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

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical

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.