I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

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

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