Edmund Leach

"Culture provides the script for social performance."

"Every society must solve the problem of how to deal with death."

"The anthropologist is an interpreter of human meaning."

"We are trapped not by culture but by our inability to see it."

"All symbols are arbitrary yet all symbols are necessary."

"The study of kinship is the study of how societies reproduce themselves."

"Culture is the accumulation of solutions to recurring problems."

"We communicate through what we do as much as what we say."

"Anthropology is the study of humanity; without it, we are merely tourists in other people's worlds."

"The function of ritual is not to compel the gods, but to organize our social relationships."

"We are all guilty of reading meaning into chaos; the question is whether we acknowledge this tendency."

"Magic is simply science applied to the sacred; both require belief to function."

"The boundary between the sacred and profane is drawn by society, not by nature."

"To study culture is to study the mirror in which we see ourselves reflected."

"Symbols have power only because we grant them power through collective agreement."

"The anthropologist must become a bridge between worlds, never fully belonging to either."

"Kinship systems are humanity's first technology for organizing chaos into meaning."

"We cannot escape the paradox: to observe culture, we must step outside it."

"Religion is culture's way of transforming the arbitrary into the sacred."

"Every society creates myths to explain what it fears to acknowledge about itself."

"The difference between primitive and modern is merely a difference in the complexity of our illusions."

"What we call tradition is often just yesterday's innovation that survived."

"The study of kinship is the study of human nature itself."

"Ritual is not irrational; it is rational in ways we have yet to fully comprehend."

"We are creatures who cannot live without creating order from disorder."

"The sacred exists nowhere except in the human mind and its social manifestations."

"To understand another culture is to understand the contingency of our own."

"Anthropology teaches us that nothing is natural, everything is cultural."

"The map is not the territory, but we cannot navigate without one."

"We invent our traditions and then forget we invented them."