhuman powers, to remember the courtesies and obligations of family, to pay homage to certain sacred plants, or to avoid particular places.

Peter Farb
Men in all societies possess the biological equipment to remove their hats or shoes, but it is the birth within a particular culture that decides that a Jew will keep his hat and shoes on in his place of worship, a Mohammedan will take off his shoes, and a Christian will keep his shoes on but remove his hat.

Peter Farb
No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Peter Farb
When today's remnants of Indian societies are examined closely, it is seen how well some have worked out a compromise with their White conquerors—acculturation without assimilation.

Peter Farb
Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.

Peter Farb
A complex society is not necessarily more advanced than a simple one; it has just adapted to conditions in a more complicated way.

Peter Farb
Invariably the prophet emerges from his hallucinatory vision bearing a message from the supernatural that makes certain promises: the return of the bison herds, a happy hunting ground, or peace on earth and good will to men. Whatever the specific promises, the prophet offers a new power, a revitalization of the whole society.

Peter Farb
The astonishing cluster of them [geniuses] that appeared in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C.... what changed was the culture, which allowed exceptional minds to flourish.

Peter Farb
No sooner did the first Whites arrive in North America than a disproportionate number of them showed that they preferred Indian society to their own.... Throughout American history, thousands of Whites exchanged breeches for breechcloths.

Peter Farb
Experiments... have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language.

Peter Farb
Why did not Indians enter White society, particularly in view of the numerous attempts by Whites to "civilize" them? The answer is that White settlers possessed no traditions and institutions comparable to the Indians' hospitality and sharing, adoption, and complete social integration.... Whites who educated Indians did so with the idea that the Indians would return to their own people as missionaries to spread the gospel, not that they might become functioning parts of White society.

Peter Farb
The Hopewell fused elements of the Adena, the Archaic, and other Woodland patterns of life. Thus, it cannot technically be identified as a culture.... Rather, the Hopewell people were an amalgam of many societies whose customs varied greatly, but who were bound together by... a cult of the dead and a trade bond... a network of trade linked widely separated areas of the continent.

Peter Farb
An isolated human in a simple society is usually a dead human...

Peter Farb
Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.

Peter Farb
The Shoshone did not wage war, because it served no purpose.

Peter Farb
The League [of the Hodenosaunee] favorably impressed the White settlers, and some historians believe it to have been one of the models on which the Constitution of the new United States of America was based.

Peter Farb
Inspired by the teachings of Smohalla, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé in Idaho rebelled in 1877. Before he was trapped only thirty miles short of refuge in Canada, he had consistently outwitted and outfought a superior United States Army... although he forbade his warriors to scalp or to torture, the Whites massacred his women and children.

Peter Farb
Balanced reciprocity is as much a social compact as it is an economic advantage. It is particularly important in hunting-gathering societies, where no individual could possibly accumulate a surplus, live independently of other members of the band, or become so successful in the quest for food as never to need meat from someone else's kill.

Peter Farb
Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.

Peter Farb
At various stages of evolution, the Indian cultures were presented with only a limited number of possibilities. The members of certain kinds of societies—the small band, the large band, the tribe, the chiefdom, the state, and variations of these—tended to make characteristic choices concerning religion, law, government, and art... Such choices were not... consciously made... For a particular society, they either worked or they did not work.

Peter Farb
To do nothing now is to let our children lament that they never knew the magnificent diversity of humankind because our generation let disappear those cultures that might have taught it to them.

Peter Farb
Only a few years after the permanent settlement of Virginia, some fifty missionaries arrived to begin the massive task of converting the heathen. The Indians on their part, did not respond with alacrity to the idea of adopting a culture that to them, in many cases, seemed barbarous, indeed.

Peter Farb
The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today.... they were being systematically starved into submission—by the White Bureaucracy—on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota.... From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Peter Farb
By the seventeenth century, observers had reached the firm conclusion that American Indians were in no way inferior to Whites, and many writers took special pains to salute the Noble Red Man. The Jesuit missionary Bressani... reported that the inhabitants "are hardly barbarous, save in name.... marvelous faculty for remembering places, and for describing them to one another."... can recall things that a White "could not rehearse without writing." Another Jesuit enthusiastically corroborates... "nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France."

Peter Farb
A central assumption of this book has been that to examine the experience of humans throughout their 25,000 years on this continent is to hold up a mirror to the culture of Modern America.

Peter Farb
Freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations.... the habitual liar faces social sanctions... Speakers are not allowed to misrepresent... to defame other people in public, to maliciously shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater, or to utter obscenities on the telephone.

Peter Farb
Numerous sophisticated inventions undoubtedly originated in the New World. They include many aspects of plant domestication and horticulture, the hammock, the tobacco pipe, an intricate system used for ventilating and cooling ceremonial chambers, the enema, the hollow rubber ball, the toboggan, and numerous other objects and ideas that were brought back to the Old World after Columbus.

Peter Farb
The culture of the Anasazi is still the best known of all prehistoric southwestern cultures.... Their architecture... is distinctly their own, and unique among all the southwestern cultures.

Peter Farb
Social scientists of the past spoke glibly of an "agricultural revolution," a time during which human populations suddenly soared, cities were founded, and many trappings of civilization made their appearance.... The food-production revolution turns out to be a slow evolution, a long period of experimentation rather than a sudden explosion.

Peter Farb