To me the world of poetry is a house with thousands of glittering windows. Our words and images, land to land, era to era, shed light on one another. Our words dissolve the shadows we imagine fall between.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Poet (1952~)
The same can be said about a great ethnography.
12We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.
Bronislaw Malinowski (via kayburry)
My whole outlook upon life is determined by one question: ‘How can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us?’ For when we recognize them, we are also able to break them.
Franz Boas, The Shackles of Tradition (via drinking-ink)
(via fyeahanthropology)
[The Ethnosphere is] the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, ideas, beliefs, myths, intuitions and inspirations, brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. It’s a symbol of all that we’ve accomplished and all that we can accomplish.
Anthropologist Wade Davis on the “Ethnosphere,” from a 2007 interview with Davis: (http://www.ascentmagazine.com/articles.aspx?articleID=59&issueID=19)
The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.
Ruth Benedict
