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

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

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

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical