Browse Quotes

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.

The ethnographer's task is, in so far as it is possible, to make sense of the lives of others, to understand what they are up to.

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

The superorganic is not a mystical entity, but a convenient term for a certain order of phenomena, namely, those which are cultural.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.

The feeling for form, for the symmetrical, for the typical, for the rhythmic, for the beautiful, is not a luxury of the human spirit, but a necessity.

The object of anthropology is to understand the human mind.

The final goal of ethnographic field-work is to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.

The problem of explanation is to account for the fact that a person has, over time, engaged in a particular pattern of deviant behavior.

We are not just thinking and feeling beings; we are also feeling and thinking beings.

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.

The world-system is not an empire, but a system of states, which are linked together by a division of labor and a hierarchy of power.

The social construction of reality is an ongoing, dynamic process, not a static state.

Society provides us with an identity, a location in the world, a name, a history, a future. We are, in a very profound sense, products of society.

The world of everyday life is the unquestioned, taken-for-granted, and self-evident reality for all of us.

The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience.