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

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

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

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

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.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should