Anthropologists Quotes

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Quotes About Anthropologists

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You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers ... damn anthropologists. ~ Emo Philips
Anthropologists quotes by Emo Philips
An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New
Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not
new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax. ~ David Letterman
Anthropologists quotes by David Letterman
according to the unanimous opinion of anthropologists, the organization of enforced labor is one of the essentials of civilization. ~ Stanton Coit
Anthropologists quotes by Stanton Coit
If you want to be an anthropologist, you need to study physical anthropology specialized in bones. If you want to be a forensic chemist, get a degree in chemistry. Do you want to do DNA work? Get a degree in microbiology. And do well. Study hard and go to graduate school. ~ Kathy Reichs
Anthropologists quotes by Kathy Reichs
For at least a century, anthropologists have largely played the role of gadflies: whenever some ambitious European or American theorist appears to make some grandiose generalizations about how human beings go about organizing political, economic, or family life, it's always the anthropologist who shows up to point out that there are people in Samoa or Tierra del Fuego or Burundi who do things exactly the other way around. ~ David Graeber
Anthropologists quotes by David Graeber
People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand? ~ Neil Postman
Anthropologists quotes by Neil Postman
Researches still don't have an explanation for the differnece between the sizes of dogs' and wolves' brains - or for why every species of domesticated animal, from ducks and geese to horses and pigs, also has a smaller brain than its wild ancestor. The reason or reasons domestication always leads to smaller brains are hotly debated; but the effects are universal. Anthropologists have documented the same change in Homo sapiens: the brains of modern humans have shrunk about 10 percent over the last ten thousand years. ~ Virginia Morell
Anthropologists quotes by Virginia Morell
Our job should be like any other forensic scientist's - we should be truth seekers who are not partisan, who do not have any interest in the outcome, who call it as we see it no matter the consequences. But it seems a lot easier for chemists and anthropologists and pathologists to take that neutral role than it does for psychiatrists. ~ Park Dietz
Anthropologists quotes by Park Dietz
Even anthropologists, who diligently train themselves to be nonjudgmental observers of cultural differences, have trouble when it comes to recognizing and allowing for cultural differences in emotions. Because our emotions come into our consciousness unbidden and often surprise us with their intensity, we often assume that they are not influenced by cultural cues or social scripts. But with careful study, anthropologists have learned that emotions are not like muscle reflexes; rather, they are communications with deep and sometimes obscure meanings. Cultures differ not only in their response to specific events... but also in more global ways. ~ Ethan Watters
Anthropologists quotes by Ethan Watters
We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for this reason that anthropologists have not shown much interest in these models, unlike economists, for example, for whom the use of mathematics poses no problem. However, one could reach the same conclusions by using just a bit of common sense. ~ Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Anthropologists quotes by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Once you start rummaging around in the realm of the unverifiable there is considerable room for creativity, and accusations of sorcery are often blended with self-serving motives. Tribal people, anthropologists have shown, often single out despised in-laws for allegations of witchcraft, a convenient ~ Steven Pinker
Anthropologists quotes by Steven Pinker
Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call "misoneism," a deep and superstitious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events. But "civilized" man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new. ~ C. G. Jung
Anthropologists quotes by C. G. Jung
Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more Malinowski the more compelling the book. No Malinowski, and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all. ~ Neil Postman
Anthropologists quotes by Neil Postman
These 'anthropologists of peace' (who in fact are rather aggressive academics - the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia. ~ Steven Pinker
Anthropologists quotes by Steven Pinker
This (primitive-to-civilized) continuum inevitably conflates the meaning of civilized in everyday conversation-"refined or enlightened"- with "having a complex division of labor," the only definition that anthropologists defend... Was the Third Reich civilized, for instance? Most anthropologists would answer yes... If we refuse to label the Third Reich civilized, are we not using the term to mean "polite, refined"? If so, we must consider the Arawaks civilized, and we must also consider Columbus and his Spaniards primitive, if not savage. ~ James W. Loewen
Anthropologists quotes by James W. Loewen
When I first got the job, I was told nothing about my character. She's an anthropologist and she's tough, she's a female Indiana Jones. That's what I went into [Lost] knowing. ~ Rebecca Mader
Anthropologists quotes by Rebecca Mader
The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. ... International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau
Anthropologists quotes by Hans J. Morgenthau
The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower. ~ Edith Hamilton
Anthropologists quotes by Edith Hamilton
People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous. ~ Clifford Geertz
Anthropologists quotes by Clifford Geertz
And when they found our shadows
Grouped around the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death ~ Roger Waters
Anthropologists quotes by Roger Waters
The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. ~ Sandra Cisneros
Anthropologists quotes by Sandra Cisneros
Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form. ~ Lily King
Anthropologists quotes by Lily King
Some distant day, anthropologists will consider as a landmark in humankind's evolution - comparable to the capacity for destroying ourselves by nuclear obliteration - the adolescent gene's newly emergent power to dictate nightly TV viewing. ~ Steve Erickson
Anthropologists quotes by Steve Erickson
forms of printing and recording. The study of language and communication by anthropologists developed out of the European tradition of linguistics, which usually is associated with disciplines ~ Michael Rynkiewich
Anthropologists quotes by Michael Rynkiewich
The classical anthropological question, What is man? - "how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!" - is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture. ~ Paul Goodman
Anthropologists quotes by Paul Goodman
It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them.

It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished.< ~ Michael Ignatieff
Anthropologists quotes by Michael Ignatieff
For anthropologists, even the exotic's not exotic, let alone the everyday. ~ Tom McCarthy
Anthropologists quotes by Tom McCarthy
I'm deeply interested in the photograph as a record of an encounter and enjoy putting myself in a timeline of image-makers, alongside other travelers, such as anthropologists, colonists, missionaries, even tourists. I do that to emphasize subjectivity, rather than privilege any single perspective - I see myself as only one of many storytellers. ~ Susan Meiselas
Anthropologists quotes by Susan Meiselas
But those who initially went to the West were overtaken by the barbarism of the frontier with astonishing speed - think Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness. There was murder, mayhem, robbery, alcoholism, depression, and suicide, and all of it on a positively Homeric scale that still has cultural anthropologists enraptured. ~ Simon Winchester
Anthropologists quotes by Simon Winchester
I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist. ~ Elizabeth Kostova
Anthropologists quotes by Elizabeth Kostova
Why we Americans should be so dendrophilic in our homes, and so dendrophobic in our business-districts is another subject of study which should be referred to our anthropologists. ~ George R. Stewart
Anthropologists quotes by George R. Stewart
Studies [on the origin of fairy-stories] are, however, scientific (at least in intent); they are the pursuit of folklorists or anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested.

...with regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. In Dasent's words I would say: 'We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.'

Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folk-lore, and one which it cannot spoil or explain; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
Anthropologists quotes by J.R.R. Tolkien
Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us. ~ Brent Staples
Anthropologists quotes by Brent Staples
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies. ~ Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Anthropologists quotes by Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Texans are the only race of people known to anthropologists who do not depend on breeding for propagation. Like princes and lords, they can be made by breath; plus a big hat-which comparatively few Texans wear. ~ J. Frank Dobie
Anthropologists quotes by J. Frank Dobie
Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do. ~ Ted Chiang
Anthropologists quotes by Ted Chiang
I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious. ~ Michael Dorris
Anthropologists quotes by Michael Dorris
After all, we know that the foraging societies in which human beings evolved were small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared almost everything. There is a remarkable consistency to how immediate return foragers live - wherever they are.* The !Kung San of Botswana have a great deal in common with Aboriginal people living in outback Australia and tribes in remote pockets of the Amazon rainforest. Anthropologists have demonstrated time and again that immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nearly universal in their fierce egalitarianism. Sharing is not just encouraged; it's mandatory. Hoarding or hiding food, for example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behavior in these societies. ~ Christopher Ryan
Anthropologists quotes by Christopher Ryan
As has often been said, if you want to understand what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do. Above all else, what anthropologists do is ethnography. ~ John Monaghan
Anthropologists quotes by John Monaghan
Several Southeastern tribes have long said that their ancestors received immigrants from Mesoamerica and that these immigrants introduced many cultural changes. Far too few anthropologists were listening. ~ Richard Thornton
Anthropologists quotes by Richard Thornton
The practices and disciplines of building and sustaining community could fill volumes (and has). From mystics to anthropologists, we learn how critical the quality of a community is to the health and well-being of people. Yet, community remains one of the most elusive goals to so many of the Christians and churches in our individualistic Western societies. When we encounter true community, we are not encountering mere healthy relationships of equality and moral uprightness, but we are witnessing, and being invited to participate in, the divine nature of God. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Anthropologists quotes by Jamie Arpin-Ricci
The misuse of the term matriarch has led many people to identify any woman present in a household where no male resides a matriarch. Although anthropologists disagree about whether or not matriarchal societies ever really existed, an examination of available information about the supposed social structure of matriarchies proves without any doubt that the social status of the matriarch was in no way similar to that of black women in the United States. ~ Bell Hooks
Anthropologists quotes by Bell Hooks
When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said:
In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance to American anthropological history, and that the best place to start was with museums -
where the story began. The more I delved into the archives, the more I was fascinated. I was hooked. ~ Stanley A. Freed
Anthropologists quotes by Stanley A. Freed
When historians of early America turned from the pursuit of past politics, they devised a category known in the academy as 'social and intellectual history.' In it, they stuffed nearly everything except politics on the assumption, which the anthropologists assured them was correct, that it would all fit together. Somehow it did not. ~ Edmund Morgan
Anthropologists quotes by Edmund Morgan
A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has today become the political centre of the world we see here all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.
The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film has in store for it. ~ Roland Barthes
Anthropologists quotes by Roland Barthes
Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. Its just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed. ~ Carlos Barrios
Anthropologists quotes by Carlos Barrios
The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science. ~ Franz Boas
Anthropologists quotes by Franz Boas
What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists. ~ Jared Diamond
Anthropologists quotes by Jared Diamond
Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify. ~ Christopher Ryan
Anthropologists quotes by Christopher Ryan
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [ ... ] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals. ~ David Sedaris
Anthropologists quotes by David Sedaris
The obvious question is, what are the "conditions to which presumably we are genetically adapted"? As it turns out, what Donaldson assumed in 1919 is still the conventional wisdom today: our genes were effectively shaped by the two and a half million years during which our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers prior to the introduction of agriculture twelve thousand years ago. This is a period of time known as the Paleolithic era or, less technically, as the Stone Age, because it begins with the development of the first stone tools. It constitutes more than 99.5 percent of human history - more than a hundred thousand generations of humanity living as hunter-gatherers, compared with the six hundred succeeding generations of farmers or the ten generations that have lived in the industrial age.
It's not controversial to say that the agricultural period - the last .5 percent of the history of our species - has had little significant effect on our genetic makeup. What is significant is what we ate during the two and a half million years that preceded agriculture - the Paleolithic era. The question can never be answered definitively, because this era, after all, preceded human record-keeping. The best we can do is what nutritional anthropologists began doing in the mid-1980s - use modern-day hunter-gatherer societies as surrogates for our Stone Age ancestors. ~ Gary Taubes
Anthropologists quotes by Gary Taubes
Among the Indians, as among other nations, some people are born artists, but most are not. I am a born artist. I have as much interest in my people as any anthropologist, and I have studied our culture and lore. My aim is to reassemble the pieces of a once proud culture, and to show the dignity and bravery of my people. ~ Norval Morrisseau
Anthropologists quotes by Norval Morrisseau
As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world. ~ Helen Fisher
Anthropologists quotes by Helen Fisher
The same principle held in black universities, where students demanded more and more black teachers. White professors who had virtually dedicated their lives and their academic careers as historians, anthropologists, sociologists, to the problems of racism and its cures, thinking they did this for the good of the oppressed victims of racism (and often suffering social and academic insults as a result), were asked to leave schools in favor of black teachers. Some of them turned very bitter. ~ John Howard Griffin
Anthropologists quotes by John Howard Griffin
Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies. ~ Patricia Marx
Anthropologists quotes by Patricia Marx
Many reasons had been given, and every man adopted the rationale which suited his own particular emotionality. But what seemed obvious at the time became less so as the years passed. Professors of history argued, experts in economics demurred, psychologists begged to differ, and anthropologists felt it necessary to point out. ~ Robert Sheckley
Anthropologists quotes by Robert Sheckley
Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.
Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking. ~ Rust Cohle, True Detective
Anthropologists quotes by Rust Cohle, True Detective
We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame. ~ Christopher Ryan
Anthropologists quotes by Christopher Ryan
Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek. ~ Rob Brezsny
Anthropologists quotes by Rob Brezsny
Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students. ~ Lloyd DeMause
Anthropologists quotes by Lloyd DeMause
(Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.) ~ Barbara W. Tuchman
Anthropologists quotes by Barbara W. Tuchman
This was the most important discovery I had ever made in my life. It was a discovery which has irrevocably changed my whole life's direction. It immediately elevated me to the status of one of the world's leading anthropologists. ~ Donald Johanson
Anthropologists quotes by Donald Johanson
In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of specialists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which offers less than this passion play remains philosophically trivial. Cultural anthropologists suggest the appealing term 'deep play' for the comprehensively absorbing preoccupations of human beings. From the perspective of a theory of the practising life we would add: the deep plays are those which are moved by the heights. ~ Peter Sloterdijk
Anthropologists quotes by Peter Sloterdijk
Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it. ~ Helen Fisher
Anthropologists quotes by Helen Fisher
Your frequent claim that we must understand religious belief as a "social construct," produced by "societal causes," dependent upon "social and cultural institutions," admitting of "sociological questions," and the like, while it will warm the hearts of most anthropologists, is either trivially true or obscurantist. It is part and parcel of the double standard that so worries me - the demolition of which is the explicit aim of The Reason Project.

Epidemiology is also a "social construct" with "societal causes," etc. - but this doesn't mean that the germ theory of disease isn't true or that any rival "construct" - like one suggesting that child rape will cure AIDS - isn't a dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity. We either have good reasons or bad reasons for what we believe; we can be open to evidence and argument, or we can be closed; we can tolerate (and even seek) criticism of our most cherished views, or we can hide behind authority, sanctity, and dogma. The main reason why children are still raised to think that the universe is 6,000 years old is not because religion as a "social institution" hasn't been appropriately coddled and cajoled, but because polite people (and scientists terrified of losing their funding) haven't laughed this belief off the face of the earth.

We did not lose a decade of progress on stem-cell research in the United States because of religion as a "social construct"; we lost it because of the be ~ Sam Harris
Anthropologists quotes by Sam Harris
No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats. ~ Katie Hafner
Anthropologists quotes by Katie Hafner
I never should have made it through twelve years of schooling before entering a university, without ever hearing the important news that most anthropologists reject the concept of biological races. ~ Robert Wald Sussman
Anthropologists quotes by Robert Wald Sussman
Bring a baby to any grown-up -- even the gruffest or most inhibited -- and watch what happens. Without exception, they will do something to try and make the baby laugh. Psychologists, anthropologists, and other experts have theories about why this is so. For me it's enough to believe that whenever a baby laughs, our humanity is somehow exalted. ~ Jack Moore
Anthropologists quotes by Jack Moore
David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation.

The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fit ~ Geoffrey Miller
Anthropologists quotes by Geoffrey Miller
In her life Josie had heard only one or two people apologize. Wasn't that something? Wouldn't that be significant to future anthropologists? This was a time in history when no one was sorry. Sorry took too much courage, too much strength and faith and rightness to have a place in this cowardly century. ~ Dave Eggers
Anthropologists quotes by Dave Eggers
Most Kikuyu marriages were arranged on the basis of what is described by anthropologists as the bride price. ~ Louis Leakey
Anthropologists quotes by Louis Leakey
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. ~ Sherry Ortner
Anthropologists quotes by Sherry Ortner
Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical. To be aware of one's country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern - such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history. ~ Steven Pinker
Anthropologists quotes by Steven Pinker
This phenomenon suggests nineteenth-century German polymath Adolf Bastian's theory of Elementargedanke, literally "elementary thoughts of humankind," which so influenced physicists like Planck, Pauli, and Einstein, indeed many of those in the German school of physics, which was dominant in the early decades of the twentieth century leading up to World War II, as well as anthropologists like Franz Boas (the father of American anthropology) and physicians such as Jung. The idea of the collective unconscious (Jung's term for the nonlocal domain) was in the way he expressed it. It proposes a worldview in which all manifestations of consciousness, regardless of the complexity of their physical forms, are part of a network of life. A network in which each component both informs and influences as it is informed and influenced. It ~ Stephan A. Schwartz
Anthropologists quotes by Stephan A. Schwartz
Which has more caffeine--tea or coffee?

Maybe it is a reflection of our constant struggle to ward off sleep, or simply the desire for that scintillating buzz that comes from a good cup of Joe. In the United States, more than 80 percent of people consume caffeine in one form or another every day. Worldwide it is the most popular drug, far ahead of nicotine and alcohol. Some anthropologists speculate that its use may date as far back as the Stone Age. ~ Anahad O'Connor
Anthropologists quotes by Anahad O'Connor
Mermaids - those half-human, half-fish sirens of the sea - are legendary sea creatures chronicled in maritime cultures since time immemorial. The ancient Greek epic poet Homer wrote of them in The Odyssey. In the ancient Far East, mermaids were the wives of powerful sea-dragons, and served as trusted messengers between their spouses and the emperors on land. The aboriginal people of Australia call mermaids yawkyawks – a name that may refer to their mesmerizing songs.

The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology - in addition to mermaids, there were wise centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few.

But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why, then, do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples? That's a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists. ~ NOAA National Ocean Service
Anthropologists quotes by NOAA National Ocean Service
They have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahãs is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria. Does this make them more primitive? Many anthropologists have suggested so, which is why they are so concerned about finding out the Pirahãs notions about God, the world, and creation.

But there is an interesting alternative to think about things. Perhaps it is their presence of these concerns that makes a culture more primitive, and their absense that renders a culture more sophisticated. If that is true, the Pirahãs are a very sophisticated people. Does this sound far-fetched? Let's ask ourselves if it is more sophisticated to look at the universe with worry, concern, and a believe that we can understand it all, or to enjoy life as it comes, recognizing the likely futility of looking for truth or God? ~ Daniel L. Everett
Anthropologists quotes by Daniel L. Everett
Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilisation. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organisation disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present. ~ Carl Jung
Anthropologists quotes by Carl Jung
The reasons why anthropologists haven't been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there's no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever "invented" than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought. ~ David Graeber
Anthropologists quotes by David Graeber
If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water. ~ Margaret Mead
Anthropologists quotes by Margaret Mead
Buying is an activity understood by economists. Shopping is a phenomenon of interest to anthropologists and sociologists. ~ Marc Gobe
Anthropologists quotes by Marc Gobe
The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences. ~ Ruth Benedict
Anthropologists quotes by Ruth Benedict
Like other people, anthropologists may see only what they want to see, even when what they want to see is nothing. ~ J. Budziszewski
Anthropologists quotes by J. Budziszewski
John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections human beings make, that in spite of everything, we will always make. To quote from the book, 'What he saw in the people was what the old anthropologists called communitas. It wasn't that the people sang and moved. It was their singing and moving together' Singing and moving together, Wood has found a way to express this profound and beautiful idea through fiction. ~ Peter Orner
Anthropologists quotes by Peter Orner
Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way. ~ Elaine Pagels
Anthropologists quotes by Elaine Pagels
Modern man does not understand how much his "rationalism" (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic "underworld." He has freed himself from "superstition" (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation. Anthropologists ~ C. G. Jung
Anthropologists quotes by C. G. Jung
Native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language. In the same way, those who are most 'fluent' in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the 'grammar' of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists. ~ Kate Fox
Anthropologists quotes by Kate Fox
The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss
Anthropologists quotes by Claude Levi-Strauss
Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism, since it was often the case that anthropologists and ethnologists advised colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people. ~ Edward W. Said
Anthropologists quotes by Edward W. Said
Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets. ~ Rigoberta Menchu
Anthropologists quotes by Rigoberta Menchu
Instead of looking for explanations for the fact of inequality, anthropologists should look for the explanation for the notion of equality. ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila
Anthropologists quotes by Nicolas Gomez Davila
The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer. ~ Martin Buber
Anthropologists quotes by Martin Buber
Anthropologists have invented the ingenious, convenient, fictional notion of the "true Negro," which allows them to consider, if need be, all the real Negroes on earth as fake Negroes, more or less approaching a kind of Platonic archetype, without ever attaining it. Thus, African history is full of "Negroids," Hamites, semi-Hamites, Nilo-Hamitics, Ethiopoids, Sabaeans, even Caucasoids! Yet, if one stuck strictly to scientific data and archeological facts, the prototype of the White race would be sought in vain throughout the earliest years of present-day humanity. ~ Cheikh Anta Diop
Anthropologists quotes by Cheikh Anta Diop
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation. ~ Abraham Verghese
Anthropologists quotes by Abraham Verghese
If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will. If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%? In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of primitive self-expression. In America we call it golf. ~ Dave Barry
Anthropologists quotes by Dave Barry
Probably the only people left who think that economics deserves a Nobel Prize are economists. It confirms their conceit that they're doing 'science' rather than the less tidy task of observing the world and trying to make sense of it. This, after all, is done by mere historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and (heaven forbid) even journalists. Economists are loath to admit that they belong in such raffish company. ~ Robert J. Samuelson
Anthropologists quotes by Robert J. Samuelson
I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology. ~ Clifford Geertz
Anthropologists quotes by Clifford Geertz
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