Wisdom Quotes

"The ethnographer practices a discipline of attention and respect."

"Understanding requires patient observation and intellectual restraint."

"The ethnologist becomes expert in the art of humble attention."

"Tradition embodies answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask."

"Culture provides both the text and the context for human meaning."

"True equality requires understanding of inequality's sources and structures."

"To understand a society, one must understand the structure of its taboos."

"To analyze a culture, we must first step outside of it."

"We create order through the systematic classification of disorder."

"All societies employ myth to make sense of the inexplicable."

"The structure of society is encoded in its stories."

"Understanding requires empathy, but empathy is always partial and incomplete."

"The anthropologist must become a bricoleur, assembling meaning from fragments."

"All knowledge is situated knowledge; there is no view from nowhere."

"Understanding is always a partial reconstruction of another's world."

"The interpretation of culture requires a willingness to be transformed."

"The structure of myth mirrors the structure of social relations."

"The study of others is always a study of oneself."

"The anthropologist must learn to hold contradictions in mind."

"Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement."

"Boundaries are sacred because they define the structure of meaning."

"Cosmology shapes how we organize our daily lives."

"Anomalies are dangerous because they blur categories."

"Language shapes what we can perceive as real."

"The sacred and profane are relative categories."

"What seems natural is usually cultural."

"The purity system is a map of the cosmos."

"Every meal is a moral statement."

"Meaning is made in the spaces between things."

"Every culture creates monsters to define itself."