“The magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed on myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility.”— Bronisław Malinowski
“The characters of the Chou Kou Tien molar are such that it must be regarded as representing a new and primitive hominid genus.”— Davidson Black
“The significance of cultural behavior is not exhausted when we have clearly understood that it is local, man-made, and hugely variable.”— Ruth Benedict
“The ethnographer 'inscribes' social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.”— Clifford Geertz
“The great merit of functionalism is that it does get you away from the museum case classification of culture traits and gets you to thinking about the inter-connexion of things.”— Edmund Leach
“Man is the sole species of his genus, the sole representative of his order and his subclass.”— Richard Owen
“We must understand the individual as living in his culture; and the culture as lived by individuals.”— Franz Boas
“The most striking fact about the material culture of hunter-fisher groups is its poverty.”— John Grahame Douglas Clark
“Proxemics is the study of man's use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture.”— Edward T. Hall
“The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science.”— Franz Boas
“A culture is constantly in the process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members.”— Jerome Bruner