I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.