Edmund Leach

"Meaning is not found; it is constructed and then defended as if it were eternal."

"Every culture is simultaneously rational and irrational in its own terms."

"The anthropologist's greatest challenge is to see the familiar as strange."

"Exchange is the fundamental principle of social organization across all human societies."

"What appears natural to us is merely the result of culturally specific conditioning."

"The sacred and profane distinction reveals more about ourselves than about the world."

"To study humanity is to accept that rationality itself is a cultural product."

"Ritual creates order, but order also creates the need for ritual."

"We are all anthropologists of our own culture; we simply don't realize it."

"The function of myth is not to deceive but to consolidate social boundaries."

"Structure and meaning are human impositions on an indifferent universe."

"Every culture must solve the same fundamental problems; the solutions differ, not the problems."

"The study of religion is ultimately the study of how humans create meaning."

"What we call progress is merely change that we approve of."

"Anthropology is the discipline that teaches humility to certainty."

"The ties that bind us are social, not biological; we are bound by imagination."

"To classify is to create; classification is not discovery but invention."

"The boundary between us and them is drawn in culture, not in nature."

"Ritual is humanity's technology for managing the anxieties of existence."

"We construct our identities as we construct our cultures: gradually and collectively."

"The greatest anthropological insight is that difference is not deficiency."

"All societies are equally complex; they are merely complex in different ways."

"The sacred is the forbidden; the forbidden is what holds society together."

"Language does not merely express thought; it shapes what we are capable of thinking."

"We are all trapped in the prison of our own culture; awareness is the only escape."

"The past exists not as it was but as we reconstruct it to justify the present."

"Every symbol is arbitrary until we make it necessary through use."

"The anthropologist stands between worlds, fully belonging to neither, understanding both."

"Meaning is a social product; individuals inherit it as they inherit language."

"What we call custom is often merely superstition that has acquired respectability through age."