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

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

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code

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.

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

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