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

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code

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

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance