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

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

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

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

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars