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

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

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.

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

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

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.

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