I’ve written a lot of books which are written from the moon – the view from nowhere.

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I’m satisfied with it.

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn’t a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn’t have a real method, there’s a great deal of anxiety over what it is.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

If there’s ever a place where you can’t argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

We’re getting closer to our nature.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There’s been an extraordinary advance.

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

It’s always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it’s written now. There’s been an enormous shift in how it’s done, but yet you can’t...

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.

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura...

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an...

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I’m very skeptical.

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.

I think what’s known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

I don’t feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

I was trained in the ’50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley’s soul and such things.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

I don’t have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

I’m an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.

The North African mule talks always of his mother’s brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

I don’t think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they’re moving toward more diversity.

I’m writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it’s about social constructionism. So I would say I’m a social constructionist, whatever that means.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity…It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

I don’t write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it’s finished, it’s done.

I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves...

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.