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

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

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

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.

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

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