Ethnographer Quotes & Sayings

I'll bet most of the companies that are in life-or-death battles got into that kind of trouble because they didn't pay enough attention to developing their leaders. — D. Wayne Calloway

Did you know that wherever you find fool's gold, real gold exists somewhere nearby? This also goes for relationships and friendships. Real gold is found in the heart. For every piece of fake gold that you discard, remember that true gold isn't too far. — Suzy Kassem

Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden — Karl Kraus

A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love. — Honore De Balzac

I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography. — William Klein

When I started really singing I was 17, 18 years old. I used to go around trying to be a singer in the Bronx. My knees would shake but I learned by doing. — Dominic Chianese

Later, after flying in the Navy for four or five years, spending some time on an aircraft carrier, I applied to and was accepted in a program where I went to graduate school first and then to the Naval Test Pilots School. — Mark Kelly

That for me is what intrigues me the most about feature films. It's not like the little kind of esoteric projects that you and your friends get but how do you make something that has a universal appeal. Those are the movies that intrigue me the most. — Casey Neistat

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with - except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection - is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households ... writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. — Clifford Geertz

Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one rarely sees in anthropology. Lifeworlds, unsurprisingly, is no exception. The several essays included here fit into an impressive whole that set out a compelling case for a type of ethnography of which Jackson is one of the masters. The writing is strong and the critical reflections impressive. This book defines an approach to anthropology that is resonant enough to challenge the leading models of our time. — Arthur Kleinman

Julia wasn't breathing. How could she when the sensation was so intense? The taste of peppermint, the scent of Aramis, the way his breath consumed her. — Sylvain Reynard

There is an Indian story
at least I heard it as an Indian story
about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down — Clifford Geertz

When I look at my life I see high-water marks of happiness and I see the lower places where I had to convince myself that suicide wasn't an answer. And in between I see my life. I see that the sadness and tragedy in my life made the euphoria and delicious ecstasy that much more sweet. I see that stretching out my soul to feel every inch of horrific depression gave me more room to grow and enjoy the beauty of life that others might not ever appreciate. — Jenny Lawson

Every believer may not be called to preach, but every Christian is called to pray. Prayer is our duty. Prayer is our privilege. Prayer, like air, water and food, is necessary for our survival and growth. But many believers regard prayer as an optional activity. — Larry Lea

Sam Cameron has managed the near impossible: to have lived in Number Ten for three years and maintained a benign and broadly positive press. — Andy Coulson

The pleasures of relaxed chat, of casual conversation, encourage the ethnographer in everyone — Richard Sennett

I've always felt that my first duty as an ethnographer was to make sure my work did not harm those who invited me into their lives. But this can be a complicated and delicate matter because it is not always obvious at first what does harm.4 Especially in poor neighborhoods, nothing is free. People get compensated for favors one way or another. Ned and Earl figured that if I was giving their girlfriends rides as they looked for housing and went about their business, I must be getting something in return. I was, of course: stories. That was the strange thing. Their accusations were perfectly valid, and I took them seriously. — Matthew Desmond

Mars has a bit of air pressure; maybe we can build up that atmosphere to be a bit more accommodating to humans. — Buzz Aldrin