Anthropologists From The United States

"there are just a lot of stories that I hope won’t be lost. I want to be sure that this legacy remains, even though it’s a miniature community and maybe not of great interest to everybody in the world. Especially for writers like myself, who come from minority backgrounds—we’re trying to fill in absences or gaps. There was obviously no literature like Tia Fortuna when I was growing up. There’s this very large Jewish Latino community in Miami, but they’re just not represented in literature. I felt that was a gap that I could fill."

"I often say that I am Jewish because I am Cuban. I feel gratitude toward Cuba because my four grandparents found refuge there in the years before WW II at a time when the door was closed to them in the United States. If not for the welcome they received in Cuba, I would not have been born. My family came to love Cuba. When we left in the 1960s, to start a new life again in the United States after the turn to communism, it was with great sorrow. My family lived through a double exodus, a double migration, from Europe to Cuba, and then from Cuba to the United States. If we had not been given refuge twice, we would not have survived. Knowing that my ancestors fled persecution and genocide, I believe we should be compassionate and humane toward immigrants and foster policies of welcome, kindness, and generosity of spirit."

"displacement has been a common path for Jews throughout history; they’ve always been displaced from one place to another, through diaspora, through a sense of expulsion, not being welcome anymore, being truly forced out."

"I think the most fundamental thing we can do to make the world a better place is to be open to the stories of people, to listen and take in the lived experiences of others. Stories have the power to change the world. Understanding the hopes and dreams of another person, we learn that we are all connected, and that to nurture all of our communities, our families, and our individual lives we must nurture one another."

"Healing is a journey and it takes its own sweet time. What a gift it is to get a second chance at life when the worst is past. (Author's Note)"

"self-interrogation is a special quality of anthropological work, one that we don’t see enough of in fiction. Sometimes in fiction, authors hide or erase the work and interrogation that they may have done to be able to write their novels. But in ethnography, we often include that interrogation within our texts. And to me, that’s an inspiring part of our storytelling."

"I step out, legs trembling a little but my heart full, and set forth on the next journey, entrusting myself to the beauty and danger of life all over again. (Author's Note)"

"...Tainter doesn't show good judgement in his choice of information about China, nor does he display a very sound historical instinct of his own. The working historian needs at least one of those virtues."

"Personally, I feel that when your narrative about the future includes the phrase “and then a miracle happens,” you’re in trouble."

"In talking about sustainability I like to use a metaphor of sport, of a game. When you are in a sustainability exercise it is possible to lose. You can be unsustainable. But the converse doesn't hold. There is no point at which you can say that you have won. Sustainability consists of staying in the game; that is, continuing with the ability to solve problems. It is like a dance where you must be constantly in motion. There is no point where you can rest and say "Aha! We are sustainable!" It is something that always requires adjustment."

"Тhey [Romans] were forced to debase the currency. Debasing the currency for them was the same as borrowing is for us. It basically shifts the cost of solving your problems on to the future. Now, you can do that if the future doesn’t have any problems of its own. And we know that never happens, right? So the future has to deal with its own problems plus the cost of the past problems that you’ve deferred the cost of."

"“As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”"

"Over the years, she has gained a solid reputation as a poet. She is also an accomplished painter. One of her favorite subjects, the centaur, reflects what she calls "my hybrid status...like the centaur, I have always felt misunderstood and isolated-whether with Indians or with non-Indians.""

"Wendy is an intensely serious person-though not slow to laughter-and her well-informed anger showed in both the poem she chose to read and in the directness of her responses."

"anywhere in America, if you take a university-level course on American history or American literature, particularly in literature and the arts, it only has the literature and the arts that are produced by Americans of European heritage, even then largely Northern European. We are left out of the books. Black people are left out; brown people are left out; Indian people are left out. So you get the impression, going through the American education system, that the only people here are white people. It's not just a cultural matter, but it's a political matter. There is a reason for a society to be that way, that has the literary capacity and the technological capacity that America has; there's no excuse for the people being so blind, for the people to be wearing a blindfold that way. The only possible reason it could happen is because it's not an accident; that it's planned. Somebody is benefiting by having Americans ignorant about what non-European Americans are doing and what they have done; what European Americans have done to them. Somebody is benefiting by keeping people ignorant."

"Native American writers have always been a major influence on me, like Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen, just to name a few."

"What a lot of people don't realize is there were a number of revolts against the Spanish mission by the Indians. But they don't tell you this in the museums. In fact, the museum right here in Oakland paints a ridiculous picture of the missions with the happy little natives making baskets in the shade of the adobe with the benevolent padres walking around rattling their rosaries. That just is not the way that the missions were."

"I think it's impossible to be governed with any sense of integrity when you don't recognize each other and have no obligation to each other."

"the way I think of it-now I don't really know where the poems or where the art comes from, I don't know where the images come from-but however they come or wherever they come from is like communicating with a person. It's a whole person. That person shows you things and has a certain appearance but also tells you things. So as you receive images, they are either received through the ear or through the eye or through the tongue and that's just the way it feels."

"We are parts of the earth that walk around and have individual consciousness for awhile and then go back."

"One way that they [Kachinas] can be thought of is if you think of the entire earth as being one being and we as small beings living on that large being like fleas on a cat."

"if Indians are left out of every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent-for example, leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something like that somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history."

"I would much rather be respected by the Indian community through my writing than to have my books reviewed in the New York Times."

"(Could you describe your writing process?) Well, I explained it one time, on radio, as the sensation of being sick in your stomach, in that you suddenly have to throw up, suddenly, you have to vomit. There is no way you can stop it. It has to happen. It's a bodily process in which the material is expelling itself from your body. That's what it feels like to me in a mental or emotional way. Suddenly it's there and it has to be expelled. It's going to come out whether I want it to or not. If I don't have something to write on, it comes out of my mouth. It's got to come out one way or another."

"This is a plural society and all of us have to work at it a little bit to get the full flavor of the society."

"A study in Taiwan found that, despite education programs on menstruation at school, the boys in the sample had a significantly worse attitude toward menstruation than the girls. ... An older study from the United States showed that men tended to think the majority of menstrual symptoms occurred during the menstrual phase, whereas women reported that they occurred during the premenstrual phase. Men also tended to think periods were more emotionally debilitating but less physically bothersome than women. ..."

"... as an adolescent ... from the world around me, I learned that must I hide all signs that I menstruated or face deep, crushing shame."

"Menstruation is a wild process that should captivate and delight. It offers up so many lessons in terms of how we understand bodily autonomy, sexual selection, even tissue engineering. It is strange, then, that instead of being something so fundamental to science education as Mendel's peas or dinosaur bones or the planets of our solar system, it gets at best a brief mention in health class."

"The study of ovarian and endometrial functioning creates the opportunity to test questions regarding a trade-off that characterizes human pregnancy: close maternal-fetal contact to improve resource transmission, yet higher vulnerabilities to pathologies related to energetics and inflammation such as and choriodecidual inflammatory syndrome."

"...Across history, in different cultures and space, humans do realize the necessity of cooperating when faced with an external threat. So again, if we can just do a little bit of reframing the narrative, the external threat is not necessarily the Russians or whatever. No, it’s the conditions we’ve made and the conditions we face."

"...Let’s take World War II, for instance, there are numerous situations where German troops and U.S. troops understood that the enemy was right nearby, and decided, “We’re not going to shoot at you. You don’t shoot at us. You go your way. We’ll go our way.” There are many of these types of anecdotes, and there is also some more systematic evidence."

"We would solve so many problems if we could develop that expanded level of identification all the way up to humanity, all the way up to the planet level, and basically think about the Earth also, and all the creatures on it, as being part of the same bio life system. We need to get this, as in Buckminster Fuller’s book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. We’re all on the same spaceship, so we can’t be fouling our nest with pollution and so forth. It’s just foolish to be fighting among ourselves, or as the old saying goes, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to actually be steering the ship away from icebergs."

"I think anthropology is just a wonderful field… it takes into consideration all the world’s cultures and what it means to be human."

"If you’re talking about the fall of the Soviet Union into pieces, the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, in some way these are sort of child’s play compared to the larger magnitude of changes between our lives today and all of us running around as nomadic foragers for millennia upon millennia. Now here we find ourselves with mobile phones and everything else. The immensity of the changes that have occurred and can take place in the human future is huge."

"In one case that I like, somebody got the idea to examine all of the muskets collected off of the Gettysburg battlefield. I think they collected around 27,000 or so muskets. Many of the muskets were loaded twice, some were loaded thrice and a few were loaded 21 times or something absolutely crazy. Overall, 90 percent of all 27,000 muskets were loaded one or more times. If you work out the statistics around how long it takes to load a musket, and all the time there was a battle going, then if people are loading their musket and firing, you’d expect only about 5 percent to have been loaded. Of course, we don’t have videotapes of what was going on, exactly, but it points to the idea that there was a whole lot of reluctance to actually be shooting at the enemy. Now, that’s just one case from our own U.S. history, and there are others. There is a wonderful, descriptive book written by a military man and historian who served in the U.S. army [during WWII and the Korean War] named S.L.A. Marshall called Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (published in 1947). He did a series of interviews and found out that a vast majority of the combat troops were not firing at the enemy. Some were firing into the air. Some were firing into the bushes. Some were firing over the heads of the enemy. Many weren’t firing at all."

"...Really, the only way forward for humanity is going to be to pull together and address these common threats to our species survival, or else the future is not looking good."

"There's a lot of research out there that says yes there is harm, there is risk. There are a hundred deaths each year from male circumcision. It's not a separate show. You're saying we're abusing girls. You are accepting that it is okay to perform a much more intensive or invasive procedure on boys. I think if we accept it, in American society, that we do remove the foreskin on boys, we do practice genital cutting here in the US on boys, that it should not be impossible to understand that there are cultures, there are societies, that practice what certain people are now calling gender-inclusive surgery. So it's okay to cut boys in your society? In our culture we don't discriminate. We have gender-egalitarian surgeries."

"There have been sporadic attempts at using dharmic categories to contest the Western gaze and gaze back, as it were, even though these were not quite purva paksha as I am defining it. For instance, in the 1990s, anthropologist McKim Marriott, in his anthology of academic conference papers, refers to the importance of developing and deploying Indian categories of social thought and analysis, not only to understand the subcontinent better but to refine, develop and render less parochial the study of various cultures in general. 38 Marriott emphasizes how distorting and limiting Western universalism can be, and goes on to note that common distinctions in the West, such as Marx's opposition between material base and superstructure, and Durkheim's separation between sacred and profane, cannot capture the fluid and complex realities one finds in dharmic civilizations. He also points out that the West's constant search for an elusive stability is based on the presupposition that all societies are prepared to accept European and American notions of order rather than other, more fluid categories of social and political identity."

"It may be deeply uncomfortable to reflect on eating savvy creatures who express their emotions. My strong suspicion—which I hope will be tested as a hypothesis—is that some people will decrease their meat and fish intake as they learn more about who they are consuming."

"Although modern economy seems devoid of allotment practices, and prevailing ideology obscures their presence, we do practice them in many arenas. For example, in the domestic sphere, age cycle events are marked by apportionments."

"The model of economy with multiple and interwoven sources makes us less certain of our own system and induces a greater understanding of others. I cannot picture an economic finality or utopia, given the cultural legacies that make variant arrangements fitting, and the shifting balances that deny the possibility of stasis. This book represents a plea for openness to the values of equity, merit, and identity as well as efficiency in economy, and for openness with ourselves and others in trying new combinations of community and market that compose economy. With its historical and cross-cultural perspective, the anthropology of economy offers tools for undertaking these conversations and imagining such other outcomes."

"Making and keeping the base is a central concern in community, for the base makes a community as it is made. An endowment that welds together people and things, the base is passed across generations and provides the beginning for its legatees."

"The base in a system of social value is the counterpart of capital in a system of commercial value. But differing in qualities and different in their uses, many parts of the base have no common measure, unlike capital, all parts of which are measured by money and deemed commensurate in exchange. A key feature of competitive, market capitalism is making profits and accumulating them as capital, whereas the central process in community is making and sustaining a commons. But like capital, a base is a savings against contingency. Indeed, savings often have a Janus-faced appearance."

"Our own practices - dispersed and fragmented - illustrate the pull of keeping sacra and maintaining community identity, and they challenge standard theory as well."

"Economic practices and relationships are constituted within the two realms of market and community, and the four value domains that I term the base, social relationships, trade, and accumulation. The salience of these domains and realms varies across societies and historically, and the terrain is contested and changed, but economic practices are always situated in a value context."

"The base may have community value - as a symbol of identity, an expression of values, or a source of material sustenance such as a dam or reservoir - and it may be used for market purposes. But the commons, as a part of community, has as a superordinate value the good of all taken as a whole over the good of an individual. When evaluating individual use rights, the overriding criterion is the effect on community."

"In a market people exchange goods, buying and selling at the best price available until satisfied they cannot better their personal holdings. Exchanges in community are different, for they revolve about ways of dividing a shared base, are guided by multiple values, and have to do with fashioning identities as well as material life. Ethnographic illustrations of sharing the base possess the virtue of openly displaying these general processes, for the same activities often are more hidden in industrial economies."

"Indeed, social scientists have done such a terrible job that it’s hard to see how the field can be repaired. They wanted the false results they got, and they still do. I’m sure their descendants will as well. Isn’t heritability grand?"

"My friends, the Missionaries have already corrupted and denationalised a large proportion of the boys and girls of the Kendyan chiefs. I could give you names of boys and girls who are at this moment ashamed of their own Singhalese parents; and these boys and girls were educated in Missionary school. And so, from this point of view, the Missionaries have done much positive harm to Ceylon. Let us now sum up- (1) The Missionaries have taught false doctrines. (2) They have misrepresented Christianity. (3) They have divorced you from your ancestral culture. (4) The have made you worldly. (5) They have made your boys and girls ashamed of their own parents."

"I have no doubt that many of you here are fathers and mothers, and have boys and girls in Missionary schools even now. Frankly, do you not think that it is your duty to have them educated as Hindus? For the sake of Government jobs. Are you prepared to sacrifice the interest of your own blood, your own ancestral cultural inheritance, and your own religion? If your boys become doctors, or lawyers and cease to be Hindus, what is the benefit? Is that the ideal transmitted to you by the great Rishis?"