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.

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

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style

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

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.

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical