Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.