Louis Dumont

"To study another culture is to study ourselves in a mirror."

"The sacred ordering of society reflects deeper truths about human nature."

"Authenticity requires acknowledgment of our social conditioning."

"Method and humility are inseparable in scholarly work."

"Egalitarianism, taken to extremes, destroys the foundations of order."

"The ethnographer becomes a witness to the diversity of human possibility."

"Ideology claims universality; ethnography reveals particularity."

"The person is always a social person, never truly solitary."

"Understanding demands that we temporarily abandon our own perspective."

"Comparison liberates thought from the tyranny of assumption."

"Modernity has traded wisdom for efficiency."

"Value hierarchies organize society as surely as architecture organizes space."

"The holistic vision sees what reductionism cannot perceive."

"Individualism is a ideology, not a law of nature."

"Culture is the medium through which meaning flows."

"Ethnology teaches us that the world contains multitudes."

"The sacred-secular divide reflects a distinctly modern anxiety."

"To know oneself, one must first know the other."

"Comparative study reveals the contingency of what seemed necessary."

"Society precedes and shapes the individual consciousness."

"Tradition preserves what reason alone cannot discover."

"The ethnographer dwells in the space between worlds."

"Hierarchy reflects the structure of meaning itself."

"Authentic living requires awareness of one's social embeddedness."

"Method without respect for one's subject distorts knowledge."

"The modern world mistakes quantity of choice for quality of meaning."

"Society and individual are not opposed but mutually constitutive."

"Comparison illuminates what description alone cannot explain."

"The ideology of the market colonizes all domains of human life."

"Values cannot be detached from the social whole."