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

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

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

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain

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