What Is Anthropology? Quotes

“... the smallest unit we study in anthropology is not the single person, but the relationship between two. It is not the innermost thoughts of the individual that constitute our object of study, but the social dynamics between people and their products; where the innermost thoughts of the person, incidentally, are often expressed.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Døving (2001), has similarly shown, in a study based on fieldwork in south-eastern Norway, that it may be extraordinarily impolite to ask for ‘just a glass of water’ when one is visiting. In his example, the hosts do everything they can to make the guest accept beer, a soft drink, coffee, tea, even herbal tea, to avoid the horror of having her sit there drinking tap water. As Mauss could have commented; refusing to receive a gift may be the ultimate offence. It is tantamount to refusing sociality.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Faithful to the logic of the gift, Lévi-Strauss offered a return gift that was just as lavish as his mentor's [i.e. Marcel Mauss's], namely the most spectacular theoretical edifice in the anthropology of the last century, structuralism.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“In [Karl Polanyi's] view, reciprocity and redistribution are just natural, and more humane, forms of economic interaction than the raw competitive market.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“In fact, there is no such thing as 'purely economic' in economic anthropology. All economies have a local, moral, cultural element.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Although it raises spectacularly abstract questions sometimes, anthropology is not a subject for abstract speculation.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Shortly before his death in 1955, Radcliffe-Brown confessed in a letter to Lévi-Strauss that he would never understand the Frenchman's use of the term structure.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Whereas Radcliffe-Brown's structure is a social one, Lévi-Strauss's structure is mental or cognitive; ... Shortly before his death in 1955, Radcliffe-Brown confessed in a letter to Lévi-Strauss that he would never understand the Frenchman's use of the term structure.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“In Samoa, [Margaret Mead] argued, children were given love and encouragement, and they were subjected to few prohibitions. They therefore grew up to be more harmonious and happy than the cowed, disciplined and sexually frustrated American adolescents.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“In Samoa, ... children were given love and encouragement, and they were subjected to few prohibitions. They therefore grew up to be more harmonious and happy than the cowed, disciplined and sexually frustrated American adolescents.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Geertz (1973) describes how his wife and he were unable to establish a sensible relationship with the villagers in Bali because they were suspected of being government spies.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) once described a field trip to the interior of Brazil, where he met natives who were so close he could touch them, and yet they seemed infinitely far away; he could not understand them (Lévi-Strauss 1976 [1955]).”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“The map is always simpler than the territory.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Evans-Pritchard (1956) once found that his studies of witchcraft among the Azande in Central Africa made it easier for him to understand the Soviet Union under Stalinism. In both societies the fear of being accused of a violation of vaguely defined norms induced most people to follow the norms slavishly.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Anthropology is sometimes described as the art of 'making the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar'. It has also been described as 'the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities'.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?