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

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 of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.