The Child in the City | A Case Study in Experimental Anthropology
“The only way I can be Indian now, the only way I can be Cherokee now, is nostalgically. I can tell the stories but anyone can tell any stories now, stories don’t have the weight that we need them to have, they’re not the proper baggage.”
On Becoming Authentic: An Interview with Jimmie Durham
“The only way I can be Indian now, the only way I can be Cherokee now, is nostalgically. I can tell the stories but anyone can tell any stories now, stories don’t have the weight that we need them to have, they’re not the proper baggage.”
Conversations with Anthropological Film-Makers: David MacDougall
“There’s a close parallel between the notion of the anthropologist as hero, discovering a foreign culture and bringing it back home, and the film-maker doing the same thing and bringing back evidence of it on film.”
Conversations with Anthropological Film-Makers: Melissa Llewelyn-Davies
“The wonderful thing about film, if you use the medium properly, is that the image is richer and overwhelms your simple message and commentary.”
Miracle in Natal: Revolution by Ballot-Box
“It was a moment that was filled with wonder and grace, a time of dreams and wishes and miracles. After so much brutality…the spirit of the election emerged as something that transformed us all.”
The Relation
“…readers generate their own responses by everything brought to the reading — you don’t (ordinarily) read a book by writing it over again.”
Anthropology, the Intellectuals, and the Gulf War
“Intellectuals can no longer go straight to the public but must bow to the demands of the media if they are to reach a wider audience than their immediate academic circle.”
Redrawing the Map: Two African Journeys
“The genre of post-colonial travelogue demands a new geography — new points of origin, trajectories of meaning, enigmas of arrival…”
From Physics to Anthropology — and Back Again
“Boas and Rivers returned attention to their own culture. The return from the field to the metropolis revealed the fundamental political structures of their tradition in characteristic institutions of modern know-how: the museum, the hospital, the academy and the state.”
Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals
“Somehow, all of us must devise ways of inserting ourselves meaningfully into the most inclusive versions of human history.”