Anthropology Quotes

We have never been modern.

Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.

To be alive means to be entangled in the lives of others.

Gender is not a thing, but a set of social relations and practices that are constantly being produced and reproduced.

The ethnographic present is always a present that is already past.

The Amerindian cosmos is not a collection of things, but a collection of perspectives.

The opposition between nature and culture, far from being a universal given, is a specific feature of Western modernity.

The mimetic faculty is the nature that culture uses to create second nature.

Culture is a deeply compromised idea I cannot do without.

The concept of 'religion' is a modern construct, a product of specific historical forces and intellectual traditions, particularly in the West.

The problem with 'culture' is that it is a concept that has been used to essentialize and exoticize others, to create boundaries and hierarchies.

Culture is not a pristine text but a contested zone, a site of struggle where different groups vie for the power to define and represent reality.

The original affluent society is not one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied, but rather one in which they are few.

The function of culture is to make life secure and continuous for the human species.

The cultural core includes those features of culture that are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

Culture is superorganic.

Of all men's misfortunes, the bitterest is to know much and to be impotent.

To inhabit the world is not to be in it, but to be of it.

We are not outside observers of the world. We are entangled in its intra-activity.