#anthropology

For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology’s turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider’s perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today. ↗

— Ian Tattersall

#explorer #history #museums #nature

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed. ↗

— Tim Ingold

#anthropology #ecology #global-warming #humanity #hunter-gatherer

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#anthropology #belongs #history #questions #sociology

It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man. ↗

— Michael Jackson

#experience #true-nature #experience

Explorations of the world are simultaneously explorations of the human body and being, charting the range of sensory experiences possible in the world and the values that can be attached to such experiences ↗

— Chris Gosden

#prehistory #experience

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context. ↗

— Wilhelm Dilthey

#anthropology #beings #context #experience #human

I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time. ↗

— Franz Boas

#currents #darwin #due #helped #hope

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#asking #different #everybody #gets #how

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#also #anthropology #been #central #field

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#anthropology #anything #call #diverse #done