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

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

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

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

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

[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.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.