Cross-Cultural Analysis Quotes

Soviet moviegoers gazed enviously on the jalopy that took the Joads from Oklahoma to California. The message Russians took from 'The Grapes of Wrath': even the poorest capitalists have cars!

Therefore, we must not look at the African people, even before they met whites, as if they had something unique, which was not to be found in other societies.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong.

Every society needs to examine itself in relation to other societies.

If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

Its [the anthropological method] power to make us understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung, that it impresses us with the relative value of all forms of culture, and thus serves as a check to an exaggerated valuation of the standpoint of our own period, which we are only too liable to consider the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of other cultures and hindering an objective criticism of our own work.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what's similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences.

One Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. ... Because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media.

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.

I'm really interested in how non-American countries process race.

I feel like I studied anthropology in college for a reason.

There is no reason why an American scholar cannot by himself or herself develop an adequate understanding of another culture. And I don't find any reason to suppose that the birth within a culture automatically confers understanding.

Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.

For me, a bit of anthropology in the evening is always better than staying and watching the telly.