196 Quotes About Anthropology

Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

I'm not an anthropology buff, but I've read enough of it to know that the Zuni don't think that their way is the way for everyone, and that the Navajo don't think their way is the way for everyone. Each of them has a way that works well for them.

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other line so many hard and round billiard balls

The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.

If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.

But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.

The story of our human lineage is continually enlarged, almost daily, by discoveries from physical anthropology, archeology, and genetics.

Like other people, anthropologists may see only what they want to see, even when what they want to see is nothing.