Anthropology Movies: Trailer for Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" with Toshiro Mifune

Anthropology Quotes

"Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess." -- Margaret Mead (1)

"Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities." -- Alfred L. Kroeber (2)

"The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences." -- Ruth Benedict (3)

"Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different." -- Nancy Banks Smith (4)

"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." -- Clifford Geertz (5)

"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology." -- W. H. Auden (6)

“[However] scientific (at least in intent) [studies on the origins of stories] are the pursuit of folklorists or anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. ... With regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. In Dasent's words I would say: 'We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.'" -- J. R. R. Tolkien (7)

"All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer" -- Robert Owen (8)

"Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is." -- Clifford Geertz (9)

"I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash." -- Kurt Vonnegut (10)

"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." -- Clifford Geertz (11)

"We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization." -- David Graeber (12)