I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work in my discipline, which strikes me as a kind of medieval scholasticism of a special kind.

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 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'.

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

I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work in my discipline, which strikes me as a kind of medieval scholasticism of a special kind.

The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations.

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.