“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.

Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliver good service from unhappy employees.

For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.

Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can’t tell you whether someone will fit into a company’s culture.

The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.

There’s so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

Soul is a constant. It’s cultural. It’s always going to be there, in different flavors and degrees.

You don’t want to raise a kid in a culture where the kid who asks the most questions is annoying. You want a culture where the kid who asks the most questions gets awards and gets another piece of cake.

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.