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

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

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false

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

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down