I started out doing social anthropology, not dealing with material culture, not dealing with things.

What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

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.