Education Quotes

"Myths teach us through pleasure and identification, not instruction."

"Cultural relativism requires us to understand, not to endorse, all systems."

"The anthropologist must become a stranger to himself to see clearly."

"Comparison is inevitable; but comparison with humility is the mark of true scholarship."

"Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context."

"The profound problem is that ordinary men do not take intellectual life very seriously."

"One does not join the intellectual community by taking a test but by acquiring the ability to talk its language."

"Language is the medium through which culture is transmitted and sustained."

"To practice anthropology is to embrace the profound difficulty of understanding others."

"Understanding a tradition requires inhabiting it sympathetically while remaining analytically distant."

"The written word separates thought from speaker and listener."

"Society reproduces itself through ritual, not through force."

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

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

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

"The study of culture requires both sympathy and skepticism in equal measure."

"The anthropologist must practice what I call 'controlled distance' from all cultures."

"The study of other cultures is a way of defamiliarizing our own."

"The effort to compare is the effort to understand what human culture is about."

"The study of religion requires us to examine our own assumptions and biases."

"We do not discover meaning in texts; we create meaning through reading and interpretation."

"The most important lesson from the study of religion is recognition of human diversity."

"The academic study of religion must bracket all truth claims."

"The boundaries between disciplines are as artificial as the boundaries between religions."

"Interpretation requires both empathy and critical distance."

"The study of religion requires us to expand our capacity for empathy and imagination."

"Every act of understanding is an act of translation across difference."

"Comparison between societies reveals hidden assumptions in our own."

"To understand a people, begin with their own categories of thought."

"Comparison is the soul of anthropological understanding."