“In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which we look.”

I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore,

he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

We can see that there is far too great an emphasis placed on the future.

Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

Americans have a penchant for the future and tend to disregard the past.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.

When you talk about hip-hop, you’re talking about the whole culture and movement. You have to take the whole culture for what it is.

Well hip hop is basically the whole culture of the movement. There’s the rap which is a form of hip hop culture.

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

All music now is influenced by Hip Hop. It’s so deeply ingrained in the culture.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.