Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology

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

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

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

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

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