Matthew Engelke > Quotes

“Difference for difference's sake, though, is not the point of anthropology. If it was, we would indeed be dazzled, even blinded. While anthropology wants to document difference - and often be a witness to it - it also wants to make sense of those differences. Anthropology seeks to explain.”
― Matthew Engelke, Think Like an Anthropologist

“every anthropological project should contain within it something alien and other, something that not only challenges and unsettles scholarly terms of analysis but redefines what they mean and the thought-work they can do. With this approach, anthropology should always be open to the possibility of wonder.”
― Matthew Engelke, Think Like an Anthropologist

“For most people, in most times and places, the boundaries between nature and culture are blurry at best, if they exist at all. And in many places they are not in play.”
― Matthew Engelke, Think Like an Anthropologist

“In each of these prototype cases, as in the fully-fledged anthropological ones we’ve considered briefly, two key features stand out: (1) the importance of fieldwork; and (2) the principle of cultural relativism. You can’t understand anthropology without understanding these things.”
― Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist

“culture is not bounded in place.”
― Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist

“One leading figure has referred to archaeology as “the study of past peoples based on the things they left behind and the ways they left their imprint on the world.”9 It is the study, in his words, of small things forgotten: the remnants of cooking pots, house foundations, clay pipes, roads, wells, burial mounds, and even rubbish pits”
― Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist

“It’s that culture itself—the ability to be a native and have a point of view in the first place—isn’t possible without this material infrastructure.”
― Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist

“In order to get a holistic explanation, anthropology often has to upend common sense and question what gets taken for granted. Anthropology prompts us to reconsider not only what we think we know - what it means to be affluent, why blood matters, what constitutes reason - but also the terms by which we know it.”
― Matthew Engelke

“At one extreme, there are political scientists who treat culture as primordial and unchanging. Reading some international relations theory can drive the anthropologist mad. It is as if the nation, or national culture, is as well-defined and solid as a rock. At the other extreme, there are psychologists who do experiments on small groups of people and then extrapolate out to claims about cognition or human nature. But then when you look more closely, you see that the small group of people they studied happened to be students at the university where they teach. For any self-respecting anthropologist, one question immediately springs to mind: Can we really extrapolate from a group of college kids at Harvard University to the rest of humanity? In asking that question, the anthropologist is appealing to the culture concept.”
― Matthew Engelke, Think Like an Anthropologist

“Kulturbrille”
― Matthew Engelke, Think Like an Anthropologist

“It’s often a very bad idea to ask people about their culture, or to ask them what they “believe” or “think” or even what something (a ritual, fatherhood, the Omkara) “means.” The problem is, they’ll probably tell you something. But they might well be making it up or thinking off the tops of their heads;”
― Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist