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

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

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

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