Quotes About Anthropologists

#1. Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.

Lloyd DeMause

#2. Many anthropologists work with a concept called embodied knowledge - tacit, nonscientific knowledge - and look for ways to incorporate such information into product design.

Katie Hafner

#3. Sociologists and anthropologists tell us that religion has three dimensions: creed, code, and cult; or words, works, and worship; or theology, morality, and liturgy.

Peter Kreeft

#4. Texans are the only race of people known to anthropologists who do not depend on breeding for propagation. Like princes and lords, they can be made by breath; plus a big hat-which comparatively few Texans wear.

J. Frank Dobie

#5. The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.

Sandra Cisneros

#6. 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

#7. The classical anthropological question, What is man? - "how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!" - is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture.

Paul Goodman

#8. I never should have made it through twelve years of schooling before entering a university, without ever hearing the important news that most anthropologists reject the concept of biological races.

Robert Wald Sussman

#9. Like other people, anthropologists may see only what they want to see, even when what they want to see is nothing.

J. Budziszewski

#10. The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#11. Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.

Brent Staples

#12. Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies.

Patricia Marx

#13. This was the most important discovery I had ever made in my life. It was a discovery which has irrevocably changed my whole life's direction. It immediately elevated me to the status of one of the world's leading anthropologists.

Donald Johanson

#14. Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

Clifford Geertz

#15. anthropologists speak of ritual leadership and ritual space.

Elaine N. Aron

#16. [I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.

Steven Pinker

#17. Fiction. Anthropologists have theorized that we gravitate toward dangerous stories because of the deeper chemical need in our brains to feel the rush and

Anonymous

#18. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#19. Buying is an activity understood by economists. Shopping is a phenomenon of interest to anthropologists and sociologists.

Marc Gobe

#20. What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.

Jared Diamond

#21. Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

Rob Brezsny

#22. according to the unanimous opinion of anthropologists, the organization of enforced labor is one of the essentials of civilization.

Stanton Coit

#23. Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.

David Graeber

#24. The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.

Edith Hamilton

#25. As has often been said, if you want to understand what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do. Above all else, what anthropologists do is ethnography.

John Monaghan

#26. The loss of body hair is interesting to anthropologists, because it is a feature that distinguishes us from our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees. They have body hair, we don't.

Mark Stoneking

#27. Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Abraham Verghese

#28. You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers ... damn anthropologists.

Emo Philips

#29. forms of printing and recording. The study of language and communication by anthropologists developed out of the European tradition of linguistics, which usually is associated with disciplines

Michael Rynkiewich

#30. The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science.

Franz Boas

#31. Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.

Clifford Geertz

#32. 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 reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Terry Pratchett

#33. Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.

Helen Fisher

#34. Some distant day, anthropologists will consider as a landmark in humankind's evolution - comparable to the capacity for destroying ourselves by nuclear obliteration - the adolescent gene's newly emergent power to dictate nightly TV viewing.

Steve Erickson

#35. Most Kikuyu marriages were arranged on the basis of what is described by anthropologists as the bride price.

Louis Leakey

#36. For anthropologists, even the exotic's not exotic, let alone the everyday.

Tom McCarthy

#37. With the willingness of Time-Life and a team of historians, forensic anthropologists, photographic experts, and cutting edge technology, the means are at hand to recognize the participants in Alfred Eisenstaedt's beloved photograph.

Lawrence Verria

#38. If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture.

William Gibson

#39. As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world.

Helen Fisher

#40. Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

Robert Graves

#41. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets.

Rigoberta Menchu

#42. The raw data of anthropologists can be misleading; it can make the differences in values between cultures appear greater than they are...It is only that life forces upon them choices that we do not have to make.

James Rachels

#43. These 'anthropologists of peace' (who in fact are rather aggressive academics - the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia.

Steven Pinker

#44. Karen told me about an old woman who was the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands. She was the only one left who could speak her tribe's language, but the anthropologists didn't realize it and never bothered to learn it from her. When the old woman died, the language died with her.

Jerzy Kosinski

#45. (Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)

Barbara W. Tuchman

#46. Why we Americans should be so dendrophilic in our homes, and so dendrophobic in our business-districts is another subject of study which should be referred to our anthropologists.

George R. Stewart

#47. Several Southeastern tribes have long said that their ancestors received immigrants from Mesoamerica and that these immigrants introduced many cultural changes. Far too few anthropologists were listening.

Richard Thornton

#48. Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.

Terence McKenna

#49. Once you start rummaging around in the realm of the unverifiable there is considerable room for creativity, and accusations of sorcery are often blended with self-serving motives. Tribal people, anthropologists have shown, often single out despised in-laws for allegations of witchcraft, a convenient

Steven Pinker

#50. Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

Lily King