"The anthropological production of knowledge has at least two elements: fieldwork and analysis. Some might want to add a third one, namely description; you first collect a body of empirical material through various field methods, you then describe whatever it is that you’ve discovered and, finally, you analyse the findings. Many, including the author, are sceptical of the distinction between description and analysis because the analysis inevitably begins in the description itself and, indeed, already with observation. No all-encompassing, neutral description exists of anything, and nothing has a meaning independently of that ascribed to it. Already the delineation of the field of enquiry – socially, thematically, spatially, with respect to the concepts used – necessarily entails that reality ‘out there’ is presented in a selective and theoretically biased way. It is impossible to describe everything, or to give equal emphasis to everything one has observed."

“It should be noted here that a research area which has grown rapidly since the 1980s is the aforementioned STS field, that is, the sociological study of technology and science. Here, western science and technology are studied as cultural products, and many of its practitioners adhere to the so-called symmetry principle proposed by the French sociologist Bruno Latour, which entails that the same terminology and the same methods of analysis should be used for failures as for successes; in other words, that what we are doing is looking at science as a social fact, not as truth or falsity. Similarly, most anthropologists would argue that our task consists of making sense of ‘the others’, not judging whether they are right or wrong.”

“We still ask of our diverse world how it can be that people, born with roughly the same inborn potentials and opportunities, can turn out to be so different, and, in the next instance, what they can still be said to have in common. Still, anthropologists insist on giving priority of place to local life-worlds and on a methodological openness intended to prevent ethnocentric misjudgements. For, as Clifford Geertz has put it, if all you crave is home truths, you might as well stay at home.”

“The relation between the social sciences and the natural sciences has long been fraught with difficulties. A minority of social scientists regard their activity as an extension, or a branch, of biological research. Others argue that the social sciences ought to be sciences of the same kind as the natural sciences; that they should strive after the same kind of precision and the same kind of parsimonious clarity that can be achieved for instance in chemistry.”

“All cultural translation necessitates some interpretation and simplification. No sane reader would be able to make sense of a text which consisted exclusively of directly translated, unmediated quotations from informants. Compression and editing are therefore necessary elements of cultural translation. Moreover, no matter how outstanding an anthropologist is, as a fieldworker, as a writer and as an analyst, the text always represents a selection, and it will always to a greater or lesser extent be marked by the subjectivity of the translator.”

“Anthropology is an intellectually challenging, theoretically ambitious subject which tries to achieve an understanding of culture, society and humanity through detailed studies of local life, made sense of through comparison and contextualisation. But it is also a form of storytelling about the lives that you and I could have led, but didn’t because we were busy living our own lives.”

“Anthropological theory may be compared to a large crossroads with busy traffic and a few, temporarily employed traffic policemen who desperately try to force the unruly traffic to follow the rules. Or it could be described, more harmoniously, as a coral reef, where the living corals literally build upon the achievements of their deceased predecessors.”