An Anthropologist Quotes & Sayings

I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them. — William Gibson

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people. — Bernadette Devlin

If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water. — Margaret Mead

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

If somebody had said to me in June or July of 1987, 'We'd like you to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, but you're never allowed to discuss any economics after you leave,' I'd have said, 'Forget it.' What do they want me to do? Become an anthropologist?' — Alan Greenspan

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he wrote in Diplomacy, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable. — Walter Isaacson

And it occurred to me; I was not part of the action. Oh God, I thought, I'm not an anthropologist. I'm the lonely voice-over narrator of adolescence. The bitter, voice-over voice. — Joanna Pearson

It will take you long, lonely years, but one day you will grow tired. Tired of boys, tired of contempt, and then where will you be? All these girls around you with their stories and their lives, the solace of one another, and you will be as far away from them as an anthropologist among a foreign people, curious but unable to make contact. Have faith: you will learn. — Sarah McCarry

It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. . . . An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. . . . It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. — Joseph Mitchell

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

In his classic
account of the life of the Nuer of the Sudan, British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard
(1940:103) noted that
the Nuer have no expression equivalent to "time" in our language, and they cannot,
therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes,
can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I don't think they ever experience the
same feeling of fighting against time because their points of reference are mainly
the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow
a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no
autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision.
Nuer are fortunate. — Richard H. Robbins

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head. — Ken Burns

Admit it. You just had sex," Alice hissed.

Cali's jaw dropped open. "That's none of your business," she replied in outrage, "and how the hell did you know?"

Alice shook her head "You're glowing orgasmically. It's disgustingly sweet. And Kent looks ridiculously relaxed and possessive."

Brushing her best friend away and flushing a little, Cali pretended to look for her salad tongs. "Mind your own business."

"Fine," Alice grumbled. "Don't tell me all the dirty details." She paused for a beat. Then added, "It was rear entry, wasn't it?"

Cali almost strangled on her shock and indignation. "It was not."

Alice chuckled maliciously. "Don't lie to me. He has that macho glint in his eyes. I'd know that look anywhere. I'm an anthropologist, remember? And mating rituals are one of my specialties. — Zannie Adams

When I first got the job, I was told nothing about my character. She's an anthropologist and she's tough, she's a female Indiana Jones. That's what I went into [Lost] knowing. — Rebecca Mader

You can lose a reader in a blink of an eye. If a person is an engineer or chemist or an anthropologist or whatever, you spoil the whole book for that person if there's obviously ignorance here. What's wrong with so much science fiction is that the science is so lousy that it isn't worth paying attention to. — Robert Caro

He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all. — Arthur C. Clarke

An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New
Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not
new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax. — David Letterman

My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It's the only way to ignore that the rest of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft. — Julia Glass

Too often, the anthropologist takes on the role of police detective, discovering what is "hidden," assembling "evidence" to make a strong "case"... But sometimes what is called for is not an "investigator" at all, but an attentive listener. — Liisa H. Malkki

As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects. — Annia Ciezadlo

I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos. — Joan Didion

I don't want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I'm not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning. — Temple Grandin

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

Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language. — Thomas Kuhn

The pioneering anthropologist Louis Leakey once stated, Without an understanding of who we are, we cannot truly advance. — Gregg Braden

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking. — George Lucas

Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in American law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree upon a specific quid pro quo exchange. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an anthropologist might label a gift exchange. In a relationship of reciprocal altruism, one person confers a benefit on another with no explicit expectation that it will immediately buy a return favor, unlike an impersonal market transaction. — Francis Fukuyama

I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. — William James

And what does an anthropologist do these days?" sad Paul.
"Same thing a supernumerary minister does
becomes a public charge, a bore, or possibly a rum-dum, or a bureaucrat. — Kurt Vonnegut

It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist. — Gregory Bateson

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist. — Clifford Geertz

Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) examines the very thin line separating a joke from an insult: a joke expresses something a community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn't want to consider. — Henry Jenkins

I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist. — Elizabeth Kostova

I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night. — James C. Scott

The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer. — Martin Buber

I'm helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are "near enemies" to every great virtue - reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can't possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a "pathological empathy" of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can't help but stay present — Krista Tippett

An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell each other stories!' We humans forget how alike we are, living in a world that only reminds us of our differences. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

But one may acquire what MacIntyre calls a "second first language," a language which is learned in the same way that a child learns to use the native tongue. A missionary or an anthropologist who really hopes to understand and enter into the adopted culture will not do so by trying to learn the language in the way a tourist uses a phrasebook and a dictionary. — Lesslie Newbigin

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply Ours. — Vine Deloria Jr.

I learned from the Macarturos. I had never been at a table with a labor organizer and a playwright and a performance artist and an anthropologist and a human rights lawyer. Usually at most gatherings, it's all writers. But suddenly I was at a table with all these different people and I learned from each of them, learned from the work they're doing, learned new ways to solve my problems. — Sandra Cisneros

A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years. — Michael Leunig

I've sort of been an anthropologist of modern America, in a non-academic way. Whether it's Marines or Tupperware salesladies, high end audiophiles or bike couriers, I'm fascinated by the hallmarks of the American tribe. — Hampton Sides

The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations. — James C. Scott

Engineers naturally tend to focus first on the product and then on its users. For an anthropologist, it's the exact reverse: people come first, then the product. — Guruprasad Madhavan

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

The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist. — W. H. Auden

To the anthropologist, as I explained before, it's generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones. To the anthropologist, there's no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon - only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype. — Tom McCarthy

The brain scans and mood swings of an infatuated lover, scientists have recently discovered, look remarkably similar to the brain scans and mood swings of a cocaine addict - and not surprisingly, as it turns out, because infatuation is an addiction, with measurable chemical effects on the brain. As the anthropologist and infatuation expert Dr. Helen Fisher has explained, infatuated lovers, just like any junkie, will go to unhealthy, humiliating, and even physically dangerous lengths to procure their narcotic. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth. — Jennifer Block

The techno-medical model of maternity care, unlike the midwifery model, is comparatively new on the world scene, having existed for barely two centuries. This male-derived framework for care is a product of the industrial revolution. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. Pregnancy and labor are seen as illnesses, which, in order not to be harmful to mother or baby, must be treated with drugs and medical equipment. Within the techno-medical model of birth, some medical intervention is considered necessary for every birth, and birth is safe only in retrospect. — Ina May Gaskin