I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

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

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

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical

[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.

A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

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