Minerva Martins

“A number of ethical, aesthetic, psychiatric or forensic classfications that are produced by the "institutional sciences",not to mention those produced and inculcated by the educational system, are similarly subordinated to social functions, although they derive their specific efficacy from their apparent neutrality. They are produced in accordance with the specific logic, and in the specific language, of relatively autonomous fields, and they combine a real dependence on the classificatory schemes of the dominant habitus (and ultimately on the social structures of which these are the product) with an apparent independence.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

“The radical questionnings announced by philosophy are in fact circumscribed by the interests linked to membership in the philosophical field, that is, to the very existence of this field and the corresponding censorships.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

“Using a slogan from ANT, you have 'to follow the actors themselves', that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts best define the new associations that they have been forced to established.”
― Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

“When pressed, the Suyá would say that the only ones who still knew what they meant were the beings that taught the songs to the Suyá in the first place. One can go no further, for it is hard for an anthropologist to get translations directly from jaguars, birds, bees, and extinct enemies.”
― Anthony Seeger, Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People