Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

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

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style