I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity

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.

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it

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

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.