It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

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

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.

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

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

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology