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 »
Here was a big constructive imagination; here was a mere doctor laying bare the origins of Greek drama as no classical scholar had... ever done, teaching the anthropologist what was really meant by his totem and taboo, probing the mysteries of sin, of sanctity, of sacrament--a man who, because he understood, purged the human spirit from fear. I have no confidence in psycho-analysis as a method of therapeutics ... but I am equally sure that for generations almost every branch of human knowledge will be enriched and illumined by the imagination of Freud.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In some ways being a parent is like being an anthropologist who is studying a primitive and isolated tribe by living with them....... To understand the beauty of child development, we must shed some of our socialization as adults and learn how to communicate with children on their own terms, just as an anthropologist must learn how to communicate with that primitive tribe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himse...lf to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New Yorkers speak more quickly and shift topics more rapidly. We all know that. But the way it's done is fascinating. At least it ...fascinated me when I first moved to New York. Someone has the floor and talks. As soon as I know what they are going to say, I can jump in, finish the sentence to show I understand, and take off into my own turn. The northern California I know isn't like that. Someone talks, and I lie back and listen and let them roll for a while. When they're done, there'll be a pause that will flash like a green light to announce that someone else can have the floor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been r...eared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizi...ng, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already unde...rstand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survi...ves transfixed with rapture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »