Top Barbara Myerhoff Quotes

Barbara Myerhoff Biography

Barbara Myerhoff (February 16, 1935 – January 7, 1985) was an American anthropologist and filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Barbara Myerhoff Quotes

[Ritual] dwells in an invisible reality and gives this reality a vocabulary, props, costume, gesture, scenery. Ritual makes things separate, sets them apart from ordinary affairs and thoughts. Rituals need not be solemn, but they are formalized, stylized, extraordinary, and artificial. In the name of ritual, we can do anything. We can do astonishing acts. In the end, ritual gives us assurance about the unification of things.

Astonishing, Names, Reality, Things, Vocabulary

The best lives and stories are made up of minute particulars that somehow are also universal and of use to others as well as oneself.

Made, Particulars, Somehow, Stories, Use

All rituals are paradoxical and dangerous enterprises, the traditional and improvised, the sacred and the secular. Paradoxical because rituals are conspicuously artificial and theatrical, yet designed to suggest the inevitability and absolute truth of their messages. Dangerous because when we are not convinced by a ritual we may become aware of ourselves as having made them up, thence on the paralyzing realization that we have made up all our truths; our ceremonies, our most precious conceptions and convictions - all are mere inventions.

Conspicuously, Convinced, May, Messages, Paralyzing, Sacred

The self is made, not given

Given, Made, Purpose, Self

Nathan Gamble

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William Ramsay

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Barbara Myerhoff Biography

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