Anthropologists From The United States

"In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of such a grande ideé, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, “to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives.”"

"The state [..is a] metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing conditions of life to be consistent with that reality: that is, theatre to present an ontology of the world and, by presenting it, to make it happen--make it actual."

"We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. "If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process," Stanley Cavell has remarked, "that may be because speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough.""

"In the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they look, the one-eyed is not king, he is spectator."

"Clifford Geertz says it all in one crisp, succinct sentence: "I'm probably a closet rhetorician, although I'm coming out of the closet a bit." For over three decades, Geertz has been attempting to steer anthropological scholarship away from a rigidly scientific model and toward a humanistic, interpretive, hermeneutic model-apparently with great success. Perhaps it is Geertz's preoccupation with seeing science and scholarship as rhetorical, as socially constructed, that makes his work so eminently appealing to many of us in rhetoric and composition. Geertz sees rhetoric as central to his own life and work. From his college days as an English major at Antioch College and a copyboy at the New York Post to 1988 and his Works and Lives (where he "reads" the work of four major anthropologists as if he were a literary critic explicating canonical texts), Geertz has been consumed with questions of language, rhetoric, interpretation."

"One way to understand women's consciousness is to make visible the cultures it creates. Culture may be defined as the ordered system of meanings in terms of which people define their world, express their feelings, and make their judgments. Cultural interpretation, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has suggested, is a process of "searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms-words, images, institutions, behaviors-in terms of which . people actually represent themselves to themselves and to one another."...To name women's consciousness is to identify its webs of significance and meaning, to make it intelligible on its own terms. This identification, according to Geertz, is a process of cultural interpretation: "the analysis... is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behavior, institutions or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly-that is-thickly described.""

"Some professors and especially 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. (That's perhaps a little extreme.) In my field I have always argued for the pluralistic approach to things rather than solidification into some particular line (even my own line) of work. But there is a great deal of anxiety. I think it is true that scholars, both young and old, are overly anxious about pluralism, diversity, conflict-younger ones especially because when they're first getting into a field they want to know what it is they're supposed to know, but older ones, too, because they somehow yearn for a lost paradise when everyone knew what they were doing."

"I wanted to be a novelist and a newspaper man... I went to Antioch College and majored in English, at least in the beginning, with the intention of doing something like that.... Antioch had a co-op program so I went to work for the New York Post as a copyboy when I decided I didn't want to be a newspaper man; it was fun, but it wasn't practical. After a while I shifted into philosophy as a major, but I never had any undergraduate training at all in anthropology and, indeed, very little social science outside of economics. I had a lot of economics but nothing else. Anthropology wasn't even taught at Antioch then, although it is now. And except for a political science course or two and lots of economics, I didn't have any social sciences. So I was in literature for at least half the time I was there, the first couple of years, and then I shifted to philosophy, partly because of the influence of a terrific teacher and partly because in a small college you can run out of courses. 'Men I got interested in the same sort of thing I'm interested in now: values, ideas, and so on. Finally, one of my professors said, "Why don't you think about anthropology?" That was the first time I had thought seriously about being an anthropologist, and then I began to think about it and I went to Harvard and so on."

"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."

"The "control mechanism" view of culture begins with the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public — that its natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square."

"One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one."

"Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns — customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters — as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms — plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) — for the governing of behavior."

"To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action — art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, common sense — is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of de-emotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said."

"Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like."

"There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.'"

"O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How, in your darkness, did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?"

"Whereas James Weldon Johnson believed that the recognition of an African American literary tradition would end racism in the United States, I believe that the recognition of Afro-Latin@ poetry will bring to light new structures of racism that have emerged and entrenched themselves as this country has become increasingly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic...Latin@s have been at the center of African American verse since its inception, as evidenced by Weldon Johnson's discussion of and admiration for black poets in Latin America. Likewise, connections between Harlem Renaissance poets and Afro-Latin American poets are numerous. This is an artistic connection that has grown within the United States"

"Young man—Young man—Your arm’s too short to box with God."

"Find Sister Caroline... And she's tired— She's weary— Go down, Death, and bring her to me."

"This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image."

"With his head in his hands, God thought and thought, Till he thought: I'll make me a man!"

"And God smiled again, And the rainbow appeared, And curled itself around his shoulder."

"So God stepped over to the edge of the world And He spat out the seven seas; He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed; He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled; And the waters above the earth came down, The cooling waters came down."

"And God stepped out on space, And He looked around and said, "I'm lonely— I'll make me a world.""

"Some men enjoy the constant strife Of days with work and worry rife, But that is not my dream of life: I think such men are crazy. For me, a life with worries few, A job of nothing much to do, Just pelf enough to see me through: I fear that I am lazy."

"And Satan smiled, stretched out his hand, and said,— "O War, of all the scourges of humanity, I crown you chief.""

"The glory of the day was in her face, The beauty of the night was in her eyes. And over all her loveliness, the grace Of Morning blushing in the early skies."

"Eternities before the first-born day, Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame, Calm Night, the everlasting and the same, A brooding mother over chaos lay."

"I am a thing not new, I am as old As human nature. I am that which lurks, Ready to spring whenever a bar is loosed; The ancient trait which fights incessantly Against restraint, balks at the upward climb; The weight forever seeking to obey The law of downward pull;—and I am more: The bitter fruit am I of planted seed; The resultant, the inevitable end Of evil forces and the powers of wrong."

"Father, Father Abraham, To-day look on us from above; On us, the offspring of thy faith, The children of thy Christ-like love."

"You sang far better than you knew; the songs That for your listeners’ hungry hearts sufficed Still live,—but more than this to you belongs: You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ."

"Whose starward eye Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh, “Nobody knows de trouble I see”?"

"How would you have us, as we are? Or sinking 'neath the load we bear? Our eyes fixed forward on a star? Or gazing empty at despair?"

"It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic."

"The glory of the day was in her face, The beauty of the night was in her eyes."

"Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst."

"The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them."

"We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered."

"Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty. Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies; Let it resound loud as the rolling sea."

"In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity."

"The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world. https://www.facebook.com/partnersinhealth/photos/%E2%80%9Cthe-idea-that-some-lives/10151726145651986/"

"[It] was seemly [of Paul], I thought, resisting beatification. But then he told me, “People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.” . . . I felt a small inner disturbance. It wasn’t that the words seemed immodest. I felt I was in the presence of a different person from the one I’d been chatting with a moment ago, someone whose ambitions I hadn’t yet begun to fathom."

"God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he’s not the one who’s supposed to divvy up the loot. . . You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that’s where He is."

"I can’t sleep. There’s always somebody not getting treatment. I can’t stand that."

"The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health."

"And we begin to understand that the goal of life is to die young — as late as possible!"

"Among both the Northern and Eastern Hamites are to be found some of the most beautiful types of humanity."

"The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness."

"The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice."

"The omelet called “race” has no existence outside the statistical frying- pan in which it has been reduced by the heat of the anthropological imagination."