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 had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

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

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

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.

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

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world