My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

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

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

[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.

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

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

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.