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

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.