Anthropology Quotes

I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Modernity is not a stage of history, but an attitude toward history.

Is there an ultimate, universal, and irreducible level of male dominance in human society?

The ethnography of speaking is concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking as an activity in its own right.

The Nuer are a people who have no government, no laws, no police, no courts, and no prisons. They are, in short, an anarchic society.

The concept of function applied to human societies is based on an analogy between social life and organic life.

The human mind, in its normal condition, is one and the same in all individuals of all races, and its operations are governed by the same laws.

The science of culture is essentially a reformer's science.

There has never been a people, however primitive, that did not practice some form of gift exchange.

Capitalism is not a monolithic force; it is a landscape of diverse projects, some of which are quite small and local.

Globalization is not a single process, but a set of disjunctive and overlapping processes, which are not always in sync with each other.

The state, by its very nature, is a project of legibility and control.

The 'culture of poverty' argument often blames the victim, obscuring the systemic forces that create and perpetuate poverty.

The body is not merely a biological entity; it is a social and political text, inscribed with power relations and cultural meanings.

The anthropologist's task is not simply to describe, but to understand the human condition in all its complexity and contradiction.

The world of humankind is a world of organized violence.

The ultimate source of human behavior is the human brain, but the ultimate source of human culture is the human body.

Liminality is not a state of being, but a state of becoming.

Dirt is matter out of place.