103 quotes found
“I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching t...”
“There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.”
“For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropologys turbulent history has hidden behind the staid faade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insiders perspective, the well-know...”
“Historical periodization always tells a story. It is a narrative device for putting meaning into the flux of historical process - creating protagonists, heroes, pace, and plot. For this reason, the...”
“Somewhere beyond Tibet, among the icy peaks and secluded valleys of Central Asia, there lies an inaccessible paradise, a place of universal wisdom and ineffable peace called Shambhala . . . It is i...”
“For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical develo...”
“To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human.”
“Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have...”
“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In r...”
“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust...”
“I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alon...”
“These hapless livers were probably not always mere myths, and these legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush ...”
“The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.”
“It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man.”
“Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else....”
“When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance...”
“Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.This ...”
“What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you ...”
“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”
“It may be in the cultural particularities of people in their oddities that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.”
