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

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style

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

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity

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

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

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology