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.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

Culture is public, because meaning is

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.