I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done

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

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

[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.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology

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

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