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.”