Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.
Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should
People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.
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.
I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.
I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.
I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done
I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false
I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it
Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars
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've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything
I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world
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 put your finger on someone who actually did it
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
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 what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain
I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style
I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology
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
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
I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity
If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code
I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now
