An Anthropologist Quotes

#1. I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

Clifford Geertz

#2. And what does an anthropologist do these days?" sad Paul.
"Same thing a supernumerary minister does
becomes a public charge, a bore, or possibly a rum-dum, or a bureaucrat.

Kurt Vonnegut

#3. If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?'

Alan Greenspan

#4. I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.

Elizabeth Kostova

#5. An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New
Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not
new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax.

David Letterman

#6. If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.

Margaret Mead

#7. I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.

Joan Didion

#8. If you want to be an anthropologist, you need to study physical anthropology specialized in bones. If you want to be a forensic chemist, get a degree in chemistry. Do you want to do DNA work? Get a degree in microbiology. And do well. Study hard and go to graduate school.

Kathy Reichs

#9. I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

Ken Burns

#10. As soon as you take out a pencil and paper with the Indians, you're one thing to them - an anthropologist - and what they tell to anthropologists is always distorted.

Ruth Beebe Hill

#11. Engineers naturally tend to focus first on the product and then on its users. For an anthropologist, it's the exact reverse: people come first, then the product.

Guruprasad Madhavan

#12. I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them.

William Gibson

#13. As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects.

Annia Ciezadlo

#14. And it occurred to me; I was not part of the action. Oh God, I thought, I'm not an anthropologist. I'm the lonely voice-over narrator of adolescence. The bitter, voice-over voice.

Joanna Pearson

#15. When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply Ours.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#16. A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years.

Michael Leunig

#17. I've sort of been an anthropologist of modern America, in a non-academic way. Whether it's Marines or Tupperware salesladies, high end audiophiles or bike couriers, I'm fascinated by the hallmarks of the American tribe.

Hampton Sides

#18. I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training.

Jan Chipchase

#19. The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations.

James C. Scott

#20. An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell each other stories!' We humans forget how alike we are, living in a world that only reminds us of our differences.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#21. I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night.

James C. Scott

#22. It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

Gregory Bateson

#23. When I first got the job, I was told nothing about my character. She's an anthropologist and she's tough, she's a female Indiana Jones. That's what I went into [Lost] knowing.

Rebecca Mader

#24. The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

W. H. Auden

#25. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) examines the very thin line separating a joke from an insult: a joke expresses something a community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn't want to consider.

Henry Jenkins

#26. I don't want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I'm not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.

Temple Grandin

#27. Too often, the anthropologist takes on the role of police detective, discovering what is "hidden," assembling "evidence" to make a strong "case"... But sometimes what is called for is not an "investigator" at all, but an attentive listener.

Liisa H. Malkki

#28. Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject ... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

Susan Sontag

#29. The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.

Martin Buber

#30. The pioneering anthropologist Louis Leakey once stated, Without an understanding of who we are, we cannot truly advance.

Gregg Braden