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.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars

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

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

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false