Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.

I've also done things that put me in odd situations.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.