I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

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

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

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now

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