Quotes About Anthropology

#1. 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

#2. I had just received my degree in Calcium Anthropology ... the study of milkmen.

Steven Wright

#3. Missions is not applied anthropology, comparative religion or sociology. It is storming the gates of hell. It is a power confrontation-h and-to-hand combat with Satan and his demons.

K.P. Yohannan

#4. In anthropology, things were mostly Stone Age: Yanomamo, Mbuti, !Kung - Susan once had it in her mind to learn how it had been before it all got fucked up, but soon tossed the notion, concluding that things have never been not fucked up. [-'Jonah Sees Ghosts']

Mark J. Sullivan III

#5. I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

David Plotz

#6. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all.

Kurt Vonnegut

#7. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Alan Furst

#8. 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

#9. Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

Alfred L. Kroeber

#10. The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

Ruth Benedict

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

David Graeber

#12. A free throw seems boring but then when you sort of dig into what's going on and the history and psychology and the social anthropology around the free throw - it's interesting.

Alex Blumberg

#13. It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it.

Clifford Geertz

#14. I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

Marie Brennan

#15. A worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge - from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, cave paintings, and more.

Marcus J. Borg

#16. One of the many pieces of advice his father had given him - besides the importance of antivenom and the need for a good, sturdy blade - was that field anthropology was ninety percent preparation, and ten percent trying desperately to recover when you didn't prepare properly.

Ben Mezrich

#17. It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can't stand primitive people - they're so stupid.

Kurt Vonnegut

#18. I wasn't a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.

Darren Aronofsky

#19. When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

Mary Doria Russell

#20. I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

George Lucas

#21. For me, a bit of anthropology in the evening is always better than staying and watching the telly.

Nick Rhodes

#22. Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.

Edward Sapir

#23. The Gnostic Anthropology addresses the magnificence of the Being, your inner being.

Samael Aun Weor

#24. Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

Clifford Geertz

#25. I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.

Franz Boas

#26. Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.

Paul Di Filippo

#27. 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

#28. Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

Jacque Fresco

#29. The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

James G. Frazer

#30. Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology.
Snappy dresser, though.

Kathy Reichs

#31. If you wish to be a good Leader, have a all round personality. Read psychology, philosophy,history,anthropology, sociology, finest works, scriptures and even Law.

Moutasem Algharati

#32. Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.

Aleister Crowley

#33. [Attending the Sun Dance] There was a smattering of tourists, both serious and recreational. Professors of anthropology and ethnology. Writers of fact and other fiction. A family from Wisconsin pausing on their long, sacred pilgrimage to The Land of Disney.

James D. Doss

#34. I find myself doing fieldwork physically, in the tradition of anthropology. I literally go to the opposite end of the world, to the most exotic faraway places I possibly can, only to find the closest things to me when I get there.

Aleksandra Mir

#35. There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.

Paul Ricoeur

#36. 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

#37. In 1981, while doing postdoctoral field work in cultural anthropology, Bonnie A. Nardi lived with villagers in Western Samoa, trying to understand the cultural reasons that people there have an average of eight children.

Katie Hafner

#38. Telling everyone I wanted to go into forensic anthropology was my form of rebellion.

Bryce Dallas Howard

#39. [W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.

Bronislaw Malinowski

#40. We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Clifford Geertz

#41. Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.

Edith Wharton

#42. Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine.

Roberto Bolano

#43. Maybe if I'd studied writing instead of anthropology, I'd be more sensible. You know - pick a genre, follow the rules, stay in the box - but let's face it. Sensible people don't major in anthropology.

Mary Doria Russell

#44. If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

Wilhelm Dilthey

#45. I do feel a kinship with anthropology or ethnography, although when you hear those terms you think of something exotic. Generally, photographic anthropology has that taste of the faraway or undiscovered place. But my anthropology has more to do with what's in my reach.

Ari Marcopoulos

#46. Both freethought and anthropology are symptoms of the same underlying condition - the relative condition, the condition of difference.

Jack David Eller

#47. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Kurt Vonnegut

#48. If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

Clifford Geertz

#49. Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

Peter Gay

#50. Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.

James S.A. Corey

#51. I've done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can't use it for progress.

Hans Rosling

#52. The last time I saw a brow that low I was watching slides in anthropology class

Jennifer Crusie

#53. Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different.

Nancy Banks-Smith

#54. 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

#55. Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

Lily King

#56. Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#57. Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together

Clyde Kluckhohn

#58. Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station.

Mira Jacob

#59. The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology.

Helena Blavatsky

#60. I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

Clifford Geertz

#61. Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal.

Edward Sapir

#62. Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.

Randy Newman

#63. I'm not an anthropology buff, but I've read enough of it to know that the Zuni don't think that their way is the way for everyone, and that the Navajo don't think their way is the way for everyone. Each of them has a way that works well for them.

Daniel Quinn

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

Kurt Vonnegut

#75. 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

#76. Archaeology is the only branch of Anthropology where we kill our informants in the process of studying them.

Kent V. Flannery

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography.

Brian Solis

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Clifford Geertz

#92. Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

Joan D. Vinge

#93. The 'science' in 'science fiction' isn't just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.

Ann Leckie

#94. Theology is anthropology.

Anselm Feuerbach

#95. I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

Tim Robbins

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. I find anthropology is a marvellous discipline to shock me out of my own world into another world.

John Dominic Crossan

#99. 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

#100. 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