In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and ...female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature.... What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself--as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony--those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a "read," commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitio...ns. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "text" is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the s...ociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In view of the fact that they are ostensibly interested in many of the same problems, the extent to which sociologists and anthrop...ologists have maintained fundamentally distinctive approaches is one of the more curious facts in the history of Western thought. The sociological attitude has tended toward the practical and present, the anthropological toward pure understanding and the past. Anthropology developed in the classes; sociology in the masses. A rich man's hobby can permit itself the luxury of aesthetic exultation in fascinatingly different and complex materials. The anthropologist has also been considered less socially dangerous by the conservative because he was "a gentleman" and preoccupied with the long ago and the far away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absu...rdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The daughters of distant fathers, when they're little, don't know about biology and cultural bias and incest taboos and gender rol...e and economic downturns and all the buzz words of sociological, anthropological and psychological mitigation. All they know is that Daddy isn't there as much as Mommy . . . Daddy is simply the silent partner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn t...oday from the humanities as well as from the scientists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability... to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this... faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »