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 of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.
My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.
I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.
I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.
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.
I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.
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.
