The Invention of Culture Quotes

“To a degree that we seldom realize, we depend upon the participation of others in our lives, and upon our own participation in the lives of others. Our success and effectiveness as persons is based upon this participation, and upon an ability to maintain a controlling competence in communicating with others.”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“It is worthwhile studying other peoples, because every understanding of another culture is an experiment with our own.”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“Whereas painters of the early and middle 1400s enriched their own (and their countrymen's) understanding of the Gospel by recreating it in reality, their successors used this technique to study (and broaden) their entire world view. Hieronymus Bosch mastered a whole genre by merging the realism of Flemish painting with fantastic allegories of the human condition. His pictures of vermin and birds in men's clothing, atrocities, and weirdly juxtaposed objects use the realism of the earlier masters as a means of stark caricature. It was in this form, the most extreme possible, that character and moral differentiation were introduced into the realm of realistic depiction.”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“the central idea of Habu”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“The Invention of Culture represents a generalization of the argument in my monograph Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion (Chicago 1972)”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“man invents his own realities”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“Anthropologists are distinctive for their apprehension rather than their comprehension”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“The peculiar situation of the anthropological fieldworker, participating simultaneously in two distinct worlds of meaning and action, requires that he relate to his research subjects as an "outsider," trying to "learn" and penetrate their way of life, while relating to his own culture as a kind of metaphorical "native."

To both groups he is a professional stranger, a person who holds himself aloof from their lives in order to gain perspective.”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture

“Anthropology studies the phenomenon of man, not simply man's mind, his body, evolution, origins, tools, art, or groups alone, but as parts or aspects of a general pattern, or whole. To emphasize this fact and make it a part of their ongoing effort, anthropologists have brought a general word into widespread use to stand for the phenomenon, and that word is culture.”
― Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture