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

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

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 don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.