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

When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.

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.

When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.