A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

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

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.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done

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.

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