Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night.
Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer. I'm very interested in studying cultures and social issues, but as an academic I don't think I would have been too successful.
Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.
The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.
I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world.
Thanks to the unprecedented reach of British navigation, London in the early 18th century was not just the emporium of the world, it was the first place in which it was possible to assemble artifacts from around the world and allow people to study them.
The Southern Baptist Church is a specific culture in itself. So, I had to study, talk to people, watch tape and go to performances to see how Gospel artists move compared to secular artists.
I was always looking for evidence of these common musical roots, but I was too young to know that what I was doing was called ethnomusicology.
When I went to college, I really became interested in cultural anthropology. Our behavior isn't that different from other primate species'.
I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.
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.
