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

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

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

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done