You have them, you name them. They’re helpless, and you teach, or train, them. Feed them, water them, whatever. And as they grow up, you just hope that they grow up well and don’t spend...

The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According...

[T]he choice of human groupings for cultural comparisons is not a natural or scientific choice, but a political one.

We have been taught, both inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of...

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought – a system in which the sinner is to be punished...

I remember taking an anthropology class in college and the professor was explaining that there is little ‘sexual dimorphism’ in humans. He meant that there are few outward, observable differences between makes and females. At...

Hominids are all the Neanderthals, australopithecines, Homohabili, Homo erecti, etc., the upright-walking apes of which we arethe only surviving species.

In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined...

All social interactions require some loss of freedom.

What we mean when we say that something is “cultural” is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would...

These people know the reality and laugh at it. Such laughter has little concern with what is funny. It is often bitter and sometimes a little mad, for it is the laugh under the mask...

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

Human beings disappear; their histories remain.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God’s image. Either/or:...

The single most important human insight to be gained from this way of comparing societies is perhaps the realization that everything could have been different in our own society – that the way we live...

You are not Flesh & Blood – You are the Master of It”- Drø the Finder –

All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us...

It’s because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That’s the reason.

There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist—musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn. … No amounts of stone...

But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status,...

Paint-My girlfriend is so besotted that she can’t take her eyes off me. After we’ve turned out the light she puts on her night-vision goggles, and watched me as I sleep. Quite often I am...

The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can...

I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

The classical anthropological question, What is man?—”how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!”—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and...