Quotes About Anthropology

Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one rarely sees in anthropology. Lifeworlds, unsurprisingly, is no exception. The several essays included here fit into an impressive whole that set out a compelling case for a type of ethnography of which Jackson is one of the masters. The writing is strong and the critical reflections impressive. This book defines an approach to anthropology that is resonant enough to challenge the leading models of our time.

In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

For me, a bit of anthropology in the evening is always better than staying and watching the telly.

This is an extremely ambitious book. In addition to science and mathematics, Byers brings to bear insights from literature, philosophy, religion, history, anthropology, medicine, and psychology. The Blind Spot breaks new ground, and represents a major step forward in the philosophy of science. The book is also a page-turner, which is rare for this topic.

Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.

The magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed on myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility.

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is

Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography.

I find anthropology is a marvellous discipline to shock me out of my own world into another world.

The last time I saw a brow that low I was watching slides in anthropology class

If I'd have gone to art school, or stayed in anthropology, I probably would have ended up back in film ... Mostly I just followed my inner feelings and passions ... and kept going to where it got warmer and warmer, until it finally got hot ... Everybody has talent. It's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is.

The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’ I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

See how exciting Anthropology is? He’s a leading expert in ancient Greece. Now you should all change your majors so that you can ogle men like him all day long. Or better yet, uncover naked male statues. (Tory) Was that necessary? (Acheron) Hey, I live to recruit students for the department. If I can make you good for something, then by golly I’m going to do it. (Tory)