Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance. |
I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist. |
The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about. |
I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves. |
I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology. |
I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain. |
Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars. |
Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should. |
We're getting closer to our nature. |
I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means. |
I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything. |
My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things. |
I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive 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. |
If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code. |
I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false. |
Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue. |
The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. |
Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him. |
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it. |