Quotes by Anthropologists - Page 2

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
Jared Diamond
We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.
David Harvey
From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent
Gustave Le Bon
Since the 1970S, financial innova­tions such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state power, have permitted a huge flow of excess liquidity into all facets of urbanisa­tion and built environment construction worldwide.
David Harvey
Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.
Marvin Harris
The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!
James C. Scott
The family is the basis of society. As the family is, so is the society, and it is human beings who make a family-not the quantity of them, but the quality of them.
Ashley Montagu
The idea of “art for art’s sake” is a recent Western cultural phenomenon that in some ways both distracts and diminishes the reality of human creative expressions. If we define art broadly, then it permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. All of us search for and attempt to create that which is aesthetically pleasing; thus, we are all “artists.
James Peoples
Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.
Pierre Bourdieu
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
Ernest Becker
Ultimately amorality is immorality.
Roger M. Keesing
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Thomas Huxley
..she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. .. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.
Zora Neale Hurston
In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.
Heather Paxson
For any ranked society, whether a chiefdom or a state, one thus has to ask, why do the commoners tolerate the transfer of the fruits of their hard labor to kleptocrats? This question raised by political theorists from Plato to Marx are raised anew by voters in every modern election. Kleptocracies with little public support run the risk of being overthrown, either by downtrodden commoners, or by upstart would be replacement kleptocrats seeking public support by promising a higher ratio of services rendered to fruits stolen.
Jared Diamond
Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story.
Zora Neale Hurston
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
Carlos Castañeda
Science is simply common sense at its best - that is rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic.
T. H. Huxley
He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.
Zora Neale Hurston
When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond.
Loren Eiseley
It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness.
Carlos Castañeda
[John] watched the flames for a while. "I would have to say that I find God in serving His children. 'When I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stanger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you cared for me, imprisoned and you came to me.'" The words lingered in the air as the fire popped and hissed softly. Sondoz had stopped pacing and stood motionless in a far corner of the room, his face in shadows, firelight glittering on the metallic exoskeleton of his hands. "Don't hope for more than that, John," he said. "God will break your heart.
Mary Doria Russell
So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.
Zora Neale Hurston
I never want to see umbrellas around me." he [Mussolini] once said. "The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope's soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.
David I. Kertzer
If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.
David Graeber
In the sweet territory of silence we touch the mystery. It's the place of reflection and contemplation, and it's the place where we can connect with the deep knowing, to the deep wisdom way.
Ángeles Arrien
Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. . . . Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.
Mary Doria Russell
Most geniuses are geniuses because of the way they manage their natural talents. He was one because of the way he took advantage of the world's defects.-pg 129
Albert Sánchez Piñol
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
Zora Neale Hurston
All organisms vary. It is in the highest degree improbable that any given variety should have exactly the same relations to surrounding conditions as the parent stock. In that case it is either better fitted (when the variation may be called useful), or worse fitted, to cope with them. If better, it will tend to supplant the parent stock; if worse, it will tend to be extinguished by the parent stock.If (as is hardly conceivable) the new variety is so perfectly adapted to the conditions that no improvement upon it is possible,—it will persist, because, though it does not cease to vary, the varieties will be inferior to itself.If, as is more probable, the new variety is by no means perfectly adapted to its conditions, but only fairly well adapted to them, it will persist, so long as none of the varieties which it throws off are better adapted than itself.On the other hand, as soon as it varies in a useful way, i.e. when the variation is such as to adapt it more perfectly to its conditions, the fresh variety will tend to supplant the former.
Thomas Henry Huxley
It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of “religious violence,” we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence.
Jack David Eller
Biologically valid races are not real, but cultural racism is, and we must understand how this cultural reality affects our everyday interactions.
Robert Wald Sussman
But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males.
Jared Diamond
There is no death! the stars go down To rise upon some other shore And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown They shine for ever more.
John L. McCreery
Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?
Jane Goodall
In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
Wade Davis
big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.
Jared Diamond
Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely...
Cheikh Anta Diop
The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without.
Loren Eiseley
The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.
Loren Eiseley
Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indign
David Graeber
I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.
Zora Neale Hurston
heavily tattooed women can be said to control and subvert the ever-present 'male gaze' by forcing men (and women) to look at their bodies in a manner that exerts control.
Margo Demello
Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.
Zora Neale Hurston
The Hawaiian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe.
Roland Burrage Dixon
I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing? They return more frequently than comets do, in fact. It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satellites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome: they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little as we may care to, as our hearts tell us to, we can also observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize their shadows, colors, and relief. Only, they are dead stars: from them we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty that we have already seen them, examined them, questioned them without really understanding the laws that the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed.
Marc Augé
A baby's cry is precisely as serious as it sounds.
Jean Liedloff
Finally, there are assuredly diversities of gifts pertaining to diverse breeds of men; and unless we are all reduced to the dull dead level of socialism, and perhaps even in that case, for the sake of relief, we shall continue to stand in need of all these gifts. Let us hope, then, that blue eyes, as well as brown eyes, will continue to beam on our descendants, and that heads will never come to be framed all upon one and the same pattern.
John Beddoe
A budding fashionista even at four, I would capture the little lizards and latch them, still living, onto my earlobes as earrings. Most girls wouldn't touch them, I thought they completed the outfit.
Mireya Mayor
In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.
Ashley Montagu
As a result, amongst working-class Americans, government is now generally seen as being made up of two sorts of people: "politicians," who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and "bureaucrats," who are condescending elitists almost impossible to uproot.
David Graeber
The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten.
Loren Eiseley
I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.
Marvin Harris
There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Much has been written on the excellence of bats' navigation equipment. It is all false. Tropical bats spend their entire time flying into obstacles with a horrible thudding noise. They specialize in slamming into walls and falling, fluttering onto your face. As my own 'piece of equipment essential for the field' I would strongly recommend a tennis racket; it is devastatingly effective in clearing a room of bats.
Nigel Barley
But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.
Thomas Henry Huxley