Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

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

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is

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

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.

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything