#anthropology

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts. ↗

— Ian Tattersall

#evolution #nature

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#chimpanzees #humanity #stories #science

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

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

The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology. ↗

— H. P. Blavatsky

#assign #born #climates #common #countless

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#feminism #had #i #i think #impact

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different. ↗

— Nancy Banks Smith

#different #except #over #people #same

The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other. ↗

— John Tooby

#evolutionary-psychology #sexes #age

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...) (The interpretation of cultures) ↗

— Geertz Clifford

#linguistics #communication