Top 50 Anthropology Quotes

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn’t a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

I have a B.S. in Biology from MIT, an M.Sc. in Human Biology and a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Oxford University, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. I never intended for so many degrees, but I enjoyed getting them all.

Maybe if I’d studied writing instead of anthropology, I’d be more sensible. You know – pick a genre, follow the rules, stay in the box – but let’s face it. Sensible people don’t major in anthropology.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had an enormous interest in the sciences – everything from quantum physics to anthropology.

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.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There’s been an extraordinary advance.

Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

As an anthropology major, I wanted to understand the cultural significance of poverty – why it exists and why some countries can rise above it while others can’t.

When I went to college, I really became interested in cultural anthropology. Our behavior isn’t that different from other primate species’.

Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it’s a different world than now.

I cannot wait until the day I can go back to school… I’ve already picked my program: anthropology at Columbia. I will not get in, but a girl can dream.

I’m always looking for instances of people doing things for and with each other for pleasure, for passion, for camaraderie, from kindness. It’s the anthropology of people figuring how to punctuate life with the lyrical.

Can fiction teach us? Absolutely. Fiction has the power to illustrate place, era, and atmosphere in vivid detail. But it is not Anthropology for Dummies.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

I look at my time on this earth as social anthropology, at home and in work life.

I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn’t make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy… I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

I fell in love with Norman Mailer’s ‘Of a Fire on the Moon’, a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA – and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.

I was born in Middletown, Connecticut, while my dad was getting his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and anthropology at Wesleyan University.

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.

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

In 1981, while doing postdoctoral field work in cultural anthropology, Bonnie A. Nardi lived with villagers in Western Samoa, trying to understand the cultural reasons that people there have an average of eight children.

My work has gotten more political over time, but once you start exploring food, you find you’re up against economics and politics and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to deal with.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.

Because human development is the most specific and exalted mission of woman, studies in anthropology and theory of pedagogy are essential in girls’ education.

My mom worked her way all the way up; she has a doctorate in anthropology. Imagine doing that while having three kids. It’s just amazing. She provided the best possible example in terms of chasing your dreams.

I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.

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

The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so, it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.

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’ve been on this kick reading about the beginning of forensic science: autopsies, fingerprinting, psychological profiling. I’ve been reading a lot of books about forensic anthropology.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

Whereas what man can learn about the world through his senses and through the intellect which relies upon sense-observation may be called ‘anthropology,’ what the spiritual man within us can know may be called ‘anthroposophy.’

If there’s ever a place where you can’t argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

I love Anthropology for kitchenware – they make the best bowls, plates, cutlery etc.

It is universal to give gifts as an expression of love. My academic background is anthropology, the study of cultures. We have never discovered a culture where gift-giving is not an expression of love.

Commitment, belief and positive attitude are all important if you’re going to be a success, whether you’re in sports, in business or, as in my case, anthropology.

The ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ isn’t just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.

I’m double majoring in social studies – which is sociology, anthropology, economics, and philosophy – and African-American studies.

I attended classes and taught classes, in Food Anthropology at Pace University, with an anthropology professor. You can trace history by the architecture and food of a place. Food is one of those things that transcends and stays in the culture.

The study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic.

I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.