Philosophy Quotes

"Meaning requires difference; identity requires opposition."

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

"Ritual is time made sacred through human action."

"Meaning emerges in the spaces between things."

"Society creates the distinctions that allow it to function."

"The person is a social construct, yet no less real for being so."

"To interpret is not to explain but to translate."

"Dirt is matter out of place."

"The natural body is a social construct."

"We are all anthropologists of our own culture."

"Every system requires what it defines as waste."

"Society is maintained through shared categories of thought."

"Meaning emerges from difference, not essence."

"Taboos protect the structure of the social order."

"The margins define the center."

"We cannot understand others without understanding ourselves."

"Categories are weapons as much as tools."

"We are all trapped in our own classification systems."

"The primitive is a category, not a people."

"Rituals are solved problems given form."

"Meaning requires the stability of categories."

"Every classification system is also a hierarchy."

"Meaning emerges from the arrangement of categories."

"Order is always provisional and contested."

"Primitive societies are societies without a state, not societies before the state."

"Anthropology reveals what we have lost in becoming 'civilized'."

"Society is the human answer to the problem of power."

"In primitive societies, difference does not create hierarchy."

"The tribe knows what the nation-state denies: that power corrupts."

"The primitive world had fewer things and more meaning."