Top 100 Quotes About Anthropology
#1. I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy ... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.
Patrick Rothfuss
#2. I believe that it is the task of social science to produce nuanced and people-centered forms of knowledge, correcting asymmetries of information and helping to promote, to the best of our ability, informed consent, human protection, and safety in medical and research settings.
Adriana Petryna
#3. What's it mean; are you determined
To make modern all mankind?
If so, you should be be-sermoned
And brought back to healthy mind.
Charles C. Abbott
#4. The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.
Leslie White
#6. If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.
William Graham Sumner
#7. No longer were there "doctors" of anthropology and physics and literature to offend the real doctors and confuse the public; they had put a stop to that, as they had put a stop to so many things that were unseemly and inappropriate.
Suzette Haden Elgin
#8. Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#9. Try seeing, feeling, and tasting the water you swim in the way a land animal might perceive it. You may find the experience fascinating -- and mind-expanding.
Erin Meyer
#10. I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?
Leslie Feinberg
#11. History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick
Edward Hallett Carr
#12. I like the ritual, the liturgy of a well-crafted, emotional fashion show. I will never be jaded with this side of fashion. The catwalk is pure anthropology, something like an esoteric encrypted parade. It can totally be replaced but it will be missed.
Hedi Slimane
#13. Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.
George Lucas
#14. Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.
H.G.Wells
#15. It was difficult to hold Broca's brain without wondering whether in some sense Broca was still in there - his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments.
Carl Sagan
#16. Can any one deny that the old Israelites conceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occasionally, violent man?
Thomas Henry Huxley
#17. Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is.
Clifford Geertz
#18. I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.
Kurt Vonnegut
#19. 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
#21. There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.
Kenan Malik
#22. Archaeology is the only branch of Anthropology where we kill our informants in the process of studying them.
Kent V. Flannery
#23. When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.
Donald Johanson
#24. He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.
Jon Krakauer
#25. Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person - the person's origins and
destiny. There is an implicit anthropology and an implicit theology in every economics.
William T. Cavanaugh
#26. 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
#27. The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so, it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.
Maria Montessori
#28. It wasn't that he seemed at all violent - rather, he had a peculiar unhinged intensity that told her that to challenge him would mean hearing him defend his hypothesis for the next forty minutes.
Joe Pitkin
#29. I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.
Italo Calvino
#30. anthrapologize FW 151.7 v. Express regret or apologize for the science of man or anthropology. So many mistakes, unintentional and sometimes not, have been made in the study of human origins and development, especially racial, along with customs and beliefs, that some apologies are needed.
Bill Cole Cliett
#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. At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#34. The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#35. In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West.
Charles Portis
#36. Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.
Samuel P. Huntington
#37. I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.
Henry Fairfield Osborn
#38. The paradox of anthropology: to see something, you had to be outside of it, but when you were outside of it, you couldn't see it for what it was.
Paul La Farge
#39. We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.
Alexander McCall Smith
#40. Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography.
Brian Solis
#41. We can reproduce within our own minds the way that the world is put together for other people. This is the extraordinary privilege and adventure of anthropology.
Marshall Sahlins
#42. The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others.
Dee Williams
#43. There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#44. Theology is Anthropology ... [T]he distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#45. I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
Clifford Geertz
#46. The soul is a mystery. Scientists and Theologians constantly butt heads on the soul's definitive and can't come to grips with its purpose and actual existence. Yet, the basic framework taught in a High School physics class helps with an explanation of the latter - the existence of the soul.
H.D. Rennerfeldt
#47. It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.
China Mieville
#48. Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.
Joan D. Vinge
#49. Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.
Terence McKenna
#50. The 'science' in 'science fiction' isn't just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.
Ann Leckie
#52. I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.
Richard E. Leakey
#53. I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.
Tim Robbins
#54. I've been on this kick reading about the beginning of forensic science: autopsies, fingerprinting, psychological profiling. I've been reading a lot of books about forensic anthropology.
Caitlin Kittredge
#55. There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.
Howard Morphy
#56. If evolution exists in every living species, likewise so too does devolution.
Samael Aun Weor
#57. It is ... highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Ian Tattersall
#58. In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.
Alan Dundes
#59. Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.
Clifford Geertz
#60. We have to do a better job at the work of anthropology if we hope to maintain our role in the public discourse.
Christopher W. Brooks
#61. More and more clearly every day, out of biology, anthropology, sociology, history, economic analysis, psychological insight, plain human decency and common sense, the necessary mandate of survival that we shall love all our neighbors as we do ourselves, is being confirmed and reaffirmed.
Ordway Tead
#62. People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.
Clifford Geertz
#63. The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
Clifford Geertz
#64. The childhood poverty of both my parents and their minimal education did much to influence me and my two younger brothers in our education and career choices. One brother became a dentist and the other, a professor of anthropology with a Ph.D. degree.
Ferid Murad
#65. The magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed on myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility.
Bronislaw Malinowski
#66. Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: 'What is the scientific status of the claims?' 'What social or ideological needs do they serve?'
Noam Chomsky
#67. All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.
Robert Owen
#68. In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.
Aleksandra Mir
#69. Commitment, belief and positive attitude are all important if you're going to be a success, whether you're in sports, in business or, as in my case, anthropology.
Donald Johanson
#70. Well, we are terribly divided politically, yes, and, you know, I don't mean to intimidate you and your listeners but I have a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.
Kurt Vonnegut
#71. Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
Octavia Butler
#72. History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
W. H. Auden
#73. Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.
Andrew Lang
#74. I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.
Deborah Levy
#76. My degrees are in anthropology, and I have friends who have worked with apes.
Gregory Keyes
#77. The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")
William S. Wilson
#78. A person can spend every day of his life finding examples of our spectacular oddness, and if that's what he likes to do, then his life is destined to be full and rich.
Robert Reed
#79. The story of our human lineage is continually enlarged, almost daily, by discoveries from physical anthropology, archeology, and genetics.
Richard J. Borden
#80. I was an anthropology major in college, and I've had a lifelong fascination with Egyptology, mummies, and all sorts of bizarre cultural practices.
Tess Gerritsen
#81. Hominids are all the Neanderthals, australopithecines, Homo
habili, Homo erecti, etc., the upright-walking apes of which we are
the only surviving species.
Joe Quirk
#82. The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.
Marshall Sahlins
#83. It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would to be to establish university faculties of astronomy,anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously
Tony Benn
#84. I find anthropology is a marvellous discipline to shock me out of my own world into another world.
John Dominic Crossan
#85. Early anthropology was not at all seen as art for art's sake; it was intended to facilitate the colonizer's work.
David Van Reybrouck
#86. Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
Margaret Mead
#87. Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.
Lily King
#88. Museums are the anthropological screened porches of suburbia. You can be near something great, but not actually personally experience it.
S. Kelley Harrell
#89. It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.
Alexander McCall Smith
#90. To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human.
Steven Mithen
#91. Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.
Jane Howard
#92. Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant. But these are natural limitations inherent to the science. It is the artificial limitations that hamper us - and, through us, you.
Orson Scott Card
#93. Ever since I was a kid, I've had an enormous interest in the sciences - everything from quantum physics to anthropology.
Micky Dolenz
#94. The human person is in danger: this is certain, the human person is in danger today, here is the urgency of human ecology! And it is a serious danger because the cause of the problem is not superficial but profound: it is not just a matter of economics, but of ethics and anthropology.
Pope Francis
#95. Human material culture - the buildings and roads and works that would strike any human as an obvious sign of intelligence - had for years seemed like part of an elaborate mating ritual to the starlings, useless and flamboyant as the peacock's tail.
Joe Pitkin
#96. The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.
Guy Deutscher
#97. The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
William Carlos Williams
#98. Makers?" said Toby. Jaysir nodded.
"We're not loners, you know. There just weren't any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity.
Karl Schroeder
#99. Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
Joan D. Vinge
#100. The study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic.
Maria Montessori
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