196 Quotes About Anthropology

Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.

It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man.

will’ is ‘character’, but it is character ‘completely freed from everything which may be only empirical and thus belong to anthropology’.

Slavery and mastery are ugly things. But if the slave or master looks, behaves and talks in formal manner, slavery and mastery not only become acceptable but also respectable.After fire, formality is the next best discovery of mankind. Fire makes everything eatable, formality makes everything acceptable and respectable.

The oils we used on our torches and in our lamps have kept the darkness of night and predators at bay in our corporate and singular lives. Residual oil was even found in our ancestors’ campfires that were most likely from a meal shared in common around said fire. Oil was in one sense a residual and sign of community and social and cooperative sharing.

Critical play means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life . . . . Criticality in play can be fostered in order to question an aspect of a game’s 'content,' or an aspect of a play scenario’s function that might otherwise be considered a given or necessary.

I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

The fewer things you have, the better. Reduce your baggages as much as possibly can. When you get ride of your things, you get easier in yourself, and you decrease your suffering more and more. But 'I want, I want...' that's the beginning of suffering. - Murata