I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

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

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

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