Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

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

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

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it

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