Cultural Interactions Quotes

World history is the world's court.

I have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity of travelling across this country and enduring all the classic situations that go with talking to people.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

I enjoy India whenever I go and Sri Lankans are overwhelmingly friendly.

I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

I speak a little bit of French and German, but apparently, I'm really bad at Dutch. The pronunciations are quite hard. I tried to say 'hello' in Dutch, and it did not work. People were just like, 'What?'

People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.

When historians of early America turned from the pursuit of past politics, they devised a category known in the academy as 'social and intellectual history.' In it, they stuffed nearly everything except politics on the assumption, which the anthropologists assured them was correct, that it would all fit together. Somehow it did not.