The real controversy comes with anthropologists - not all, but some - who see themselves as studying culture, and they then see culture from the perspective of humans, which is what they study. From their perspective, or, from some of their perspectives, it's sort of heresy to even talk about culture in any other animal. Others would say, "Yeah, you can talk about it, but our definitions of culture are so utterly different from yours and include things like values, and so on, which you've never shown to exist in any of these other creatures. "
Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.
As soon as you take out a pencil and paper with the Indians, you're one thing to them - an anthropologist - and what they tell to anthropologists is always distorted.
Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. . . If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.
Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology
Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.
We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for this reason that anthropologists have not shown much interest in these models, unlike economists, for example, for whom the use of mathematics poses no problem. However, one could reach the same conclusions by using just a bit of common sense.
I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.
I'm deeply interested in the photograph as a record of an encounter and enjoy putting myself in a timeline of image-makers, alongside other travelers, such as anthropologists, colonists, missionaries, even tourists. I do that to emphasize subjectivity, rather than privilege any single perspective - I see myself as only one of many storytellers.
Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.
Anthropology. . . has always been highly dependent upon photography. . . As the use of still photography - and moving pictures - has become increasingly essential as a part of anthropological methods, the need for photographers with a disciplined knowledge of anthropology and for anthropologists with training in photography has increased. We expect that in the near future sophisticated training in photography will be a requirement for all anthropologists. (1962)
Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.
People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?
Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should
The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things. . . have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.
I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.
