#anthropology

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#anthropology #back #body #fall #knowledge

The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit. ↗

— Christopher McDougall

#inspirational #physiology #running #inspirational

Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: "Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs. ... The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. ↗

— David Graeber

#economics #life

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world. ↗

— Jane Howard

#anthropology #beamed #gave #her #platform

In the world “out there,” there are no verbs, no speech events, and no adjacency pairs. There are particles of matter moving around in certain recurrent and yet not fully predictable patterns. We interpret such experiences as and through symbolic means, including linguistic expressions. That’s what it means to be human. ↗

— Duranti a Alessandro

#linguistic-anthropology #linguistics #experience

Museums are the anthropological screened porches of suburbia. You can be near something great, but not actually personally experience it. ↗

— S. Kelley Harrell

#experience

Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life. ↗

— Joan D. Vinge

#aspects #developed #existence #holistic #human

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit. ↗

— Donald Johanson

#africa #anthropology #around #began #biology

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class. ↗

— Tim Robbins

#acting #acting class #anthropology #class #courses