Low Anthropology Quotes

The last time I saw a brow that low I was watching slides in anthropology class

The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.

When you stop looking forward to things, you get used to low expectations and you realise, what's the big deal about success anyway? If we're all to attain everything we've been conditioned to desire - wealth, fame, education, prestige, security - then those things will become so prevalent that they'll become meaningless.

the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).11 This has been assumed to be what Paul was saying in these letters. More specifically, when people express “faith” in this line of thought, they are assured that they are therefore forgiven and heaven-bound. This, it has been assumed, is what Paul meant by “justification.” One can see a low-grade version of this when young persons, moved by a sermon or perhaps by an apologetic argument, say a prayer of Christian commitment and are thereupon informed that they are now “justified by faith,” that they are therefore going to heaven, and that they must not try to supplement this pure, justifying “faith” either with moral effort or with religious ritual.

Real humility has nothing to do with creating in myself a low self-image or making myself feel guilty. It means recognizing that all my talents and virtues are gifts from God, gifts for which I am profoundly thankful. These gifts are entrusted to me so I can share them with people around me. I also share in their gifts, for which I am thankful to those people and to God. Real humility is also a recognition in practice that God loves each of my neighbors just as he loves me, so each one is invaluable.

Indeed, there is some evidence that abrupt change may already be underway. In recent years we have witnessed the greatest contraction of Arctic sea ice since modern measurements began, and perhaps much longer if anecdotal and anthropological reports are to be believed.42 The summer of 2012 saw an all-time low in Arctic sea ice cover.43 Already in the summer of 2000 a Canadian ship succeeded in transiting the legendary, once impassable Northwest Passage, the elusive goal of mariners since the sixteenth century.

above all Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice by Kōshō Uchiyama; Shinshu Roberts’s Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji; and the works of John Tarrant, chiefly Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life. David Zahl’s Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself) is a liberating

Nothing over the last few million years of human history has changed human energetics as much as the low cost of working at a desk using machines run by electric power.

Low anthropology powerfully reframes the way we approach the good or beautiful things done by otherwise disreputable individuals -- namely, as evidence of grace rather than defilement. As musician Nick Cave notes, "Perhaps beauty can be measured by the distance it has travelled to come into being. That bad people make good art is a cause for hope.

While a low anthropologist may agree with the people around them that a given moral end is important, they will be hesitant to justify the adoption of unsavory means to achieve that end. That is, they will be quick to accept stepwise solutions, confident that pragmatism stands a better chance of exacting long-term change than ruthlessness.

If I follow a standard prescription of briskly walking thirty minutes a day, almost two extra miles, I’ll spend about a hundred extra calories per day, theoretically allowing me to shed approximately five pounds in half a year—about the reductions most studies report. If a skinny hunter-gatherer mother loses five pounds in six months, she’s in trouble, but many obese American dieters aim to lose about fifty-five pounds.39 Losing that many pounds that quickly through exercise alone would theoretically require Herculean efforts like running eight miles a day. Although far from easy, dieting is unquestionably more effective for shedding many pounds. While walking 30 minutes a day won’t lead to rapid, spectacular weight losses, an evolutionary and anthropological perspective puts a different spin on the argument that walking expends too few calories to shed excess pounds. While the commonly prescribed two-mile daily walk expends a pittance—just 4 percent—of the average person’s daily energy budget of twenty-seven hundred calories, that pittance is partly attributable to setting the exercise bar so low. It bears repeating that the standard public health recommendation is 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week. This amounts to a paltry 21 minutes a day, one-sixth the level of physical activity among nonindustrial people like the Hadza.40 Although jobs, commuting, and other obligations fill our days with necessarily sedentary activities, the average American still spends at least eight times as much time (170 minutes per day) watching television.41 It is no wonder that studies using modest exercise doses report modest weight losses.

Once the run was over, however, something funny would happen. No matter how fast or far any of us had gone, everyone was exhausted. Spent. Keeled over. That’s when the backslaps and high fives would happen. We were bonded in our fatigue, whereas a moment before we were separated by our giftings. Physically drained but emotionally fortified, we laughed and kidded around, talked about how hard it had been. The feeling was always positive. Our shared limitation brought us closer together. A theologian might say that God has given everyone different gifts and abilities, yet similar weaknesses. This is one of the great insights of the Christian faith. The world runs after success and strength and perfection and finds that the track only gets longer, the runners more spread out. The Christian considers weakness the location of grace and unity, not evidence of their absence. You might say, then, We are separated by our virtues but united in our distance from virtue. We are divided by the specifics of our political or aesthetic ideals but united in the fact that we fall short of those ideals. We are separated by how and whom we love but united by our failure to love perfectly. We are separated by the career paths we’ve taken but united by the ubiquity of regret, both professional and otherwise. We are separated by how much we’ve gained or accrued but united in the experience—somewhere along the line—of loss (and the fear of loss). We are stratified according to how we live but re-democratized by the fact of death. If you want to find common ground with someone, then don’t start with what they put on their résumé. Start with what they leave off.

But to those who have a hard time loving themselves, who feel acutely their own failures and shortcomings, and whose personal narratives seem impervious to spin—which is to say, all of us in our unguarded moments—the words of Martin Luther might sound a bit more alluring: “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. He does not give saintliness to any but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.

The radical acceptance of the accumulations of our lives is born in the giving up, the acknowledgment of the artifice. It is what journalist Ken Fuson exudes in his self-penned obituary. Having been unshackled from pretense by a public struggle with addiction and freed from performance by impending bodily death, Fuson delivered a remarkable eulogy for himself: He attended the university’s famous School of Journalism, which is a clever way of saying, “almost graduated but didn’t.” . . . In 1996, Ken took the principled stand of leaving the Register because The Sun in Baltimore offered him more money. Three years later, having blown most of that money at Pimlico Race Track, he returned to the Register, where he remained until 2008. For most of his life, Ken suffered from a compulsive gambling addiction that nearly destroyed him. But his church friends, and the loving people at Gamblers Anonymous, never gave up on him. Ken last placed a bet on Sept. 5, 2009. He died clean. He hopes that anyone who needs help will seek it, which is hard, and accept it, which is even harder. Miracles abound.9 Fuson evinces true authenticity, something close to real freedom, and it is beautiful. His prose is not a parade of accomplishments but a catalog of embarrassing details and defeats—the kind that makes a reader’s heart beam with appreciation, identification, laughter, and hope.

In trying to explain the appeal of marriage to an adolescent daughter who shows almost zero interest in the arrangement, columnist Heather Havrilesky says something remarkable about love: Marriage can’t simply be about living your best lives in sync. Because some of the peak moments of a marriage are when you share in your anxieties, your fears, your longing, and even your horrors. . . . That’s why sickness and death are key to marriage vows. Because there is nothing more divine than being able to say, out loud, “Today, I am really, truly at my worst,” knowing that it won’t make your spouse run for the hills. My husband has seen my worst before. We both know that our worst is likely to get worse from here. Somehow that feels like grace.4

One can define conservatism as the political form of melancholy. It remained decisive for the conservative syndrome which took shape in Europe after the 1789 French Revolution that it had resulted from looking back at the irretrievable goods, life forms and arts of the pre-bourgeois times. One of the preconditions was the certainty of never becoming the dominant view. It acquired its elegiac hues by emphasizing the habit of expecting the darker constants of human nature. To be conservative is to continue believing that good and noble things are tied to places and unique phenomena – for vulgar things, on the other hand, the majority principle and mechanical repetition are sufficient. Such reserve imposes itself on those with nothing more to win in a history addicted to novelty. This way of feeling will be cultivated by those who are keen to avoid being mistaken for profiteers of future conditions. When people in the optimistic mainstream speak of a constant improvement of living conditions, the conservative keeps a low profile. Assuming that better things lie ahead – does that not already mean searching in the wrong direction? Fluctuating between equanimity and disgust, the conservative watches the activities of those moved by progressive feelings and waits for entropy to do its work. Progress, the conservative is sure, is only ever an acceleration of the flight from good, which lies unattainable behind us… Any conservative who wanted to elevate themselves to the level of principles had to move on from here to anthropological generalizations. They had to learn to associate the idea of “mankind” with the epithet “incorrigible”… One could no longer even speak of the “return of the tragic” – for we are ineluctably embedded in it, as if in a fabric woven of first and second nature.

After all, high anthropology allows people to hold their convictions—about the world, about themselves, about others—with an ironclad certainty unavailable to those who embrace a thoroughgoing fallibility in human affairs. Such certainty, whether from the left or the right, is rooted in a rational view of other people and ourselves. We have the right information; they have fake news. We trust the science; they believe lies. We are so convinced that different information will change people’s minds that when they don’t agree with our carefully crafted Twitter rant, we assume they must be willfully idiotic.

Those who claim to harbor no regrets about their lives are usually pretty insufferable, either because they are deluded enough to deny any past wrong turns or because they look down on those who haven’t been as fortunate.

The only reason another person (or couple, or family) seems to have it all together is because we don’t know them very well.

If you want to find common ground with someone, then don’t start with what they put on their résumé. Start with what they leave off. If you want to find a basis for connection and compassion, gloss over what a person is proud of and hone in on what causes them hurt.

Our deepest problems seldom boil down to ignorance or a lack of knowledge. Most of our problems boil down to an inability to follow our own advice. They boil down to a lack of wherewithal.

A truly high anthropology views weakness and limitation as an aberration among otherwise decent people—something to be suffered, lamented, judged, or fixed, but not something to be taken lightly or laughed at. A low anthropology sees those same hurts and blind spots as humanizing. Humor is the form that freedom often takes.

Taking this class is a very significant act, and it’s not just about you. You’re also learning physical anthropology for all those friends, coworkers, family members, children, and partners who don’t have this opportunity. For two reasons, your education here is vitally important for others. First, as part of anthropology, physical anthropology will help you learn more about who you are as a biological being—as an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, a primate, and as a human being, just for starters. Second, physical anthropology is a science. As citizens of our contemporary world, we are absolutely dependent upon science and technology for our survival, and yet, the rate of scientific literacy is appallingly low. Said another way, many people lack a true understanding of the most basic scientific concepts and methods. Still fewer could talk about evolution, natural selection, and adaptation with any degree of accuracy. Your presence in a physical anthropology class can help change that.

Wheat from northern Italy is 'soft' - that is, it is already low in gluten so is ideal for pastry-making. Butter was the fat of choice for cooking in northern Italy (and a sign of wealth), compared with the oil of the south of the country, and there is no doubt that butter makes the finest pastry for sweet pies and tarts. (...) The situation in Britain was different. In Britain, butter was food for the poor. The wealthy in Britain preferred lard, maybe because the animal had to be killed to obtain the fat, thus its perceived value was higher. Lard makes superb huge 'raised' or 'standing' pies full of meat, which flourished to become one of the jewels in England's culinary crown.

【V信83113305】：Founded in 1846, Beloit College is a distinguished private liberal arts institution located in Beloit, Wisconsin. Renowned for its rigorous academic environment and commitment to experiential learning, the college emphasizes a personalized education with a globally-focused curriculum. It features a unique first-year initiative program and strong offerings in anthropology, international relations, and the arts. The campus is celebrated for its vibrant community spirit and its extensive collection of Native American burial mounds, integrating history directly into student life. With a diverse student body and a low student-to-faculty ratio, Beloit provides an intimate, engaging setting that encourages intellectual curiosity and prepares graduates for a complex world.，【V信83113305】100%安全办理贝洛伊特学院毕业证,办理贝洛伊特学院毕业证成绩单学历认证,原版定制贝洛伊特学院毕业证,原版贝洛伊特学院毕业证办理流程,终于找到哪里办贝洛伊特学院毕业证书,贝洛伊特学院毕业证书,贝洛伊特学院毕业证书办理需要多久,贝洛伊特学院毕业证办理流程,贝洛伊特学院毕业证成绩单学历认证最安全办理方式,BC毕业证最新版本推荐最快办理贝洛伊特学院文凭成绩单

【V信83113305】：Beloit College, nestled in the scenic river city of Beloit, Wisconsin, stands as a distinguished private liberal arts institution renowned for its innovative and immersive educational approach. Since its founding in 1846, the college has cultivated a tradition of intellectual rigor and global engagement. Its curriculum emphasizes hands-on learning, interdisciplinary study, and a first-year initiative that immediately connects students to real-world challenges. With a vibrant, diverse community and a low student-to-faculty ratio, Beloit fosters close mentorship and collaborative research. The campus itself is a dynamic living and learning laboratory, featuring world-class anthropological museums and a commitment to sustainability. Beloit empowers students to think critically and live purposefully in a complex global society.，【V信83113305】最佳办理BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证方式,优质渠道办理BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证成绩单学历认证,原版定制BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证书案例,原版BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证办理流程和价钱,BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证书,BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证办理周期和加急方法,BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证办理流程和安全放心渠道,BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证成绩单学历认证最快多久,BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证最稳最快办理方式,网上购买假学历BC贝洛伊特学院毕业证书

【V信83113305】：Mercyhurst University, nestled in Erie, Pennsylvania, stands as a distinguished private liberal arts institution. Founded in 1926 by the Sisters of Mercy, its core mission is deeply rooted in providing a values-centered education that emphasizes student success, civic engagement, and ethical leadership. The university is widely recognized for its signature programs in intelligence studies, archaeology, anthropology, and forensic science, offering students unique, hands-on learning experiences. With a beautiful campus and a commitment to personalized attention through a low student-to-faculty ratio, Mercyhurst fosters a close-knit academic community. It successfully blends a strong liberal arts foundation with exceptional pre-professional and graduate programs, preparing its graduates to make meaningful contributions in a complex global society.，最安全购买梅西赫斯特大学毕业证方法, 购买梅西赫斯特大学成绩单, 美国毕业证认证, 如何获取梅西赫斯特大学Mercyhurst University毕业证本科学位证书, 在线办理MU梅西赫斯特大学毕业证offer外壳皮, 美国办梅西赫斯特大学毕业证办成绩单购买, 办理MU毕业证, 本地美国硕士文凭证书原版定制MU本科毕业证书, 硕士博士学历MU毕业证-梅西赫斯特大学毕业证书-真实copy原件

【V信83113305】：Founded in 1846, Beloit College is a distinguished private liberal arts institution located in Beloit, Wisconsin. Renowned for its rigorous academic environment and commitment to experiential learning, the college emphasizes a personalized education that encourages intellectual curiosity and global engagement. Its innovative curriculum is complemented by extensive opportunities for undergraduate research, internships, and study abroad programs. The campus is noted for its vibrant community, historic architecture, and the unique Logan Museum of Anthropology. With a diverse student body and a low student-to-faculty ratio, Beloit fosters close mentorship and collaborative learning. It consistently produces graduates who are critical thinkers and adaptable leaders prepared for complex global challenges.，【V信83113305】安全办理-贝洛伊特学院文凭BC毕业证学历认证,原版BC毕业证书办理流程,高端烫金工艺BC毕业证成绩单制作,硕士贝洛伊特学院文凭定制BC毕业证书,最爱-美国-BC毕业证书样板,硕士-BC毕业证贝洛伊特学院毕业证办理,高端BC毕业证办理流程,原价-BC毕业证官方成绩单学历认证,最新BC毕业证成功案例,贝洛伊特学院毕业证成绩单-高端定制BC毕业证

Death was a sign of violence brought into a world which it could destroy. Although motionless, the dead man had a part in the violence which had struck him down; anything which came too near him was threatened by the destruction which had brought him low.