The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.

Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture.

The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly.

I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night.

It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state.

In a world of injustice there's going to be dreams of justice.

What's interesting to me is that in the late twentieth century it seems that there's scarcely a part of the world that doesn't have some capitalist return that can be realized providing that this area's made accessible and resources can be extracted from it.