Louis Dumont

"Modern equality masks new forms of hidden hierarchy."

"Anthropology must be comparative or it is merely description."

"The sacred constitutes reality as much as the material."

"Understanding requires sympathy but also critical distance."

"Holism means seeing wholes, not aggregates of parts."

"Ideology is invisible precisely where it operates most effectively."

"The West's self-image depends on its image of the Orient."

"Every social system contains its own coherence and its own contradictions."

"Purity is not a physical state but a social category."

"Hierarchy is the natural form of human consciousness."

"Culture is not optional for human beings but constitutive."

"The anthropologist must become a stranger to understand otherness."

"Individualism emerges only under specific historical conditions."

"The sacred and profane are not opposed but interconnected."

"To know ourselves, we must know how others know themselves."

"Value hierarchies are social facts, not universal laws."

"Meaning systems are coherent wholes, not collections of traits."

"The study of humanity requires abandoning the study of the human."

"Modern equality is ideology pretending to be nature."

"Every society must solve the problems of order and meaning."

"Holism sees the person as a node in a network of relations."

"The West invented the individual to justify its conquest of others."

"Understanding difference begins with understanding our own difference."

"Society is not an aggregate of individuals but a system of meaning."

"The researcher's own culture is the greatest obstacle to understanding."

"Hierarchy is everywhere because meaning itself is hierarchical."

"Values exist in relation to each other, not in isolation."

"The sacred structures human consciousness more than the rational."

"Comparison reveals what is taken for granted in each system."

"To study man is to study mans' conceptions of himself."