anthropologists-from-south-africa

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""Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey review – lifestyles of the remarkably privileged". The Guardian. 12 November 2020. Retrieved 5 April 2025."

"Dovey also loosely bases another character on Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who was also at college when she was, but the narrative skirts around one Frederick Reese. Why exactly he inspires such loathing among his peers is not given much airplay."

"“It was the great unsolved mystery of her field, why the things that make us happiest also make us unhappiest. Like alcohol. And family. And spouses. And children.”"

"It is in Pompeii, in fact, that the novel's deepest irony is found: the humans preserved after the ancient Mount Vesuvius eruption are afforded greater respect and dignity than the more recent victims of settler colonialism."

"The dual narratives converge in fascinating ways. Vita's chapters wrestle more explicitly with the function of art in post-apartheid South Africa and how inherited guilt shapes an approach to the subjects of her documentary films."

"Ostensibly structured in the form of interchanging letters between middle-aged Vita living in Mudgee and her former benefactor, an elderly American named Royce, the novel gives way to more conventional storytelling as the narrative progresses, exploring how art, and the individual artist, can reckon with a brutal colonial past."

"We’re not beholden to the political whims of a billionaire owner. No-one can tell us what not to say or what not to report."

"Allowing as many people as possible to read quality journalism from around the world – especially people who live in places where the free press is in peril."

"But beneath the phenomenon lie economic and political forces that have to do with the transformative history of the present"

"Many see this as “progressive,” but it’s retrogressive as imaginable. A discipline that for a century of its history was anti-essentialist is now sanctioning essentialisms of every kind."

"But not only white people should write about whites, or only men about men, or Navajos about the Navajo, or any human subjects only about themselves and their experiences of the world."

"I wrote an essay some years back in which I made the argument that anthropology is not defined by its content but by its methodological curiosity, by defamiliarization of the world."

"So if I look in the mirror and I look like crap, I feel like crap, then if I suddenly put a face on, I suddenly feel a little bit better, and I think it's part of my coping strategy."

"It's so funny isn't it, when you suddenly have something to write about you find your voice, and it's amazing the opportunities. I'm petrified of flying, but I actually flew a plane myself."

"I probably have always been an exhibitionist, but I've done things that I never thought I could do, and it is because of cancer. I'm dyslexic and I've just written a book. I'm not saying dyslexia stops you, but I never thought I was a writer."

"I was given this lifeline of targeted therapy and it put my cancer to sleep, but what people don't get about it is that on average people get about six months extra life and I got two and a half years."

"To be reunited with society through cure was to effect a desired situation in life, whether that be social, biological or spiritual."

"This deeply anthropological understanding of health considered that it is in fact the process of achieving a desired state is of most significance to the sufferer."

"the importance of red symbols as representing the change from sickness to good health because of the therapeutic power of symbolism for the sufferer"

"In spite of Christianity the permeating influence in the Nyuswa reserve is based more on Zulu culture than on any foreign culture’"

"In most aspects of daily life, outlook and habits, I am Zulu in spite of my mission background’."

"Important aspects of Zulu culture were unrecognised and denied by Catholicism, including the recognition of ancestral power, the consulting of a diviner and certain forms of marriage."

"According to this discovery, the oldest bows and bone arrows are now dated to just over 60 000 years old,”"

"These sites provide clues to the behaviour of early humans. The people who lived here were of the Homo sapiens species and there are signs that they lived as hunters as opposed to scavengers, as may have been the case with other human species such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster."

"The structure of the human body, with its rotating hips and shoulders, enabled humans to use the throwing skill to great effect. It was only a matter of time before the early hurled objects began to take on the shapes of darts and arrows, followed at a later stage by the manufacture of arrowheads made from bone"

"We have always written against the grain, which is the point of critique … of any weight"

"The benefits to society of having an intelligent and articulate citizenry are priceless; they cannot be measured in terms of GDP per capita or literacy rates or productivity"

"Children are naturally curious and I would argue that our education system destroys this curiosity and replaces it with anxiety about performance"

"Learning should be a joyous experience."

"An education that is devoid of ethics is empty and meaningless and will produce smart but reckless human beings."

"We should want to cultivate our minds and intellect because we think that it makes us better human beings, especially that it enhances our ethical sensibility."

"If black people are not trained to care for their hair, then who?"

"People don’t know how much money is made in telling black women that they need straight hair"

"We don’t have anything to do with it, it’s dramatic, it doesn’t ‘flow"

"Can I touch your hair? Where are you from? I cannot do anything with your hair unless I texturise it!"

"We need to start the conversation at primary school level. At the core of an academic mind is curiosity, and curiosity cannot be taught - it can only be nurtured."

"I define success by my well-being and privilege to live a location-independent lifestyle that is filled with options and freedom of choice to live my life based on what’s best for me."

"I’m not naïve and I’m not belittling anyone’s experience, I just personally have not felt the discrimination and the idea that I’m not wanted here."

"Rituals reveal values at their deepest level...it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies."