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Anthropology is an intellectually challenging, theoretically ambitious subject which tries to achieve an understanding of culture, society and humanity through detailed studies of local life, made sense of through comparison and contextualisation. But it is also a form of storytelling about the lives that you and I could have led, but didn’t because we were busy living our own lives.

— Thomas Hylland Eriksen What is Anthropology? (2017)

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More quotes by Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Identification is created both from the inside and the outside, in the encounter between one’s own presentation of self and the perceptions of others.

What is Anthropology? (2017)

Studies of thought and modes of reasoning have been central in the history of anthropology from the nineteenth century to the present day.

What is Anthropology? (2017)

The world, as it is perceived by human beings, is to a certain extent shaped by language. However, there is no agreement as to just what the relationship between language and non-linguistic reality is.

What is Anthropology? (2017)

The art of cultural translation consists in oscillating between distance and nearness, between one’s own concepts and the native ones, or – to put it differently – making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic.

What is Anthropology? (2017)

What characterises anthropological research today more than anything is the recognition of complexity; the world is complex, cultures are complex, communities are complex, and analytical strategies must acknowledge complexity.

What is Anthropology? (2017)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Hylland Eriksen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.