When I first got the job, I was told nothing about my…

As a social anthropologist, I naturally accept and even stress the fact that there are major differences, both mental and psychological, which separate the…

— Louis Leakey

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject… [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner…

— Susan Sontag

The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of…

— James C. Scott

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.

— Jared Diamond

Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000…

— Terence McKenna

An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they…

— David Letterman

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional…

— Huston Smith

“Increasingly anthropologists are being asked "what can you do for us?" by the people whose societies they are doing research on. It is sometimes…

— Anthony Seeger

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.

— Robert Graves

What if the book (of Genesis) is describing a dawning awareness of the world? The anthropologist Edmund Leach has argued that the 'bit' or…

— Charles Hampden-Turner

People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people…

— Neil Postman

Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.

— Helen Fisher

As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects.

— Annia Ciezadlo

Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilisation. Its people…

— Carl Jung

We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for…

— Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza