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

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

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false

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

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology