Ahmed

“We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.”
― Theodore C. Bestor, Doing Fieldwork in Japan

“It must be remembered: fields end freedom. Whatever the astonishing subsequent achievements of civilization, it had a little recognized price: humanity itself became one of its own domesticated species. We enslaved ourselves to conquer.”
― Mark Elvin

“What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Marco Polo, who wrote that Mongol couriers could cover 250 or even 300 miles in a single day. Reading historical tales about such exploits, one could be forgiven for imagining the steppe as a single flat grassland through which horsemen moved with a sense of freedom and ease. Here on horseback, though, it was clear the cavalry were negotiating deserts, mountains, rivers, swamps, heat, and frosts, and somehow keeping their horses fed and healthy, even before leaving Mongolia.”
― Tim Cope, On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads