"Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."-Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 1982

"For it is only through repetition that things cease to be perceived or remarked, that they become so habituated as no longer to be noticed. At the same time, however, no hegemony is ever total (Williams 1977:109); it constantly has to be made and, by the same token, may be unmade." -John and Jean Comaroff, 1992

"Well, anthropology is not on the verge of disintegration. Institutional inertia alone will keep it going for some time. More significantly, anthropology has useful and important things to teach the world, but more pressing is what it has to teach itself." -George Marcus, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, 2008

"Photographs and voice are integral to the performance of one another, connecting, extending and integrating ways of telling histories."-Elizabeth Edwards, 2006

"When change reaches a certain pace, reference works become impossible." -William Reddy, The Structure of a Cultural Crisis: Thinking About Cloth in France Before and After the Revolution, 1986

BATTLE HYMN OF THE RESEARCH EXPERTS

Some talk of race relations, and some of politics,
Of labour and migrations, of hist'ry, lice and ticks,
Investments, trends of amity
And patterns of behaviour
Let none treat us with levity
For we are out to save 'yer.

When seated in our library-chairs
We're filled with righteous thought’ho,
We shoulder continental cares
Tell settlers what they ought to,
We'll jargonize and analyse
Frustrations and fixations,
Neuroses, Angst and stereotypes
In structured integration.

Strange cultures rise from notes and graphs
Through Freud's and Jung's perception
Despite your Ego's dirty laughs
We'll change you to perfection,
We've read Bukharin, Kant and Marx
And even Toynbee's stories
And our dialect'cal sparks
Will make explode the Tories.

Rhodesians hear our sage advice
On cross-acculturation,
On inter-racial kinship ties
And folk-way elongation,
On new conceptual frame works high
We'll bake your cakes of custom,
And with a socialising sigh
We'll then proceed to bust 'em.

Our research tools are sharp and gleam
With verified statistics,
Our intellectual combat team
Has practiced its heuristics
From value judgments we are free,
We only work scientific
For all-round global liberty
and Ph.D.s pontific.


-anonymous, Northern Rhodesia Journal, 1959

"In order to escape the realism of the structure...it is necessary to pass from...statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct a theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition of establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality..." -Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice