196 Quotes About Anthropology

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for ‘[intelligent] design.’ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

Racism is an avoidable culture clash masquerading as inescapable biological warfare.

the migration patterns were the migration patterns solely of people of colour until 7000 years ago or later, when the first Caucasians appeared on earth, and the pigmentation of “white” skin only appeared 1000 years later.

linguistics without anthropology is sterile; anthropology without linguistics is blind

Human beings disappear; their histories remain.

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipatory towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy for the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect.

Respect is love in action.

Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.