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.

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.

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 never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I’m satisfied with it.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

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’m an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There’s been an extraordinary advance.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto 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.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn’t a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I’m very skeptical.

I don’t write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it’s finished, it’s done.

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn’t have a real method, there’s a great deal of anxiety over what it is.

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.

We’re getting closer to our nature.

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

I don’t think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they’re moving toward more diversity.

I’ve written a lot of books which are written from the moon – the view from nowhere.

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.

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.

I don’t have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

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 the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.

I think what’s known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

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.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.

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.

I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.