Quotes by Anthropologists - Page 5

Once I told Ha�anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, �Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.�
Mary Doria Russell
Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen from me, but it is a moment of excitement, too -- because I think I would like to try and say it better, because now the monologue in my mind has become dialogue. My immediate impulse is to write something, anything, notes to tell me the significance of what I have read, an appreciative letter to the author, the first sentences in a preface to a book that will never be written. Th archives of my readings are monumentally high. I can never let these erotic moments go. They are the paper trail of my mind.
Greg Dening
The study of man is the study of his extensions.
Edward T. Hall
He is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.
R. Briffault
I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.
Jean Rouch
Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
Clifford Geertz
Men with high baseline levels of testosterone marry less frequently, have more adulterous affairs, commit more spousal abuse, and divorce more often.
Helen Fisher
In the beginning," Scripture taught, "there was the Word," and Danny would come to believe that the two great gifts his God had given to the species He loved were time, which divides experience, and language, which binds the past to the future.
Mary Doria Russell
Totally isolated from our own culture for long periods, we became vulnerable to forgotten times and tribes re-awakening within us. Our journeys, we found, were to take us simultaneously to some of the least-charted regions of the planet and to the least-charted regions of our own minds. What began for us as the effort to capture a purely objective record of what we saw gradually dissolved into a quest, an odyssey of self-discovery which actually took place amongst the last of the lands of real living kings and queens, dragons and pirates, cannibals and headhunters, mystics and magicians.
Lawrence Blair
We called one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation... We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives.
Ernest Becker
When I was young, I knew that, somehow, I would go to Africa and live with animals. And I wanted to write books about them. I don't think I spent too much time wondering exactly how I would do it. I just felt sure that the right opportunity would somehow come. I didn't feel frustrated because I could not go a really long trip while Rusty was still alive. It would have seemed like a betrayal. And while I waited I went on learning.
Goodall
Apart from being dead its going to be necessary to die. And I'm dealing at the moment with the realization that at my age there is absoutely no way in which I can skirt the matter and come out on the other side.
Nathaniel Tarn
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
Without somebody to watch me, laugh at my jokes, tell me what to do, ask me questions, race me to the river, make me guess the names of birds, or challenge me to count the silvery fish in a school, there was nothing for me to do. Without somebody to be somebody to, it was as though I wasn't somebody myself.
Michael Dorris
The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change of perpetual flux.
Sir James Frazer
It must be understood that in some cases the process by which a god or goddess degenerates into a fairy may occupy centuries, and that in the passage of generations such an alteration may be brought about in appearance and traits as to make it seem impossible that any relationship actually exists between the old form and the new. This may be accounted for by the circumstance that in gradually assuming the traits of fairyhood the god or goddess may also have taken on the characteristics of fairies which Already existed in the minds of the folk, the elves of a past age, who were already elves at a period when he or she still flourished in the full vigour of godhead. For in one sense Faerie represents a species of limbo, a great abyss of traditional material, into which every kind of ancient belief came to be cast as the acceptance of one new faith after another dictated the abandonment of forms and ideas unacceptable to its doctrines. The difference between god and fairy is indeed the difference between religion and folk-lore.
Lewis Spence
Virtual worlds are places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity and ritual.
Tom Boellstorff
Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed I should close instantly with the offer.
Thomas Huxley
The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness.
Carlos Castenada
The new fashions sold in departmentstores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittancein terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industrythat exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this aswell: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.
Mary Doria Russell
In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their act
Jared Diamond
There is a difference between what is wrong and what is evil. Evil is committed when clarity is taken away from what is clearly wrong, allowing wrong to be seen as less wrong, excusable, right, or an obligatory commandment of the Lord God Almighty.Evil is bad sold as good, wrong sold as right, injustice sold as justice. Like the coat of a virus, a thin veil of right can disguise enormous wrong and confer an ability to infect others.
John Hartung
The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.
Robert Trivers
In this view, man is an energy-convertingorganism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansionfrom a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurtsothers, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.
Ernest Becker
They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without master...
Zora Neale Hurston
People who have made comparative studies of many different societies, know that when status is ascribed, rather than achieved, individual efforts towards excellence are not directed through any form of innovation; rather, the enhancement of status occurs only through the realisation of a previously well defined role position. It is only with social change, or when some form of continual dynamic disequilibium occurs in a society, that we begin to observe the development of achievement motivation in its modern form.
Dor Bahadur Bista
What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?
Lila Abu-Lughod
The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable.
Talal Asad
Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error.
David Harvey
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good.
Ruth Benedict
Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed. It is as though the freedom of creativity that stems from within the symbolic self cannot be contained by the body, and the person is torn apart. This is how we understand schizophrenia today, as the split of self and body, a split in which the self is unanchored, unlimited, not bound enough to everyday Things, not contained enough in dependable physical behavior.
Ernest Becker
Here are two facts that should not both be true: - There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet. - Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population -- 2 billion men and women -- malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Michael Dorris
In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.
David Graeber
How good would a Good Samaritan be, if a Good Samaritan would only intend to do good?
John Janzen
Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.
Jared Diamond
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
Ernest Becker
Wyatt Earp had been born, and born again, and now there would be a third life, for the iron fist that had seized his soul in childhood had lost its grip at last. The long struggle for control was over, and in its place, he found a wordless acceptance of a truth he'd always known. He was bred to this anger. It had been in him since the cradle. He'd never bullied neighbors or beaten a horse. He'd never punched the front teeth out of a six-year-old's mouth or hit a woman until she begged. But he was no better than his father, and never had been. He was far, far worse.
Mary Doria Russell
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale Hurston
So I do not pray. I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny. It seems to me that I have been given a mind and will power for that very purpose.
Zora Neale Hurston
Yes, I felt very small. The typewriter seemed larger than a piano, I was less than a molecule. What could I do? I drank more.-pg 237
Albert Sánchez Piñol
They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged.
Zora Neale Hurston
We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.
Ruth Benedict
The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.
Margaret Mead
What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.
David Harvey
The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.
Wade Davis
China uses about half of the world’s cement for its new roads and buildings.According to the World Bank in 2007, China had 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities.One day in January 2013, the air pollution index in Beijing was 755—measured on a scale of 0 to 500!In late 2012, 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in the river that supplies water toShanghai, the PRC’s largest city. For 2010, a ministry of the Chinese government estimated the monetary cost of the environmental damage caused by rapid industrialization at $230 billion, which is 3.5 percent of China’s gross domestic product.Air pollution from Chinese factories wafts over to the Koreas and Japan. Sometimes, upper atmospheric winds carry the sulphur dioxide from China’s coal-burning clear over to North America’s west coast.
James Peoples
Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.
Jared Diamond
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the "others", disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.
Ernest Becker
But the more time has been released from production, the more imperative it has become to absorb that time in consumption and consumerism, given that, as was earlier argued, capitalist 'economic rationality has no room for authentically free time which neither produces nor consumes commercial wealth'. The ever-present danger is that freely associating and self-creating individuals, liberated from the chores of production and blessed with a whole range of labour-saving and time-saving technologies to aid their consumption, might start to build an alternative non-capitalistic world. They might become inclined to reject the dominant capitalist economic rationality, for example, and start evading its overwhelming but often cruel rules of time discipline. To avoid such eventualities, capital must not only find ways to absorb more and more goods and services through realisation but also somehow occupy the free time that the new technologies release.
David Harvey
Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.
Wade Davis
The full-grown modern human being ... is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.
R. Briffault
[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.
Jared Diamond
This stuff of a past not worthily lived is also medicine.
Joan Halifax
The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.
Ashley Montagu
The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.
Ashley Montagu
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Eat good food, keep moving, and let your body take care of the rest.
Stephen Le
Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.
James C. Scott