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 »
Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analysed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; ...and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropolo...gy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And no less firmly do I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud's life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthro...pology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history... of human speech.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 »
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 »