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 »
The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the lang...uage he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader's eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.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 »
Mother baseball. I enjoy speculating about its bloody beginnings as a fertility rite. Funny that with all the verbiage about the s...port no one mentions the obvious structural relationship between a baseball stadium and a womb: in design, a stadium is both a circle and a "Y," two notorious female symbols. The curved and sloping shape of the stands is like a plush endometrium in which we fans cozy up to watch a lone batter square off against the universe.... I especially like to think about that when announcers describe players' bats as fast, corked, dead, quiet, live, or as loaded barrels--and pitches as high hard ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that "something else" ...that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.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 »