I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist

I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

Culture is public, because meaning is

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

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

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